This is an adapted excerpt from the December 10 episode of ‘Deadline: White House’.
As Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House, we are learning disturbing new details about the events of his first administration.
As NBC News reports:
In an effort to investigate leaks of classified information, Trump’s Justice Department secretly obtained phone and text logs from 43 congressional staffers and two members of Congress in 2017 and 2018 in a much broader investigation than was previously known, according to a new report from the ministry’s internal department. watchdog.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report also found that Trump’s Justice Department violated its own policies by secretly obtaining phone and text records from reporters. According to the report, then-Attorney General William Barr personally approved subpoenas for the news media. The department failed to consult a committee set up to review these steps.
Based on the reporting, it’s no surprise that Barr circumvented his own department’s policies and engaged in this kind of aggressive monitoring — monitoring that not only appeared to fall outside Justice Department standards but also, arguably, some constitutional standards.
With Trump’s second administration just weeks away, the question becomes: What would Pam Bondi, Trump’s chosen attorney general, do if she found herself in a similar situation? We often talk about Trump directing his loyalists, but as Michael Cohen often reminds us, sometimes Trump doesn’t have to tell you what to do. You just know what he want to you to do.
Whoever the next attorney general is — whether Bondi or another Trump loyalist — the person likely already knows what the newly elected president wants to do. They also know what the first Trump administration got away with four years ago, and now they’re coming back with a new team to be even more aggressive.
I don’t think there are any real surprises in Tuesday’s IG report, but this is on the minds of every Republican on Capitol Hill and, frankly, of the Republican voters who, despite everything we already knew about Trump and his first period in the United States White House – decided in January to return this kind of governance to Washington.
Allison Detzel contributed.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
