Two new books about America\u2019s justice system paint a bleak picture of a deeply divided country.<\/b>
\nA review of Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201ca starting point or ending point, but the middle of a much bigger story.\u201d 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: \u201c[All pledged] to keep Justice blind and impartial\u2014and independent from political influence. They agreed that the facts and the law would guide their decisions based on these shared values.\u201d
The authors point out that Trump was able to exploit a weakness in the relationship between the executive branch and the Department of Justice: \u201cThe department\u2019s political independence . was never protected under the law, but instead flourished through American presidents\u2019 shared respect to this core precept.\u201d That changed \u201cwhen the Department of Justice collided violently with Donald Trump in his rise to power, and for the first time in history, our nation\u2019s rule of laws was brought to the precipice of collapse.\u201d During his first administration, public servants and top leaders in the department were \u201ctested and battered\u201d by Trump \u201cwho manipulated facts, fanned conspiracy theories, and flouted the law.\u201d
Act One of this tragedy tells the story of how \u201ca novice President Trump trie[d] to manhandle the power of the Department of Justice for his own political gain\u201d to \u201cshield himself and his allies and to punish and harass his enemies.\u201d 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\u2019s emails (and whether she knowingly or unknowingly violated national security). The authors report that \u201cmany inside and outside the department\u201d believe that this decision tipped the election in Trump\u2019s favour and violated a \u201ccore principle\u201d 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 \u201cunchartered\u201d 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 \u201cone of the greatest crimes in American history.\u201d Leonnig and Davis argue that the Department of Justice fumbled this matter by failing to give Americans an opportunity to have a jury decide if Trump was legally culpable for what unfolded that day. Instead, the Biden administration tried to avoid the political storm that a Trump prosecution would have wrought by resting on the presumption that the Capitol riot had rendered Trump unelectable. They did not even consider the possibility that the country might elect Trump a second time. This complacency is symbolised by Biden\u2019s \u201cthoughtful\u201d attorney general Merrick Garland, whose timidity left him unable to re-establish the rule of law. Garland left it to Georgia to decide if Trump had violated the state\u2019s election laws, even though Trump was recorded telling a Georgian election official to \u201cfind\u201d him the votes he needed to win the state. Garland and others were given \u201ca fleeting moment\u201d to hold Trump \u201caccountable\u201d and they failed.
Act Three brings us into Trump\u2019s second term, by which point he had engineered what the authors call the \u201cwholesale overthrow of the Department of Justice.\u201d Trump stuffed the agency with his \u201cdutiful former defense attorneys\u201d and placed \u201celection deniers\u201d in key positions of power. The authors believe that the die has been cast and that Trump\u2019s authoritarianism will only get worse now that he has successfully trashed the norms surrounding departmental and agency independence, neutered checks, balances, and critics, and remade the US government as a loyalist operation.
Reading Injustice sometimes feels like sitting through a civics lesson. The Two FBIs, on the other hand, frequently feels like an apocalyptic religious tract. However, even readers who recoil from Nicole Parker\u2019s brand of conservative religiosity are likely to find her impressive. After witnessing the 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center firsthand, she gave up her lucrative job as a manager of investor relations at multimillion-dollar hedge fund Canyon Partners LLC to join the FBI in 2010. There, she spent four years investigating security-fraud cases before being transferred to the violent crime unit. In 2019, she began working on human-trafficking cases, and by the time she left the Bureau three years later, her service had been rewarded with three law-enforcement awards and a medal of excellence.
Parker\u2019s book is more interesting than Injustice, in part because it is a memoir and she is a likeable and humane narrator. But she really does write like it\u2019s doomsday and she\u2019s the kind of believer who seems to see God in every event, which secular readers might find a bit much after a while. But for those wishing to know what life on the ground is like for an FBI agent, her book makes for a fascinating read. Unlike Leonnig and Davis, Parker isn\u2019t really concerned about the health of the justice system, and she certainly doesn\u2019t seem to be troubled by anything Trump is doing. To the contrary, she is exclusively bothered by the behaviour of his opponents and what they are doing to the FBI.
Parker is adamant that politics\u2014even the democracy-restoring kind\u2014must be kept out of the FBI. \u201cAs sworn FBI agents,\u201d she announces, \u201cwe are held to a higher standard. Regardless of who is in the Oval Office or running for office, we were there to do our jobs.\u201d Like Leonnig and Davis, Parker has strongly negative opinions about former FBI director James Comey, but her criticisms arrive with equal force from the other side of the political spectrum. Like Leonnig and Davis, she calls Comey\u2019s eleventh-hour 2016 press conference \u201cshocking\u201d and decries the manner in which he entangled the FBI in politics. But unlike Leonnig and Davis, Parker believes that Comey\u2019s intervention was tilted to benefit the Democrats not the Republicans.
Parker argues that Clinton\u2019s misuse of a private email server clearly violated national security protocols, and she seems to think this conclusion is a no-brainer. \u201cIf anyone needed to exercise the greatest caution,\u201d she writes, \u201cit was Clinton, since she had the most highly classified information and possessed the highest security clearance possible.\u201d Comey let Clinton \u201coff easy\u201d by merely stating that Clinton was being \u201cextremely careless\u201d instead of throwing the book at her. In two instances, her mobile devices were destroyed by \u201cbeing broken in half\u201d or \u201cstruck with a hammer.\u201d Parker maintains that Clinton should have been charged with \u201cobstruction of justice\u201d and \u201can attempt to destroy evidence,\u201d which is what would have happened to an FBI agent who behaved in the same manner. FBI agents who \u201cmishandled\u201d classified information, she points out, \u201cwould have been dismissed from our jobs and likely to have gone to jail.\u201d
Comey, in Parker\u2019s view, was a partisan hack with no experience as a field agent who was connected to the \u201ccorrupt\u201d (and also partisan) Department of Justice. And this is what gave rise to what Parker calls \u201cFBI 2.\u201d On Parker\u2019s side (FBI 1) were agents who kept out of politics and followed the evidence no matter where it led them. FBI 2, on the other hand, was activist and biased, and its agents were promoted based on whether or not they embraced leftist politics. As FBI 2 supplanted FBI 1, the traditionalists were discriminated against by those highly placed in FBI 2: \u201cDiscrimination or unequal enforcement against conservatives \u2026seemed to be acceptable and even encouraged.\u201d
All of this was hugely destructive to the morale of those still working in FBI 1. Worse still, standards were depressed in the name of encouraging diversity, and unqualified or otherwise ill-equipped minority applicants were hired and promoted. Parker tells us that she witnessed this kind of thing first hand when she served as an FBI trainer. Of the diversity priorities in FBI 2, Parker writes: \u201cThe FBI is not a social justice warrior club; it is a law enforcement agency\u201d but \u201cthe mission seemed to be taking a back seat to diversity.\u201d Not only is this political correctness an outrage against fairness, she warns, but it\u2019s also dangerous: \u201cIf the FBI does not perform its duties properly,\u201d she writes, or if it \u201closes sight of its mission\u201d then \u201cpeople may die.\u201d
Once FBI 2 became dominant, Parker writes, training standards declined. Agents were not properly drilled in investigative techniques, and she believes that politically acceptable conclusions were permitted to dictate the kind of evidence that agents were tasked with providing. This provides her theory for how Russiagate came about. The Russians tried to influence the 2016 Presidential race, and Trump had kind words for Vladimir Putin, therefore \u201cTrump was in cahoots with Putin.\u201d Parker finally left the Bureau in 2022, disillusioned and disgusted.
Both of these books disclose interesting aspects of the fraught recent history of the Department of Justice, albeit from opposite sides of the political spectrum. Parker is more candid about her own biases when she acknowledges that she is a Trump supporter towards the end of the book (although this will already be obvious to most of her readers). Leonnig and Davis betray their political views with the areas on which they choose to focus their attention and criticism (Trump\u2019s refashioning of the DOJ and his role in \u201cfomenting\u201d the 6 January riots). And yet, the books complement one another well. All three authors have been trained to gather and assess evidence (although Parker put in more hours than the other two and lives were at stake when she did so). And all three despise Comey for the deleterious effect his conduct had on the agency he led (albeit for antithetical reasons).
And both books leave the reader with a profound sense of pessimism. Leonnig and Davis believe America\u2019s liberal democracy is being undermined by Trump, while the DOJ is being infiltrated by his loyalists. Parker, on the other hand, believes the danger to the American Republic comes from the leftists in FBI 2, who are hell-bent on pushing the Bureau into the political fray as an agent of progressive activism. Reading these two volumes back-to-back provides a vivid reminder of just how polarised and divided the country has become since 2016. The experience left me with a sense of dread about the country\u2019s prospects.<\/p>\n