Rachel Maddow moderates a panel at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., on Oct. 16, 2017.
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Steven Senne/AP
The Justice Department wasn’t created by the Founding Fathers. And according to Rachel Maddow, it has never been entirely independent of politics.
Maddow, host of the Rachel Maddow show on MS NOW, chronicles that complicated history in her new book Department of Fate: The Promise, the Power, and the Collapse of America’s Most Consequential Institution.
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.
Her book revisits some striking chapters in that history.
The Department of Justice was established in the wake of the Civil War. 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, the latter episode challenges the idea that the department was ever insulated from political influence.
“That it’s 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,” she said.
Maddow tells Morning Edition host Michel 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.
The digital version was edited by Majd Al-Waheidi.
