CBH Talk | David Rohde and Timothy Naftali Discuss “Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War of Democracy”
In Where Tyranny Begins, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Rohde investigates the strategies Donald Trump systematically used to turn the country’s two most powerful law-enforcement agencies into his personal political weapons.
Over the course of his presidency Trump intimidated, silenced, and bent to his will Justice Department and FBI officials, from Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr to career public servants. He sowed public doubt in both agencies so successfully that when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, he paid little political cost and, despite an unprecedented array of criminal indictments, easily won the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election.
Fifty years after Watergate, Merrick Garland’s attempt to prosecute Donald Trump has shown that the DOJ and FBI are ill-suited to hold presidents and former presidents accountable for potential crimes.
Join Rohde for a conversation led by presidential historian Timothy Naftali, Senior Research Scholar at the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and member of the State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee, as they discuss just how far Trump went in turning the two most powerful law-enforcement agencies into his personal political weapons, and how far he may go if given another shot at the presidency.
Participants
David Rohde is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of In Deep and three other books. He the national security editor at NBC News and a former executive editor of The New Yorker website, where he wrote about the Justice Department, democracy, and disinformation. He is also a former New York Times, Reuters, and Christian Science Monitor reporter. He lives in New York with his family.
Timothy Naftali is Senior Research Scholar at the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He was formerly a clinical professor of public service at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, clinical professor of history in NYU’s College of Arts and Science, and director of NYU’s undergraduate public policy program. Naftali, whose book Khrushchev’s Cold War with Aleksandr Fursenko, won the Royal United Services Institute’s Duke of Westminster’s medal for military literature in 2007, is a pioneer in the study of modern international and espionage history and is a well-recognized presidential historian.
After serving as the first director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs’ presidential recordings program. Naftali became the founding director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2007, where he curated a nationally recognized nonpartisan permanent exhibit on Watergate and oversaw the release of 1.3 million pages of records. Naftali is the author, co-author or editor of 8 books, including a biography of George Herbert Walker Bush and histories of US counterterrorism policy and of presidential impeachment.
Naftali was an historical consultant to both the Nazi War Crimes and Imperial Japanese Government Records Interagency Working Group and to the 9/11 Commission. He is currently a member of the State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee, which provides oversight for the Foreign Relations of the United States series. Naftali, who is a CNN presidential historian, has appeared in several documentaries, most recently Prime Video’s The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes and CNN’s 2010s, and has also consulted on CNN’s Tricky Dick and Netflix’s Designated Survivor.
In Where Tyranny Begins, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Rohde investigates the strategies Donald Trump systematically used to turn the country’s two most powerful law-enforcement agencies into his personal political weapons.
Over the course of his presidency Trump intimidated, silenced, and bent to his will Justice Department and FBI officials, from Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr to career public servants. He sowed public doubt in both agencies so successfully that when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, he paid little political cost and, despite an unprecedented array of criminal indictments, easily won the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election.
Fifty years after Watergate, Merrick Garland’s attempt to prosecute Donald Trump has shown that the DOJ and FBI are ill-suited to hold presidents and former presidents accountable for potential crimes.
Join Rohde for a conversation led by presidential historian Timothy Naftali, Senior Research Scholar at the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and member of the State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee, as they discuss just how far Trump went in turning the two most powerful law-enforcement agencies into his personal political weapons, and how far he may go if given another shot at the presidency.
Participants
David Rohde is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of In Deep and three other books. He the national security editor at NBC News and a former executive editor of The New Yorker website, where he wrote about the Justice Department, democracy, and disinformation. He is also a former New York Times, Reuters, and Christian Science Monitor reporter. He lives in New York with his family.
Timothy Naftali is Senior Research Scholar at the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He was formerly a clinical professor of public service at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, clinical professor of history in NYU’s College of Arts and Science, and director of NYU’s undergraduate public policy program. Naftali, whose book Khrushchev’s Cold War with Aleksandr Fursenko, won the Royal United Services Institute’s Duke of Westminster’s medal for military literature in 2007, is a pioneer in the study of modern international and espionage history and is a well-recognized presidential historian.
After serving as the first director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs’ presidential recordings program. Naftali became the founding director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2007, where he curated a nationally recognized nonpartisan permanent exhibit on Watergate and oversaw the release of 1.3 million pages of records. Naftali is the author, co-author or editor of 8 books, including a biography of George Herbert Walker Bush and histories of US counterterrorism policy and of presidential impeachment.
Naftali was an historical consultant to both the Nazi War Crimes and Imperial Japanese Government Records Interagency Working Group and to the 9/11 Commission. He is currently a member of the State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee, which provides oversight for the Foreign Relations of the United States series. Naftali, who is a CNN presidential historian, has appeared in several documentaries, most recently Prime Video’s The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes and CNN’s 2010s, and has also consulted on CNN’s Tricky Dick and Netflix’s Designated Survivor.
Brooklyn Public Library - Center for Brooklyn History MM/DD/YYYY 60