On MSNBC's Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses MAGA plans for retribution: “They didn't just write it down, they then talked about it.”
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From the December 19, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): President of Media Matters for America, Angelo Carusone, is back. Angelo, I love starting with you for many reasons, but chief among them is your granular understanding of what exactly is in black and white, in the writing in terms of their plans for retribution using the FBI. Will you take us through -- again not being paranoid, not projecting onto them things Trump said at rallies, but what is in the plan?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA PRESIDENT): I mean, they wrote it down. They didn't just write it down, they then talked about it. And so part of what the strategy is, is a bit of a shock and awe. You go in right away, and you fire as many people as you possibly can. And even if you can't, then you install as many loyalists, those that don't need to be given assignments of retribution because they already understand the assignment. They're going in with the assignment.
And that is what Project 2025 was designed to do, was to actually give both the step-by-step guide for what has to happen out of the gate and to then vet and organize the personnel that can help execute that because it's worth keeping many mind that when we talk about Kash Patel as potentially the FBI Director, he's not going to be doing all the work himself. That's going to need to be assigned out to actual agents and people at the FBI, and that's where this larger infrastructure comes in place.
MAGA had been professionalized over the past few years via Project 2025 and that's how it turns sort of -- that's how you turn these agencies into an actual instrument of revenge. And so when you take that and you overlay that with the things that Patel has already been saying publicly, the idea is you go out there, you find a couple of these individuals that will send a very clear message and you just investigate, and you find one or two things that you can really hang your hat onto to unravel these larger narratives.
And so I don't think it's a coincidence they're going after January 6th because one of the first things they need to show is that all of the attacks against Trump over the past few years were all illegitimate because this entire January 6th thing was nothing more than a hoax perpetuated by the media and Democrats in order to serve as one of the bulwarks for the deep state against Donald Trump, and that's part of it. It's to send a message and it's now built on top of a much more professional operation.
WALLACE: The other thing I was thinking about, Angelo, where they may seek to be more, I don't even know the word, but more maniacal in their selections to lead the U.S. Attorney's Offices. They met some resistance in people like Geoff Berman who was the U.S. Attorney overseeing SDNY who sent crummy cases back. He was asked to I think investigate or bring a case against either Carey or Greg Craig, he writes about it in his book. And he sends it back to main DOJ and they simply farmed it out to a more amenable office. It feels like they maybe have learned how to avoid those pockets of resistance?
CARUSONE: That's exactly right. You know, one of the things that Patel has indicated very clearly is that most of the things that are done should no longer be -- you know, both the investigation side, as well as the prosecution side, you should avoid Washington, D.C. as much as possible. And in fact, you should move as much of the investigations out to offices across the country, and whenever you can, you should stretch the degree of jurisdiction, and you should make prosecutions all across the country as well in friendlier jurisdictions where the jury pool there is going to be more sympathetic to the story that you're telling or maybe the targets that you're going after.
So it's not just that they, and in terms of the initiation of these investigations of potential prosecutions, they've also thought about how to help them to be successful on the back end as well by finding more friendlier forums and sort of more friendly jury pools. And the part that I find more disturbing in all of this is Patel's particular understanding of not just all these execution parts, but then his relationship to the larger right-wing media fever swamps.
One of the things he bragged about when he was on the board at Truth Social is how they would take narratives from QAnon and weave them into their overall messaging because it helped build support and kinetic energy and momentum for the stories that they were telling. And so when you have somebody that understands how to tap into sort of this right-wing media machine and those fever swamps, and how to sort of take these little bread crumbs that you would get as a result of these investigations, you can start to see how it all comes together.
You break main justice so that's no longer one of the barriers or firewalls against injustice. You farm it out to as many friendly places as you can that are going to pursue these investigations, maybe way outside of the bounds and the norms, and then you initiate prosecutions in forums where over the last year you've been using these breadcrumbs and the right-wing media to tell these stories that invalidate the already false narratives and conspiracies that many of these right-wing audiences believe. And now you're going to hand them a target served up on a platter in a prosecution that never would have taken place there in the first place, but now we're in a new reality where they're really operationalizing all these components together. And Kash Patel isn't just a key part of that, he's somebody that keenly understands it.
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From the December 19, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): I want to read to you some reporting and a piece in The Times about what's happening inside the government agencies where these outgoing officials believe will have some access to the truth about what's happening. This is from David Firestone, the Deputy Editor of The New York Times Editorial Board. "Most important, the threats that federal agents will dig through phone records and use surveillance and brutality to find leakers will make it far more difficult for whistleblowers to tell the truth about government abuses. Trump has already made it clear that fear will be one of the principal tools he uses to reshape Washington in his image. In particular, the fear of prosecution and investigation will be explicitly used to prevent exposure of corruption, incompetence or improper use of power. That's why the Senate should have passed the Press Act, the bill that would protect reporters from being forced by a court to reveal their sources of information."
Angelo, the other sort of line of defense that outgoing officials point to is the career staff. You are intimately versed in what happens to them. According to Project 2025, most of them are fired in the first place, and the ones that remain under extremely, extremely unimaginable pressures to toe the line and fall into line, just talk about the climate that will sort of take place starting on the 20th of January.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA PRESIDENT): Yeah, I mean, that's actually the big effect here. And this is why, you know, so much of this planning makes a difference. It's not just that their aspirational policy is written down, it's that they really thought about how you implement and execute a lot of those ideas and actions, and part of that is you have to change the culture. You have to change the culture that has relied on norms and series of practices that have served them well. There may have been some inefficiencies or whatever, but ultimately those are the norms that you have described, they're safeguards, they're guardrails. They allow for whistleblowers and truth to get out there and for abuses of power not to occur.
And so what they're going to do is to fire as many people as they possibly can under this Project 2025 sort of initiative, it's called Schedule F. And Congress has had multiple efforts over the past couple of years to try to prevent that and actually change the structure so that these people couldn't be fired, but they never did it, and they always sort of pulled it out of the National Defense Authorization Act, or right at the end they sort of sweeped it away but they had to sort of inoculate against this. So Congress didn't do their job.
But the effect of that means that that fear still exists, and even if they don't strike that pen on day one, they've talked about it so much and they put in so many of the key influencers that they know that at any moment it can happen. So the climate is going to be both: A) "My job can disappear at any moment in time so I'm going to go along to get along. I have one foot in the door, one foot out of the door because I need to make sure I am ready to make the jump. I'm not going to make myself a target because they're going to retaliate against me." There are all these instruments and organs that are designed to sort of sniff out or identify me as a deep state agent, which is the other part here. When you look at look at Trump's enemy list, ultimately a lot of them center around this conspiracy that there is this massive deep state that is designed to do nothing but serve friction and opposition to Donald Trump and that is tantamount to treason.
So if you're an individual, you're going to have all these factors in your head every single day as you're going through your job. And then when you look outside at the fourth estate, what you see is a media that is already beginning to take some steps to turtle and inoculate themselves and begin to operate out of fear and a recognition that maybe they can't protect them and a public that sort of seems to be opposed to them as well.
So that's the operating agreement. And the real intent is get as many people to leave as you can so you can replace them with loyalists, and those that you don't get to leave, make sure that you make them essentially neutered so that they cannot function as opposition to the efforts that you're going to put into place. And that's how you create the runway to initiate a lot of these day-to-day actions that are not going to be news worthy but yield still deeply, deeply significant.