Aaron C. Davis

And, you know, we follow him in the book as he goes around and begins that investigation.

It's really true.

You know, we're so far from it, but this is a big reason of why we started to report and work on the book, which is that we had written a couple stories, Carol and I, back in 2023 about some of the slow start.

And we didn't have the whole picture then, but we had some pieces of it.

And, you know, we got some blowback from people inside the Department of Justice who said, hey, you don't know what it's been like in here during the first Trump term.

And so as we set about writing a book, we said, well, let's try to capture that.

And we went back over those years of the first Trump term.

And as bad as it was and we saw in the headlines then, it was actually worse.

I mean, there was more arm twisting.

There was more, you know, cajoling and trying to get prosecutors to sign things and go against what they thought was the right reading of the law.

and the same on the FBI side as well.

We got to a place where we wanted to be able to have everyone who reads the book understand what is the Department of Justice, the condition that it's in as the sun comes up on the morning of January 6th.

And if you can grasp that, then you can understand why they're so reticent and careful and slow in the years afterward.

And when it comes to this particular point of really digging into the fake elector scheme and all the politicians around the country that become involved in that,

You know, there is suddenly a recognition inside the department when they look at this and say, this is actually the heart of the scheme.

And if we're going to go forward with this, there's going to have to be a lot of hands on the knife is one of the quotes from inside a meeting inside DOJ that, you know, everybody has to have buy in.

If we're going to go back and open an investigation on the president, the people around him, we have to have full buy in here.

On that particular one, they talked to a couple of those folks for various reasons.

But you are right that they were behind and in some ways learning a lot of what had happened in and around Donald Trump in the weeks before January 6th as they were watching television, much like the rest of America was.

It was a very odd situation where you had a Department of Justice that had not yet really engaged with this investigation and certainly not at the level and the intensity that the House Select Committee had done.