Not so long ago, when the FBI raided Donald Trump's 126-room Palm Beach mansion and found scores of classified documents, the notion that the disgraced former president would return to the Oval Office seemed far-fetched to just about anyone paying attention. Just over three years later, Trump is president, and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida is investigating the raid for being part of what the president's allies have branded a "grand conspiracy" against Trump.
Because if you look at this ruling, I will tell you, as a Justice Department alum, Kaitlan, it's painful. The way this broke. I was 10 minutes into teaching a class of college students, in a class about DOJ and the need to be independent of politics. And so, we stopped. We did breaking news is what happens if you take my class. Put it up on the screen, and started sort of reading the highlights.
This week, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discuss how Trump is using the powerful machine of government prosecution to reverse-engineer crimes supposedly committed by enemies, his diatribe against Tylenol at the disastrous press conference on autism, and the echoes of past Red Scares in today's free speech climate with historian Beverly Gage, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.
