Michael Feinberg: If you start enacting a regime where government employees are targeted and penalized and fired solely because of who they're friends with, you are going to create an environment where every public servant is going to be afraid to tell his or her superior what they think.

Simone Leeper: This is Michael Feinberg. For 16 years, he worked at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, mostly in counterespionage and counterintelligence. He rose to become the assistant special agent in charge of the field office in Norfolk, Virginia. Then in the middle of 2025, something unexpected happened.

Michael Feinberg: One Saturday morning, I got a phone call from my special agent in charge telling me that Dan Bongino had discovered I kept in touch with a former bureau official who had been discovered sending derogatory texts about President Trump during the first term. My career came to a screeching halt with really no notice.

Simone Leeper: I'm Simone Leeper, and this is Democracy Decoded, a podcast where we examine our government and discuss innovative ideas that can lead to a stronger, more transparent, accountable, and inclusive democracy. I work for Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan organization that for 25 years has been leading a campaign to solve the wide range of challenges facing American democracy.

This season on Democracy Decoded, we're focusing on something that is at the very foundation of our country, but doesn't often get the splashy headlines, the rule of law. When it works well, we hardly notice it. But when a president and his administration undermine or outright ignore this constitutionally enshrined heart of our democracy, things start going sideways very quickly for Americans. Today's episode focuses on the Department of Justice, the part of the federal government that houses the FBI. The DOJ is a cabinet level agency tasked with upholding the rule of law and given the power to investigate and punish people for criminal or civil offenses. Since Watergate led to reforms 50 years ago, Americans have expected presidents to hire leaders at the DOJ and even set broad priorities, but not to meddle in decisions carrying out the agency's mission. And yet during the second Trump administration, Americans face an urgent question: What happens when the president expects everyone at the DOJ to be in political lockstep with him personally?

Michael Feinberg: In my career, I don't think any of my subordinates had the slightest idea what my political views were, simply because they never influenced a single decision I made as an FBI agent.

Simone Leeper: Michael Feinberg was seemingly the very model of a straight arrow at the FBI, someone who dedicated his life to the apolitical work of protecting the country.

Michael Feinberg: Similarly, I did not know the views of my superiors, and that was good. We were investigators, we were law enforcement, we were an intelligence apparatus. All of our actions in order to be effective in any of those realms had to be based entirely on facts, not on ideologies.

Simone Leeper: His specialty was trying to suss out foreign spies inside the United States.

Michael Feinberg: The lion's share of my time being devoted to investigating the actions and efforts of China's intelligence services.

Simone Leeper: Michael was a student of philosophy, history, and law who found the FBI an intellectual joy.

Michael Feinberg: I learned so much from individuals of a variety of backgrounds and experiences who had I never joined the Bureau, I would've never met. I would've never encountered people like them. I learned tons of skills that you would think an FBI agent had to learn, surveillance, covert entries, processing evidence, structuring interviews and interrogations. But I also got to learn a foreign language. I got to learn about areas of science and technology to which I'd never been previously exposed. Being there made me a more well- rounded, interesting person.

Simone Leeper: The wide spectrum of views and skills all fed into a culture of patriotic mission.

Michael Feinberg: It gave me a sense of purpose. Every morning I was fortunate enough to wake up and realize that my job entailed protecting other people.

Simone Leeper: President Trump's second administration changed everything. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the country's primary federal law enforcement agency. The president appointed Kash Patel to run the FBI. Beneath Kash Patel, President Trump installed Dan Bongino as deputy FBI director. Both men were already known for their overt political views, and to hear Michael tell it, they did not check those politics at the door.

Michael Feinberg: Anytime a new director comes to the FBI, there's always some change. There is something that gets done differently. But what we saw when Kash Patel and Dan Bongino came in quick succession was a complete eradication of the parts of bureau culture that protected us from political influence and protected American civil liberties. When Patel came in, it was going to be very clear that we were no longer an independent investigative agency enforcing the law without fear or favor and without regard for political considerations. He wanted to turn us into what was functionally an armed wing of the White House that could execute on the president's priorities. To take a law enforcement organization and direct it to go against specific segments of society or against political enemies is something that is really beyond the pale in the American political tradition.

Simone Leeper: During the 2024 presidential campaign, President Trump ran on the promise of mass deportations. His FBI duly followed suit.

Michael Feinberg: The first thing that gave me an inkling we were now essentially having our work dictated by policy preferences rather than by predicated facts was when we were functionally turned into an augmenting arm of DHS. The FBI has long had the authority since 9/ 11 to enforce immigration laws, but there was always a recognition that that wasn't where we were best used. We were really good at running long- term complex investigations, sometimes multi- years long, into hard targets that no other law enforcement or intelligence agency could touch. And all of a sudden, overnight, we have agents with decades of experience pulling perimeter security duty while ICE rounded up undocumented immigrants. Now, there might've been a smart way to get the FBI involved in immigration enforcement. That wasn't it. We were just fungible bodies that happened to have guns and badges that could be used to help the president and his allies look tough on immigration. And at that point, it's just make work. It's just performative. It's not keeping anybody safe.

Simone Leeper: Michael could feel radical changes taking place. A phone call in May 2025 was the clincher. At the direction of Dan Bongino, the new special agent in charge of Michael's field office called and told him he was in effect through. Michael's offense, he was friends with a former coworker who had criticized President Trump years earlier.

Michael Feinberg: This is somebody who I worked with for a very long time before there was any controversy attached to his name, and the basis of our friendship was the same as any other friendship that you would have with somebody outside of work. We liked the same bands and we liked trying new restaurants.

Simone Leeper: Michael's friend was Peter Strzok, a former FBI counterintelligence expert. He led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Robert Mueller pulled Peter Strzok off that job when the FBI found text messages from him that indicated he might be biased against President Trump, a subject of his investigation.
In a 2022 book, Kash Patel published Peter Strzok's name among the list of what he termed " members of the executive branch deep state." Critics noted that it read like his own personal enemies list. By the time Kash Patel took over the FBI, Peter Strzok was no longer at the agency. Michael, however, was.

Michael Feinberg: He was my concert buddy. The notion that I was somehow undermining the FBI by going to see New Order in concert with him was ludicrous, and I didn't really know how to react to these accusations. The friendship wasn't a secret. It was nothing to be ashamed of, but my special agent in charge made it clear to me that my career was over because of this.

Simone Leeper: Michael was told he shouldn't expect a promotion he was up for. Instead, he should expect a demotion. He should expect to be polygraphed. It was a dark turn.

Michael Feinberg: I was in the FBI to protect people, both American citizens and my coworkers, frankly. I supervised at one point 200 people, and with that position comes an obligation to sort of be an umbrella to stop nonsense from raining down on them while they're trying to do their job. And it was very clear to me that I couldn't fulfill either of those missions being under the microscope I now was. In what was the defining heartbreak of my life, and I say that without any hyperbole or exaggeration, I realized that the only path open to me was resignation. And I realized if I stayed in the FBI and gave in to just the thuggish, ideological, frankly, unconstitutional policies and ways of thinking that were overtaking the senior most leadership, I would never be able to look myself in the eye, let alone somebody else. And to quote the Rolling Stones, I decided to " walk before they made me run."

Simone Leeper: Michael considers his fate a warning. He had done everything his country asked of him in the service of keeping Americans safe. He had risen to become a leader among his peers. He had even kept his own politics to himself, but even he could not survive presidential appointees who nursed longstanding political grudges.

Michael Feinberg: There is a misconception in the public that the only people the Trump administration are targeting are those who don't share their political views, those who are very much of the left or performatively activist or overly politicized. I was none of those things. I was a member of the Federalist Society in law school. I was actually vice president of Northwestern University's chapter. To the extent I ever worked for politically aligned organizations or political candidates, they were invariably conservative.
There is nothing in my background that anyone at the White House could find ideologically objectionable, but that didn't matter. It was enough that I was friends with somebody who had political views different than them. It was enough that I approached my job, not from the point of view of somebody with his own opinions and philosophies, but rather as an apolitical civil servant dedicated to all citizens, not just those who agreed with me. And that fundamental willingness to embrace all Americans regardless of their political stripe was enough that they didn't want me in the FBI.

Joyce Vance: The alarming issue with this Justice Department is that its leadership has been co- opted in service of the president.

Simone Leeper: This is Joyce White Vance. She's a professor at the University of Alabama Law School. For 25 years, she worked at the United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Alabama. The last eight years there, she served as the United States Attorney.

Joyce Vance: Prior to that though, I was just a line prosecutor, a career prosecutor. I say just, it was the best job any lawyer can ever have.

Simone Leeper: Since Donald Trump has returned to the presidency, Professor Vance has tracked his Justice Department via her Substack newsletter called Civil Discourse. As a former leader within the DOJ, she aims her criticism high in the department and tracks the consequences that roll downhill. That includes a sharp rebuke of Todd Blanche, both in his former role as acting attorney general and since his contentious confirmation earlier this summer as the nation's chief law officer.

Joyce Vance: Todd Blanche has been willing to do, in essence, the president's bidding, bringing cases that belong on Trump's revenge portfolio, cases that often can't get past a grand jury or don't survive early motions if they do, but also willing to show favoritism towards the president's allies, either by not moving forward with investigations or, as in the case of Trump versus IRS, with this absolutely incredible creation of a slush fund that the president would've been able to use to pay off to reward his political supporters from January 6th. There's a really frightening dimension to that, that it could have been perceived as payment towards future services. It could have been seen as, " I will always have your back no matter what crimes you commit to support me." So I think that's very dangerous. And then the idea that Trump essentially got a get- out- of- jail- free card in an addendum personally signed off on by Blanche would've given Trump forgiveness for unpaid taxes and freedom from future investigation.
So there's that level of, I'm just going to say co- option, corruption, that sits on top of the work that the career people at DOJ continue to try to do, protecting the American people. And it's increasingly difficult for prosecutors and agents to do that work because communities have lost faith in the Justice Department because of the way the leadership is conducting itself. And so we have both corruption at the top and then difficulty doing the ordained work of the Justice Department, which is really important for keeping all of us safe.

Simone Leeper: In July, a federal judge in Miami ruled against the agreement that Todd Blanche, now the Attorney General, had tried to secure in President Trump's lawsuit against the IRS. The judge found that federal law does not allow the government to excuse the president from IRS investigations. She wrote that in this case, the president and the acting AG were effectively self- dealing because the president and the government were never adversarial parties. Her ruling was a sharp rebuke to the DOJ's willingness to bend to the president's political and financial interests.

Joyce Vance: What's happened at DOJ could only take place because of the complicity of top leadership. From the get- go, there was a cabal with the first Trump attorney general in round two, Pam Bondi, had been Trump's impeachment lawyer, Todd Blanche, Trump's personal criminal defense lawyer, Emil Bove before he was appointed and confirmed as a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, another one of Trump's personal lawyers, and they were doing his bidding, not the work of the Justice Department representing the people. Everything follows from there. We saw people at the Justice Department resign. We saw people be fired, not because they weren't doing their jobs and upholding their oath to the Constitution and the rule of law, but because they would not serve this president.

Dana Paikowsky: The folks who have stayed at the Department of Justice are career attorneys who care about their cases and care about the department's mission, that it can continue to enforce federal laws in a neutral and nonpartisan way, and that the apolitical work that it was doing should still be done by people who are competent, who understand how to do it and who do it really well.

Simone Leeper: This is my colleague, Dana Paikowsky, an attorney who took on the role of senior legal counsel for voting rights at Campaign Legal Center after resigning from the Department of Justice in 2025. She started her career at DOJ enforcing federal voting rights laws. She later worked in the special litigation section focusing on systemic civil rights harms such as unconstitutional policing and prison conditions. Like many other DOJ attorneys, she made the hard decision to leave when it became clear this administration did not consider civil rights work a priority.

Dana Paikowsky: So the folks in the department were given two decision points. First, there was what folks called the FORC, which was this initial email we got from the new administration offering everybody a sort of incentive to leave their job. And at that point, I think no one in the Civil Rights Division took the exit, maybe one person did, and then the new administration made a second pass at trying to encourage as many people as possible to leave, and they provided a second opportunity for folks to exit with something that approached a severance package. We heard from our political leadership sort of in no uncertain terms that if they were us, they might think about leaving. And so yeah, I made the choice to go, and I think most other people did as well.
It was a highly personal decision, but for a lot of folks who had spent their life dedicated to enforcing these really important laws, laws that came out of the civil rights movement, that came out of the struggles of historically marginalized people to fight for their rights, faced with a decision of having to do work that felt contrary to the text of those laws, to the purposes of those laws, the decision was hard, but also easy.

Simone Leeper: When Dan Bongino chases a counterintelligence agent out of the FBI or a DOJ voting rights attorney resigns, the average American may not notice, but the DOJ's irregularities are also becoming highly public. Department lawyers keep overreaching in their efforts to indict people who oppose this administration.

Dana Paikowsky: Where you can see a marked change is in the success of criminal prosecutions. Historically, the department, when they sought to indict someone and then when they pursued a criminal case was almost always successful. Their rate of either conviction or obtaining a guilty plea was like 95, 97%. The reason for that is that the department has historically been a pretty small C conservative place. They're only really trying to bring cases if they know that they can win, if they know that they have really good evidence, if they feel confident that the case that they have built up meets the requirements, internal requirements to show this is a valid case, it's not politically motivated. And now the department is charging people with crimes that cannot make it past a grand jury so they're not getting indicted or the criminal cases fall apart. One of the most concerning spaces where we've seen that is the prosecution of protestors and folks who have taken actions to voice their dissent about the way that ICE and Customs and Border Patrol are doing their work.

Simone Leeper: Examples of failed prosecutions abound. A California prosecutor tried to secure indictments against 38 anti- ICE protestors and managed to get seven. And in Illinois, gross prosecutorial misconduct led to the dismissal of charges against all of the so- called Broadview six protestors.

Dana Paikowsky: The government has been using this provision of federal law that is pretty vague about interference with law enforcement activities to maximally prosecute people who are maybe engaging in civil disobedience to block an ICE vehicle or demonstrating outside of a facility, and a lot of these prosecutions have fallen apart. And that indicates to me that the department is not bringing cases because they feel that they are well- founded, but because they're trying to send folks a message, and that's not the right use of state power.

Simone Leeper: As the DOJ suffers embarrassing losses before grand juries, it nonetheless continues to fire people the president perceives as enemies. President Trump claims Article 2 of the Constitution, which lays out presidential powers, grants him latitude to fire virtually anyone who works in the executive branch. In July of 2025, he used that power to target a DOJ prosecutor whose father had a very public history with the president.

Joyce Vance: So Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI director Jim Comey, was a highly regarded prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. She had handled a number of high profile cases, including the Jeffrey Epstein indictment, and she obtained the conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell, his co- conspirator.

Simone Leeper: Here again is Joyce Vance.

Joyce Vance: And then Maurene Comey gets fired by the Justice Department in an email which essentially says, " You're fired under Article 2 of the Constitution." Now look, prosecutors, we're part of the civil service and we have certain protections, but this is a president who has taken an expansive view of the unitary executive theory and under that expansive view believes that he can hire and fire at will.

Simone Leeper: Unitary executive theory, as we explained in our last episode, is the controversial legal philosophy that says the Constitution demands that the president have total control over all agencies, including those specifically designed by Congress to be independent. This is the dark side of the loyalty that President Trump demands. He wants complete devotion from appointees such as Todd Blanche and Kash Patel, even at the expense of the rule of law. He also communicates his expectations to rank- and- file employees by destroying the lives of good people. If you cross him, your career may be over, your friends and your kids' careers may be over as well. So Campaign Legal Center took legal action in the Maurene Comey case, filing an amicus brief on behalf of Justice Connection and Michael Feinberg, who you heard at the top of this episode, to underline that such firings are unlawful political retribution that violate the First Amendment rights of civil servants.

Joyce Vance: So this, I think, is deeply troubling because what it suggests is that this is a president who will fire career employees doing exemplary work if he doesn't like their daddy, right? Maurene Comey's case is an extreme situation, but prosecutors at the Justice Department are now walking on eggs because you get assigned to the wrong case, you lose your career. These are the sorts of considerations we don't want our Justice Department officials to have to make. We want them to follow the facts and the law and forcing them to fight for their financial wellbeing and their family's security at the whim of a president is just appalling. Trump's suggestion that he can just wave around his magic marker copy of the Constitution and say, " I have an Article 2," is utterly unprecedented in the way we conduct federal affairs. He's stripping out the experienced career people, with the Justice Department and the FBI being top examples, simply because what he wants is loyalty.

Simone Leeper: In exchange for loyalty, President Trump has tried to offer impunity. Most famously, he has issued mass pardons and pay- for- play executive clemency, something we'll explore later this season. His DOJ also proposed a rule declaring that its lawyers can't face ethics sanctions from the state bar associations that license them. In other words, the Trump DOJ is trying to immunize its attorneys from the standard professional consequences of misconduct.

Joyce Vance: Well, first off, let's just say that the Justice Department cannot do this, right? Many people viewed it as an effort to protect others who were perceived as violating ethics rules. That's, I think, the best way of understanding this proposal, was that there were Trump political people at the Justice Department who had crossed the line, and this was an effort to protect them and prevent them from facing accountability for violating their oath that they took when they became members of the bar.

Dana Paikowsky: As a government attorney, you have such immense power. You're wielding the power of the state. The resources of the United States government are at your back. The public trust that's been vested in you means that if anything, it should be easier to hold you accountable.

Simone Leeper: Again, Campaign Legal Center's Dana Paikowsky.

Dana Paikowsky: Instead, this administration is trying to make it harder, and that's really a problem, especially in the context of what we've been talking about, right? Attorneys at the department have been showing up in court and making misrepresentations, lying to courts, taking positions that are not supportable, and so courts are referring them for sanctions. So Campaign Legal Center filed a comment strongly opposing the proposed regulation in part because we believe that it exceeds the Department of Justice's authority. We think it's not supported by adequate reasoning or data, and it would make enforcement of state ethics rules less effective and also infringe on state's traditional authority to regulate attorney conduct. So in a word, no, we don't think that they can do that, which is why we filed our proposed rule and we're prepared to fight back.

Simone Leeper: The fight for the rule of law has intensified since the 2020 election. Investigations that once would've been uncontroversial are now political battlefields, and government jobs that should be seats of impartiality are now held by people who supported efforts to overturn election results.

Dana Paikowsky: At a really high level, the rule of law means that no one, regardless of how wealthy they are, how powerful they are, is above the law. It means that laws are equally enforced, that they're fairly enacted, and that they are independently adjudicated. So it means that if you're a single person, you can go into court and try to hold the United States government accountable for violating your rights and not be worried that the judge you're presenting your case to is sort of in the pocket of the government. I think it's apparent to anybody who's living in the United States today, who's watching the world around us, that our democracy is facing unprecedented threats, and CLC is expanding its work to really meet that moment.

Simone Leeper: Campaign Legal Center has also tried to protect the FBI officials Kash Patel fired for their roles in Arctic Frost. That was the codename for the multi- agency probe into efforts to keep President Trump in power despite his having lost the 2020 election. The officials have sued Patel, alleging that the firings were illegal retaliations for them having done their sworn duties.

Dana Paikowsky: We filed an amicus brief in support of the FBI agents who lost their jobs to say that the Trump administration can't, in retrospect, fire people because they believe that the work that they did as part of the department is somehow partisan and makes them less able to do their jobs today. Again, this is a question about merit- based hiring and firing. No one is arguing that the Trump administration cannot fire FBI agents who aren't doing their jobs, who violate rules and procedures. What we are saying is that you can't fire folks who did a good job, but worked on things that you don't agree with. It's a bedrock principle in the civil service that civil servants should be able to work across administrations. We don't want to have a civil service that turns over every four years, so the only people who work there agree with the people in power. We want people who are good at their jobs, who do their jobs fairly and impartially, and that means constraining the executive's ability to fire people who have done work that they disagree with.

Simone Leeper: The rule of law requires that leaders and employees alike in the Justice Department treat all Americans equally, regardless of political leanings or social affiliations. In turn, it requires that people working inside the government are afforded equal treatment, regardless of their past assignments or their family connections, or as in the case of Michael Feinberg, their workplace friendships.

Michael Feinberg: If we want to be a safe, just, and efficient country, we can't get rid of people because of who their friends are or because of who their parents are. That's just common sense. That there are individuals at the highest ranks of government who can't see that or don't want to see that should make the American people angry. But I think in harnessing that anger and turning it to productive actions, whether in the activist community or in the political campaigning community or in the legal field, the American people still have the ability to change things for the better. I'm not going to pretend that the hour is not late. I look around America and I see lights being dimmed that I worry will not be re- lit for quite some time, but the light hasn't vanished. We just need to rekindle it.

Joyce Vance: The reality is it's because we are a solid rule of law country that we're able to have the comfortable lives that we have.

Simone Leeper: And finally, once again, Joyce Vance.

Joyce Vance: Foreign countries, at least up until now, were comfortable coming to the United States and investing, whether in property or deals or businesses, because there was a rule of law that clarified their rights and responsibilities if they had a dispute. They had certainty. And for the same reason, you and I can pay rent to a landlord, and we know that once we've paid that money, we're entitled to live in that rental property. The landlord can't just arbitrarily boot us because we have a rule of law and it acts as the architecture, the solid architecture that all of our lives are draped on top of. So really, whether you're a lawyer or not, whether you've ever heard the phrase rule of law, it is in such a concrete way what animates the good lives we live. In every aspect of our lives, we're touched by the security of the rule of law as a precondition for stable, happy lives.

Simone Leeper: In no part of the government is the rule of law more vital than in the Justice Department. The breakdowns large and small that we are witnessing, the firing, the abuses, the ideological tests together constitute an emergency for American democracy, but there is hope when former department workers step forward to hold it to a higher ethical standard. They allow us regular Americans to contribute to another keystone of democratic life, transparency. When the rule of law is under assault, it's up to all of us to identify and articulate what's happening, then to come together to decide how to protect the institutions that matter to us.

Next time on Democracy Decoded, we look at the state of political dissent and size up the attacks the Trump administration has launched on First Amendment rights. This season of Democracy Decoded is produced by Jar Podcast Solutions for Campaign Legal Center. Campaign Legal Center is a nonpartisan legal organization dedicated to solving the wide range of challenges facing American democracy. For a quarter- century, Campaign Legal Center has been leading a campaign for democracy in courtrooms and capitals across the country, a campaign for voting rights and fair representation, a campaign to hold our government and elected officials accountable, a campaign to limit the corrosive influence of big money in our elections, and a campaign for the rule of law so every American can participate meaningfully in the democratic process. Today, the threats to our democracy go beyond anything we could have imagined when we first opened our doors.
During this pivotal year for our country, Campaign Legal Center needs support to continue to fight on behalf of the American people. Your tax- deductible donation directly funds our efforts to do just that. If you would like to support our work, visit campaignlegal.org and click on the donate button.

Special thanks to our guests, Michael Feinberg, Joyce Vance, and Dana Paikowsky. I'm your host, Simone Leeper. Thanks so much for listening. If you learned something new today, find us on your podcast platform of choice and hit subscribe. You'll get updates as we release new episodes. Leading this production for Campaign Legal Center are Casey Atkins, multimedia manager and Madeline Greenberg, communications associate. This podcast was produced by Sam Eifling, editing and mixing by Luke Badio. Democracy Decoded is a member of the Democracy Group, a network of podcasts dedicated to engaging in civil discourse, inspiring civic engagement, and exploring the future of our democracy. You can learn more at democracygroup.org.