Two new books about America’s justice system paint a bleak picture of a deeply divided country.
A review of Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department by Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis, 496 Pages, Penguin Press (November 2025) and The Two FBIs: The Bravery and Betrayal I Saw in My Time at the Bureau, by Nicole Parker, 288 pages, Broadside (November 2025)
At first glance, The Two FBIs (by veteran FBI agent Nicole Parker) and Injustice (by journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis) offer very different accounts of the problems faced by America’s leading federal domestic investigation agency. Parker condemns the political correctness and leftist ideology that she says has colonised her beloved FBI and sapped its effectiveness. Leonnig and Davis are much more concerned by the threat posed by President Donald Trump and his use of the Department of Justice as an instrument of politics and vengeance. However, these two very different books do convey a shared sense of doom and trajectory: democracy, all three authors agree, is being eroded from within by partisans installed in previously non-partisan agencies.
Leonnig and Davis treat the rise, fall, and return of Trump as a three-act tragedy. They spend a good deal of time discussing the 6 January riot at the US Capitol, but they warn readers that this event was not “a starting point or ending point, but the middle of a much bigger story.” The meat of that story, they argue, is the process by which Trump has unconstitutionally gutted the Department of Justice. The authors show how his first term was a trial run to gather power, but by the time he began his second term, the DOJ had become his plaything. This naked politicisation violated a conviction shared by past presidential administrations, whether they were run by Republicans or Democrats: “[All pledged] to keep Justice blind and impartial—and independent from political influence. They agreed that the facts and the law would guide their decisions based on these shared values.”
The authors point out that Trump was able to exploit a weakness in the relationship between the executive branch and the Department of Justice: “The department’s political independence . was never protected under the law, but instead flourished through American presidents’ shared respect to this core precept.” That changed “when the Department of Justice collided violently with Donald Trump in his rise to power, and for the first time in history, our nation’s rule of laws was brought to the precipice of collapse.” During his first administration, public servants and top leaders in the department were “tested and battered” by Trump “who manipulated facts, fanned conspiracy theories, and flouted the law.”
Act One of this tragedy tells the story of how “a novice President Trump trie[d] to manhandle the power of the Department of Justice for his own political gain” to “shield himself and his allies and to punish and harass his enemies.” FBI director James Comey is a pivotal villain in this tale. Leonnig and Davis are particularly critical of the press conference he called on the eve of the 2016 election, at which he announced that the Bureau would be reopening its investigation into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails (and whether she knowingly or unknowingly violated national security). The authors report that “many inside and outside the department” believe that this decision tipped the election in Trump’s favour and violated a “core principle” of the DOJ by involving it in a presidential election. Emboldened, Trump then fired Comey for refusing to clear him of colluding with Russian intelligence during the 2016 presidential campaign. According to the authors, this took the Bureau into “unchartered” territory. (Trump then threatened to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller III for the same reason.)
Act Two takes the reader into the subsequent administration, run by a befuddled Joe Biden who found himself dealing with the fallout of the 6 January Capitol riot, described by the authors as “one of the greatest crimes in American history.
