Steve Bannon delivered a no-holds-barred message to his podcast audience this week, focused almost entirely on federal law enforcement. “The [Justice Department] is completely corrupt from top to bottom,” said the far-right media personality. “It will have to be purified. Restructuring will have to be done.”
After insisting that the department will have to get rid of “a lot of staff” following Donald Trump’s possible return to the White House, Bannon added that he sees the FBI as “the American Gestapo,” and wondered whether it agency should exist at all.
Steve Bannon on Project 2025: We’re going to purge the federal government of those who don’t support Trump. We will restructure the Justice Department to prosecute our political opponents. On the afternoon of January 20, 2025, we will be laying off tons of staff pic.twitter.com/lFr9AqeSak
— Biden-Harris Headquarters (@BidenHQ) May 28, 2024
It was certainly a striking perspective, but Bannon’s rhetoric did not come out of the blue. On the contrary, Reuters reported two weeks ago:
The report added that under Team Trump’s vision, the future Republican White House would “flood the Justice Department with tough conservatives who are unlikely to say ‘no’ to controversial orders” from the Oval Office. Trump and his operation would then “restructure the department so that key decisions are concentrated in the hands of government loyalists rather than in the hands of career bureaucrats.”
All of this is to say that while the “independence and impartiality” of the Justice Department are its core values, that would effectively end if the Americans were to return Trump to power.
None of this is kept secret. Bannon presented the plan – out loud, from behind a microphone, while looking into a camera.
At this point, I suspect some readers are thinking, “Wait, didn’t Trump and his team already do this during their time in office?” The answer is: sort of.
As we’ve discussed, the former president spent much of his tenure in the White House transforming Justice Department prosecutors into his own personal attack dogs. The New York Times reported in 2022 that Trump and his team were “trying to turn the country’s law enforcement apparatus into an instrument of political power” to carry out the Republican’s wishes. A Washington Post analysis published shortly afterward highlighted the many instances in which Trump leaned not only on the Justice Department to follow his whims, but also on his efforts to push federal law enforcement to tell the “big lie.” in the aftermath of his election defeat.
The Republican weaponization effort reached a truly astonishing peak less than a month before Election Day 2020, when Trump publicly called on federal prosecutors to go after Joe Biden — then the Democratic Party presidential candidate who was leading the Republican incumbent in the polls – accuses him of undefined crimes. The then president added that his future successor should not be “allowed” to act against him.
On October 7, 2020, as early voting was underway in much of the country, Politico published a particularly memorable headline: “’Where are all the arrests?’: Trump demands Barr lock up his enemies.”
The next day, the Republican incumbent spoke with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo and called up the Justice Department to “indict” his alleged Democratic enemies – including Biden.
After his 2020 defeat, Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly said the former president “regularly” sought to use the Justice Department to retaliate against critics.
So why would the sequel be worse than the original? Because Trump and his team have failed to transform the Justice Department into an arm of his political operation — even though they now believe they have learned from their failures and know exactly what to do to complete the regressive vision.
It’s hard to imagine this will shift many votes in the fall. Much of the public likely doesn’t realize that federal law enforcement is supposed to be free from partisan interference, and those voters are likely indifferent to the potential consequences of Team Trump’s politicization of a “purged” Justice Department .
But when it comes to the stakes in 2024, little is more important than this.
This message updates our related previous reporting.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
