Rachel Maddow says Trump killed the Justice Department. Now she wants his attorney general impeached

You could tell before Rachel Maddow even walked onstage Sunday evening that the sold-out crowd at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium in Washington, D.C., was having a very good week.

Democrats had just delivered a historic midterm drubbing to Republicans, winning control of both chambers of Congress. The audience was practically buzzing. University President Ellen Granberg noticed.

“What a spectacular crowd,” she said. “Y’all are feeling good. I wonder why.”

But one of the night’s biggest ovations wasn’t for an election winner.

It came when Maddow, appearing with fellow MS NOW host Chris Hayes, recognized David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist prosecuted by the Trump administration for allegedly damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Hearn faced a felony charge after touching a loose piece of the pool’s lining. Prosecutors later acknowledged that evidence pointed to a flawed renovation, rather than vandalism, as the cause of the damage. D.C. Superior Court Judge Todd Edelman permanently dismissed the case in October.

Hearn stood when Maddow called his name. Then the audience rose with him and gave him a standing ovation.

It was an unexpected illustration of the question running through Maddow’s latest book: What happens when ordinary Americans find themselves confronting the power of their own government?

Her new book, Department of Fate: The Promise, the Power, and the Collapse of America’s Most Consequential Institution, arrives Tuesday. The Advocate received one of a limited number of advance print copies.

Three weeks earlier, in an exclusive interview with The Advocate, Maddow offered a devastating assessment of the institution that prosecuted Hearn.

“It’s essentially dead and will need to be refounded from the ground up, which is what this book is about,” she says of the Justice Department.

Related: Rachel Maddow sees Americans’ active resistance as key to overcoming Donald Trump’s strongman game

The remarkable Americans Maddow wants us to remember

Anyone familiar with Maddow’s storytelling knows how her brain works. Historical figures have a way of turning up in unexpected places, sometimes connecting events separated by generations.

During the interview, The Advocate noted the reappearance of Hamilton Fish, a Republican congressman associated with pro-Nazi propaganda efforts who figured prominently in Maddow’s 2023 book Prequel. Maddow also mentioned O. John Rogge, a Justice Department prosecutor who investigated American fascist networks. Both are familiar characters from her earlier historical work.

But there’s something more personal happening in her research. Maddow says she has become increasingly conscious of how often her stories center on people who risked their careers, reputations, or lives to confront abuses of power.

That theme runs through her work, from her podcast Ultra and Prequel, which explored American fascist movements, to Burn Order, which examined the incarceration of Japanese Americans, and her documentary Kill. Bury. Print., about Oklahoma journalists who faced threats after investigating local officials.

In the interview, Maddow talks about reporter Chris Willingham, whose work exposing alleged misconduct involving local law enforcement changed the course of his life. She also remembers the government officials who challenged Japanese American incarceration, sacrificing careers and reputations in the process.

She points out that these people were not simply brave. She celebrates that courage means acknowledging its costs and supporting the people who bear them.

“We need to be honest and real about what it takes to do the right hard thing instead of the wrong easy thing,” Maddow tells The Advocate.

She has come to recognize that these stories aren’t just subjects she happens to find interesting. They’re becoming the defining theme of her work.

“The sacrifice of everyday Americans, the heroism of everyday Americans, and what a serious and solemn thing it is to ask people to stand up and do right by their country in dangerous times, I feel like is kind of the work of my life right now,” she says.

Department of Fate takes that question back to the Justice Department’s creation in 1870, when the federal government was struggling to enforce Reconstruction’s constitutional guarantees.

In South Carolina, the Ku Klux Klan was terrorizing Black communities. One victim was Jim Williams, a Black political organizer murdered in 1871.

Attorney General Amos Akerman, himself a former slaveholder, pursued the Klansmen responsible for the violence.

What makes Akerman extraordinary to Maddow is that he insisted on respecting the constitutional rights of the people he prosecuted, even when extraordinary federal powers let him disregard them.

“Due process is not a favor,” Maddow said Sunday. “Due process is not something that you grant people because you like them.”

At Lisner, she read from a letter Akerman wrote to his young son as political pressures threatened his career.

“Ask what is right, not what is popular,” Akerman advised. “When you have ascertained the right, try to make it popular, but cleave to it popular or not.”

Maddow said she has thought about those words almost daily since discovering them in Akerman’s papers. They have given her strength this year.

What especially resonates with her is Akerman’s insistence that doing what is right isn’t enough. People also have a responsibility to persuade others. And when persuasion fails, they must decide whether to remain committed anyway.

Among the young men observing Akerman’s prosecutions was Louis Post, a stenographer who recorded testimony. Nearly 50 years later, Post found himself working at the Labor Department as federal authorities rounded up immigrants and suspected radicals during the Palmer Raids.

Post had learned what constitutional enforcement looked like under Akerman. Now he watched the Justice Department abandon those principles.

He used his relatively modest authority over deportation proceedings to challenge the government’s actions, ultimately stopping thousands of removals.

The book is hardly an uncomplicated celebration of federal law enforcement. Maddow also recounts how Attorney General Richard Olney used federal authority against striking railroad workers during the Pullman strike while resisting action against powerful railroad interests.

The Justice Department, she shows, has been capable of extraordinary justice and extraordinary abuse.

“The reason I keep doing history, the reason I keep doing this in my work is because I fall in love with previous generations of Americans who got this stuff right,” Maddow said Sunday.

Related: Rachel Maddow on standing up to government lies and her Walter Cronkite Award

The most important story in America isn’t Trump

In a June 2025 interview with The Advocate, Maddow identified the public’s response to Trump’s presidency as the country’s most consequential political development.

“The character of the opposition to Trump is the most important story in the country,” she said then.

Has that changed?

“My assessment of that has not changed,” she says in the October interview.

What fascinates her is that ordinary Americans have continued organizing and protesting even as institutions with far greater influence have, in her assessment, accommodated the administration.

“I’m much less interested in what he’s trying than the way the American people are acting to restrain him,” she says.

For Maddow, the November 3 midterms would test whether that resistance could translate into political power. The election delivered Democratic control of both chambers of Congress, and on Sunday, she was particularly encouraged by the participation of Black, Latino and young voters.

But the point, she argues, is bigger than which party wins. It’s whether Americans still believe they can use democratic institutions to change their lives.

Related: Rachel Maddow on modern-day extremism, American democracy and her new book, Prequel

What happens when the government becomes the threat?

During the October interview, The Advocate raised the case of Andry Hernández Romero, the gay Venezuelan makeup artist deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison.

Maddow’s reporting helped bring his ordeal to national attention. The Advocate subsequently interviewed him about his imprisonment and efforts to rebuild his life in Spain.

“In any democracy, in any constitutional republic, the places where constitutional protections are weakest tend to grow,” Maddow warns.

She says that practices normalized against immigrants can eventually spread to other Americans. She points to immigration enforcement operations involving U.S. citizens and the danger of allowing detention systems to operate without meaningful constitutional safeguards.

She sees another reversal of the department’s founding purpose in the administration’s treatment of transgender people.

The Justice Department has investigated hospitals providing gender-affirming care and sought patient records. Major U.S. hospitals have suspended care for transgender minors without announcing when their programs might reopen, even though those treatments remain legal under state law. Transgender service members are also challenging federal restrictions on military service in court.

“The Justice Department has completely abandoned the idea that you would pursue the defense of constitutional rights for disfavored minorities and instead is just trying to make itself as much of a weapon for Trump as it possibly can,” Maddow says.

For her, restoring the department’s mission means ending what she describes as the government’s practice of “hunting transgender people and hunting immigrants and persecuting the president’s perceived political enemies.”

From presidential loyalty to public accountability

The book’s final chapters examine William Barr’s second tenure as attorney general, including his handling of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and politically sensitive prosecutions.

Maddow argues that Barr demonstrated how the department’s enormous discretion could serve a president’s political interests.

She expected that pattern to intensify during Trump’s second term. Instead, she says, Homeland Security and immigration agents have become the administration’s primary instruments of coercive power while the Justice Department has lost much of its institutional independence.

That doesn’t make its investigations harmless.

“I think that the investigation is the punishment,” she says, discussing cases involving Trump’s perceived adversaries.

On Sunday, Maddow explicitly called for Attorney General Todd Blanche’s impeachment, citing his interview with convicted Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell and other federal decisions she believes warrant scrutiny.

“I mean, Todd Blanche should be impeached,” she said, emphasizing that she was speaking “not as a news anchor, but as the author of a new book about the Department of Justice.”

Blanche has defended his leadership of the department and rejected accusations that federal law enforcement has been weaponized against Trump’s opponents. He has also warned Democrats against what he characterizes as politically motivated investigations.

But Maddow wants more than leadership changes. Her book outlines proposals including restrictions on a president’s former personal lawyers and campaign workers serving in the Justice Department, stricter professional qualifications for its leaders and higher Senate confirmation thresholds for political appointees.

She also proposes giving federal judges greater influence over selecting U.S. attorneys in their districts. The aim is to make independence and professional experience more consequential than loyalty to the president.

Accountability would also have to outlast an official’s tenure. Maddow calls for giving the department’s inspector general more resources and the power to compel testimony from former officials. She points to Barr as an example of why that authority matters and argues that leaving office should not mean leaving questions about one’s conduct unanswered.

Her proposals would give the watchdog a stronger role in ensuring that recommended reforms are implemented and misconduct leads to consequences.

“I don’t think it needs to be rebuilt,” she said Sunday. “I think it needs to be refounded.”

The people Maddow still trusts

For Maddow, the election was an encouraging demonstration that Americans still believe they can use their democracy to change the country’s direction.

But winning an election, she suggested, was only the beginning.

“There will come a day when your country will need you,” she told the audience Sunday.

It’s the lesson she takes from Akerman, Post and countless people whose names history nearly forgot. None could have known exactly when circumstances would demand something extraordinary of them.

Maddow doesn’t believe anyone can do it alone.

“I think that when you find instances of unlikely David versus Goliath resistance actually paying off and Goliath falling, it is usually because David has friends,” she tells The Advocate.

While her faith in institutions has diminished, her faith in ordinary Americans hasn’t.

“I trust the people more than our institutions a lot,” she says.