Rachel Maddow argues Justice Department never stood apart from politics

Maddow tells Morning Edition the department has lost thousands of employees

The host of the Rachel Maddow show on MS NOW chronicles the Justice Department’s complicated history in her new book, “Department of Fate: The Promise, the Power, and the Collapse of America’s Most Consequential Institution.” Maddow discussed the book with Morning Edition host Michel Martin in an interview published Nov. 13.

The Justice Department wasn’t created by the Founding Fathers, and, according to Maddow, it has never been entirely independent of politics. In her telling, it is “naive to argue that the Justice Department has ever been independent from the control and direction of its political masters and its appointed political leadership.”

The idea took shape during President Trump’s first term, as Maddow watched then-Attorney General Bill Barr initially steer the department toward supporting Trump’s false claims about fraud in the 2020 election.

Maddow expected Trump, if reelected, to expand the department’s power and resources. Instead, she told Morning Edition, the department has lost thousands of employees and has since become “this incredibly diminished thing.”

“So I wanted to look into the history of that to figure out what we might be losing and whether or not the way Trump was treating the Justice Department really was unique or whether it was continuous with some of the history of the department,” Maddow said.

The book revisits striking chapters in that history. The Department of Justice was established in the wake of the Civil War, and Amos Akerman — a former Confederate officer and slave owner who later became attorney general — used the newly established department to confront white supremacist violence in the former Confederate states.

Decades later, Attorney General Richard Olney used federal power to help railroad companies suppress workers’ strikes. For Maddow, that episode challenges the idea that the department was ever insulated from political influence.

In the conversation, Maddow told Martin why she considers the department America’s most consequential institution, what its history reveals about the exercise of federal power, and why she believes Congress must play a role in rebuilding it.

NPR’s digital version of the interview was edited by Majd Al-Waheidi.