Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department
by Carol Leonnig
View on GoodreadsCarol Leonnig's 2007 investigation (republished in updated form, given the topic's renewed relevance) of the Bush-era politicization of the Justice Department — the US Attorney firings, the voter-fraud manufactured cases, the loyalty-test hiring at Civil Rights Division.
Core ideas
- The 2006 US Attorney firings — eight prosecutors removed apparently because they had insufficient loyalty to White House political priorities — were the breach in long-standing post-Watergate DOJ independence norms that subsequent administrations have built on.
- The voter-fraud focus (the manufactured cases brought on weak evidence, the prosecutors fired for refusing to bring them) is the book's underdiscussed material — the early-2000s build-out of the legal-grievance infrastructure that supplied the post-2020 election-denial machinery.
- The book lands differently in 2026 than in 2007 — what was framed as scandalous norm-violation then has been institutionalized; reading it now reads as the early-warning record.
Published2025
Pages492
ISBN9780593831380
ReadFeb 2026
