Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Getty Pictures
This text was tailored from Elie Honig’s e-book When You Come on the King: Inside DOJ’s Pursuit of the President, From Nixon to Trump, revealed on September 16 by Harper.
Jill Wine-Banks managed to get a uncommon Saturday off from her all-consuming job as a Watergate prosecutor to attend a household marriage ceremony in New York in late October 1973. When she returned to her lodge round midnight, a desk clerk handed her a handwritten message of a telephone name from a colleague again house in Washington, D.C.: “The workplace has been seized by the FBI. Return instantly.”
Wine-Banks, then 30 years previous and the one girl on the Watergate crew, realized that particular prosecutor Archibald Cox, a honored former Harvard Legislation professor, had been fired by President Richard Nixon and that Lawyer Basic Elliot Richardson and Deputy Lawyer Basic William Ruckelshaus had chosen to resign in protest reasonably than perform Nixon’s corrupt order. Wine-Banks informed me she took the primary flight again to D.C. on Sunday morning and went on to the workplace, the place she discovered yellow police tape marking off the working house. Wine-Banks began to take away tape from her desk when an FBI agent informed her, “I wouldn’t try this, miss.” She ignored him.
James Quarles was a scholar of Cox’s at Harvard and later labored for him on the Watergate crew beginning in 1973, when Quarles was 26 years previous; greater than 40 years later, Quarles would serve as a prime deputy to particular counsel Robert Mueller. (Quarles quipped to me with a chuckle, “I used to be too younger for Watergate and too previous for Mueller.”) “We mentioned, ‘Let’s make the president hearth all of us if he desires to do away with this,’” Quarles recounted. Wine-Banks mentioned she and others discovered an unoccupied house within the workplace and sat collectively on the ground. Fifty-plus years later, she remembers Cox’s phrases: “So long as you may proceed your work, don’t give him [Nixon] what he desires.” She informed me, “So we saved exhibiting up, we saved working, and no person threw us out.”
Lower than two weeks later, Leon Jaworski grew to become the brand new particular prosecutor. Carl Bernstein, the now-legendary reporter protecting Watergate for the Washington Put up, recalled to me that Jaworski “more and more grew to become conscious that Nixon and the folks round him had been attempting to impede justice. Jaworski was a straight shooter … assiduous, decided, and particularly sensible. As a prosecutor, he was agency and couldn’t be intimidated. He’s actually among the many heroes of Watergate.”
Jaworski’s work culminated in July 1974 when the U.S. Supreme Court docket dominated by an 8-0 margin that Nixon needed to flip over audiotapes made by the interior White Home recording system, together with a “smoking gun” tape wherein Nixon and his chief of employees plotted to have the CIA shut down the FBI’s investigation. Lower than three weeks later, Nixon resigned.
Nixon actually tried to derail the Watergate felony investigation, however he additionally acknowledged limits on his obstructive capability. He fired the particular prosecutor, however, constrained by politics, norms, and resistance from throughout the Justice Division, Nixon left the remainder of the Watergate crew in place and relented to the appointment of Jaworski, whose investigation in the end compelled his resignation.
Leon Jaworski (heart).
Photograph: David Hume Kennerly/Getty Pictures
No president — no individual of any station — desires to be investigated by an out of doors prosecutor by any identify (“particular prosecutor” in the course of the Watergate period, “impartial counsel” within the late-Twentieth century, and now “particular counsel”). For the reason that Civil Struggle, presidents (within the early days) and attorneys basic (over the previous half-century) have tapped outdoors prosecutors to deal with the highest-stakes instances which may implicate the commander-in-chief or different political heavy hitters. This one is so delicate, the pondering has gone, that it presents a possible battle of curiosity for the Justice Division itself, necessitating the appointment of a trusted outsider. Robert Ray, who labored on Ken Starr’s investigation of Invoice Clinton within the Nineteen Nineties, informed me, “Everybody’s in favor of the thought of an out of doors prosecutor, in idea — till one will get pointed at them.” As one cooperating prosecution witness testified to impartial counsel Donald Smaltz in the course of the 1998 trial of Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy, “God is aware of, if I had $30 million, I may discover dust on you, sir.”
Donald Trump plainly understood the stakes. When he realized in 2017 that the Justice Division had appointed Mueller as particular counsel, he slumped again in his chair and responded, “Oh my God. That is horrible. That is the top of my presidency. I’m fucked.” Trump’s visceral response was, in a single respect, an implicit act of contrition. Why would anybody be so upset except they’d one thing to cover? However in a broader sense, Trump’s response was fully rational, an correct reflection of historic reality. Even these presidents and different topics who’ve averted indictment by outdoors prosecutors have nonetheless sustained substantial private and political harm.
However Trump in his second time period is totally different in variety from any prior president, together with his personal first-term self. On reflection, it’s a miracle the Mueller appointment occurred in any respect after which endured for 2 years till the case’s pure finish. Though Trump consistently attacked and undermined the investigation, he by no means fairly took the drastic step of ending the probe altogether.
It’s clear now that Trump has realized from his personal expertise and that any effort within the second time period to nominate one other Mueller-style particular counsel shall be smothered at inception with retribution certain to observe. And it’s simply as plain that Lawyer Basic Pam Bondi — in contrast to Justice Division management throughout Trump’s first time period and all through historical past — will instantly snuff out any probe aimed on the president or the administration and can punish anyone who even broaches the chance.
The early phases of Trump’s second time period have marked an inauspicious second for the Justice Division’s institutional independence and for accountability for the president and prime authorities officers extra broadly. Investigation and prosecution of such figures have by no means been straightforward. And up to date authorized developments — together with the Supreme Court docket’s shockingly broad criminal-immunity resolution in July 2024, Trump v. United States — pose sizable obstacles for any prosecutor in search of to carry any president or former president accountable.
On the similar time, Trump has taken a maximalist view of his personal govt energy, and neither the courts nor Congress at present has the desire or the power to rein him in. But when something, Trump’s open hostility towards any inward-looking investigation reinforces the necessity for a proper mechanism to deal with criminality by the president and his prime brass, or for a brand new iteration that may face up to dogged political interference. Outdoors prosecutors have a protracted and different historical past and have been something however good. However they’ve been crucial all through our historical past as a verify on runaway presidential energy. And now our want for a sturdy however measured special-counsel system is extra acute than ever.
Plainly conscious of the menace posed by outdoors prosecutors, presidents have lengthy tried to undermine and impede felony investigations aimed on the White Home. Nixon and Trump are essentially the most infamous offenders, and Trump has now taken self-protective obstructionism and retributive use of prosecutorial energy to completely new ranges (or depths). However they’re hardly alone within the historic sweep.
In 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant acceded to political strain and appointed Basic John Henderson as outdoors prosecutor — the nation’s first — to research a scheme involving kickbacks from Missouri whiskey distillers to administration officers. The story is previous, however the beats are acquainted: The prosecutor racked up convictions of mid-level officers and commenced to shut in on Grant’s internal circle; Grant tried to dam the felony investigation by having a army tribunal take over (a lot as Nixon would do a century later with the CIA); Grant fired the prosecutor on a flimsy pretext; and the media lambasted the president, who griped publicly that he was being unfairly focused. One newspaper wrote of the scandal, “Let no responsible man escape, except he lives within the palace.”
Within the early Fifties, the IRS was rocked by a sequence of scandals involving bribery and tax-kickback schemes. One official was suspected of gifting costly, then-newfangled deep freezers to numerous influential recipients, together with President Harry Truman’s spouse, Bess. Beneath political strain from Congress and the media, Truman named Newbold Morris, a revered New York Republican, as an impartial prosecutor. However Morris promptly ran wild, haphazardly probing the non-public funds of varied administration officers. Two months after the appointment, the lawyer basic fired Morris, and Truman fired the AG. Truman informed his employees of the high-profile termination, “I hate to do that to anybody. He was crying on the finish.”
Invoice Clinton typically shunned publicly attacking impartial counsel Starr, however he relied on verbal gymnastics to mislead federal investigators and the American public alike. (The Oxford English Dictionary now defines Clintonesque as a declare that’s “true in most respects, however intentionally deceptive in sure particulars.”) Starr’s runaway investigation of Clinton started in 1994 as a financial-fraud case centered on a sequence of Arkansas land offers often called Whitewater and wound up 4 years later specializing in the president’s sexual encounters with White Home intern Monica Lewinsky.
Ken Starr
Photograph: Ron Sachs/CNP/Getty Pictures
In August 1998, the president testified to Starr and his crew of prosecutors from the White Home Map Room over dwell video feed to grand jurors seated in a courthouse a couple of mile away. Clinton’s private lawyer, David Kendall, who sat on the president’s elbow all through the testimony, recounted to me, “Because it went alongside, I felt advantageous. We had gone over 13 or so set items, and he was hitting all of them. The clock was winding down. He was polished, and he was protecting his mood in verify.” In the meantime, on the prosecutor’s aspect of the desk, Sol Wisenberg — one in every of Starr’s prime deputies — stewed. “I used to be getting annoyed with the testimony and with a few of our questioning,” he informed me. “At one level, I didn’t understand it, however I used to be getting so offended I used to be hitting the desk. And Ken leans over to me and says, ‘Cease doing that.’”
When he bought his likelihood to query Clinton, Wisenberg confronted the president with a previous assertion by one in every of his attorneys that “there’s completely no intercourse of any variety in any method, form, or type with President Clinton.” Wisenberg posited to Clinton that the denial “was an totally false assertion. Is that appropriate?” As Wisenberg requested the query, Clinton turned his head to the aspect, cleared his throat, and appeared to wrestle to suppress a smile. He paused for 3 seconds and delivered his notorious reply: “It depends upon what the which means of is is.” Greater than a quarter-century later, Wisenberg distinctly recollects the second: “I used to be so joyful as a result of, for my part, he was kicking our ass to that time. However I knew instantly when he mentioned that, it was the one factor folks would bear in mind.”
The Home impeached Clinton in December 1998 for perjury and obstruction; the Senate (which requires a two-thirds vote to convict) acquitted the president on each prices. (As he left workplace in 2001, Clinton’s Gallup Ballot approval score spiked to 66 p.c — then, and nonetheless, the very best of any departing president because the ballot started in 1952.)
If Nixon had the Saturday-Night time Bloodbath, Trump had his Saturday-Afternoon Tantrum. At precisely 2:23 p.m. on Saturday, June 17, 2017, Trump positioned a name from the presidential retreat at Camp David to White Home counsel Don McGahn. McGahn later informed Mueller’s investigators that Trump instructed him to dispatch Mueller. However Trump, exhibiting some hesitancy to fireplace Mueller outright, got here up with a pretext: Mueller had varied conflicts of pursuits, Trump asserted, so he wanted to recuse himself from the case. McGahn seen these purported conflicts — one concerned Mueller disputing his membership charges at a Trump-owned golf membership — as “foolish” and “not actual” and had beforehand communicated that view to Trump. Nonetheless, Trump pressed on along with his request.
Robert Mueller
Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Pictures
McGahn thought again to the teachings of Watergate. He later informed Mueller’s investigators that he “needed to be extra like Decide Robert Bork and never ‘Saturday-Night time Bloodbath’ Bork” — a reference to Bork finishing up Nixon’s order to fireplace Cox. McGahn initially deliberate to resign, as Richardson and Ruckelshaus had carried out in 1973. However after consulting with confidants — one in every of whom recalled that McGahn mentioned Trump had instructed him to “do loopy shit” — McGahn reconsidered. In the end, he dealt with the state of affairs a lot as a dad or mum with an unruly toddler would: He ignored the request and waited for the match to peter out.
When Joe Biden took workplace in 2021, his administration inherited the John Durham probe, which had been launched by Trump to “examine the investigators” shortly after Mueller’s work resulted in 2019. Though Durham was plainly hostile to Democratic political pursuits, Biden and his Justice Division allowed him to spend two years ending out his work fully unobstructed. Durham concluded his investigation in 2023 with little to indicate for it: one responsible plea from an FBI lawyer that resulted in a probation sentence, and two trials that ended with not-guilty verdicts. One of many folks charged by Durham and acquitted at trial, Igor Danchenko, informed me, “They tried to show me into Ivan Drago. They tried to play off Russian pictures from 25 years in the past … the jury had been by no means going to purchase Durham’s b.s.”
Biden additionally endured the appointment of 1 particular counsel (Robert Hur) to research the president himself for mishandling of categorized paperwork and one other (David Weiss) to research his son Hunter on gun and tax offenses. In an interview with me, Bob Bauer, the veteran protection lawyer who represented President Biden, criticized the assertion in Hur’s closing report that Biden was “a sympathetic, well-meaning, aged man with a poor reminiscence”: “Why is it not attainable to do a report like this in far lower than 300-plus pages? The derogatory commentary was fully extraneous to the discovering that there was no felony violation.” And Abbe Lowell, who represented Hunter Biden, informed me the appointment of Weiss as particular counsel “all took place ass-backwards.”
President Biden absolutely didn’t welcome any of those special-counsel probes, however he allowed them to play out freed from public or back-channel interference. But his public veneer belied his underlying anger at Lawyer Basic Merrick Garland for permitting the instances to fester. Based on Bob Woodward’s 2024 e-book Struggle, Biden informed an affiliate, “Ought to by no means have picked Garland. That is by no means going to fucking go away.” In the end, Biden’s pardon of his son — after the president and his supporters repeatedly claimed he would by no means do such a factor out of respect for the criminal-justice course of — undermined his beforehand professed reverence for the impartial prosecutorial system.
Nonetheless, regardless of all of the pushback and complaining and scheming, the establishment of the outsider prosecutor has endured in U.S. politics, and presidents throughout events and centuries have allowed themselves to be investigated. Trump is basically totally different, nevertheless; he has now chosen to bypass typical strategies developed by his predecessors to undermine and derail outdoors prosecutors. As a substitute, Trump has deserted the niceties and decreed by his actions that he shall be fully investigation-proof.
Lower than a yr into Trump’s second time period, he and Bondi have already made clear their intent to make use of the DOJ as a score-settling weapon of political retribution.
Throughout his second marketing campaign, Trump displayed his fierce intuition not just for self-protection but in addition for payback. At a March 2023 rally, for instance, he informed an approving crowd, “I’m your warrior. I’m your justice. And for many who have been wronged and betrayed: I’m your retribution.” Trump threatened publicly to pursue those that had been then prosecuting him — particular counsel Jack Smith, Lawyer Basic Garland, Manhattan district lawyer Alvin Bragg, and Fulton County district lawyer Fani Willis. Bondi, for her half, echoed Trump’s requires retribution. In August 2023, within the rapid wake of Trump’s 4 felony indictments (and earlier than her nomination as AG), Bondi mentioned on Fox Information, “The Division of Justice, the prosecutors, shall be prosecuted, the unhealthy ones. The investigators shall be investigated.”
Pam Bondi
Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Pictures
Trump and Bondi wasted little time making good on their vow to pursue vengeance. Simply days after he took workplace in January 2025, the president despatched an unmistakable message to the Justice Division when his appearing lawyer basic (Bondi had not but been confirmed) fired a couple of dozen profession prosecutors who had labored on Smith’s prosecution crew (Smith had resigned weeks earlier than). The termination letters supplied no pretext: “You performed a major position in prosecuting President Trump.” Days later, new DOJ management fired dozens of FBI brokers who had labored on the Trump case and different January 6 prosecutions. Because the lone-wolf murderer Omar put it in The Wire (with a nod to Emerson and Machiavelli earlier than him): “You come on the king, you finest not miss.”
Bondi enthusiastically facilitated the president’s requires vengeance. Instantly upon taking workplace as lawyer basic, she launched a so-called Weaponization Working Group to research and undermine Smith and different Trump prosecutors. By making a working group outdoors the parameters of the DOJ’s special-counsel rules, Bondi ensured the inquest may proceed with out regard to the established restrictions, guideposts, and reporting necessities.
Certainly, the Justice Division has spent a lot of the summer season of 2025 on a retributive binge. Bondi initiated a felony grand-jury probe of Barack Obama and varied prime advisers for his or her intelligence assessments relating to Russian efforts to affect the 2016 presidential election. Up to now, the AG has supplied neither a coherent idea of potential criminality nor a proof of how conduct relationship again nine-plus years may be chargeable given the five-year statute of limitations relevant to most federal crimes.
In August 2025, the Justice Division initiated a federal civil-rights probe of New York lawyer basic Letitia James, who had sued Trump for his recurring overvaluation of real-estate belongings, which resulted in a verdict value over $500 million together with curiosity. (A New York appeals courtroom upheld Trump’s civil legal responsibility however threw out the monetary penalty later in August 2025.) Additionally that month, the Workplace of the Particular Counsel — an executive-branch ethics watchdog separate from DOJ and the prosecutorial “particular counsel” of the identical nomenclature — launched a probe of Smith after Republican senator Tom Cotton claimed Smith had engaged in “unprecedented interference within the 2024 election.”
Bondi’s prosecutors additionally pursued potential felony prices towards James and Democratic senator Adam Schiff, a longtime Trump antagonist, for purported mortgage fraud referring to their private acquisitions of actual property. In August 2025, Ed Martin — a political sycophant and 2020-election denier who had by no means labored as a prosecutor earlier than he grew to become head of the Weaponization Working Group — held a preposterously amateurish picture op on the road outdoors James’s non-public house. And in September, the Justice Division opened a felony mortgage-fraud investigation of Lisa Prepare dinner, a Federal Reserve governor who incurred Trump’s wrath by declining to vote for decrease rates of interest. The felony investigations of James, Schiff, and Prepare dinner adopted referrals from Invoice Pulte, a rabid loyalist who donated over $1 million to Trump’s political operations and now heads the Federal Housing Finance Company.
On the similar time, Bondi has made clear she is going to countenance no investigation which may hassle Trump or his administration. In March 2025, for instance, the public realized that Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth, nationwide safety adviser Mike Waltz, and different high-ranking administration officers had mentioned delicate army assault plans over the nonsecure Sign app and had inadvertently added a journalist to their group chat. Whereas comparable (or much less severe) latest incidents of mishandling of categorized info had resulted in prolonged felony investigations of Hillary Clinton (the private-email-server investigation that ended with James Comey’s fateful, ill-advised 2016 Election Eve bulletins), Trump (the Mar-a-Lago investigation that led to Smith’s appointment as particular counsel and Trump’s indictment), and Biden (which resulted in Hur’s appointment as particular counsel and an ensuing yearlong-plus investigation), Bondi shortly made clear she would allow no such inquiry into the brand new Trump administration. Simply days after the scandal broke, the lawyer basic introduced, primarily based on no substantive DOJ investigation, that “first, it was delicate info, not categorized and inadvertently launched. And what we needs to be speaking about is it was a really profitable mission.” Case closed earlier than it was ever opened.
Already throughout his second time period, Trump has obliterated numerous guardrails, norms, and legal guidelines that after reined in runaway presidents and different highly effective officers. He has fired inspectors basic, disregarded ethics legal guidelines, profited handsomely from the presidency, and neutered intelligence, whistleblower, and law-enforcement buildings.
The query for the subsequent president and others who will observe is whether or not any of these protections shall be restored. It’ll be tempting to let these checks on presidential energy stay lifeless and buried. If Trump bought away with discarding techniques that might have imposed accountability, why ought to the subsequent president convey them again, probably at his or her personal peril?
However significant, impartial felony investigation — imperfect because it has been through the years — is significant and can’t be left behind. As Archibald Cox testified to Congress simply weeks after he was fired because the Watergate prosecutor in 1973, “The pressures, the strain of divided loyalty are an excessive amount of for any man, and as honorable and conscientious as any particular person may be, the general public may by no means really feel fully straightforward in regards to the vigor and thoroughness with which the investigation was pursued. Some outdoors individual is totally important.”
We’ve all heard the maxim {that a} nation could be measured by the way it treats its weakest members. We additionally should observe an inverse corollary of kinds: A nation reveals a lot about itself by the way it holds accountable its strongest leaders when it suspects they’ve carried out fallacious.
