This is the Catery Daily podcast for Thursday, January 9th, 2025. I'm Caleb Brown.

It's an odd position for both federal law enforcers and the incoming Trump administration.

Trump's open threats against those in federal government who, to his mind, have wronged him may mean future criminal charges

or other penalties. And that will mean using some of the same coercive tactics and avoidance

of trial courts that are the bread and butter of federal law enforcement today.

Cato's Clark Neely explains.

There is this tension that exists for what Donald Trump would like to see in the pursuit of criminal justice going forward.

One, he has pledged to go after people who have wronged him, quite frankly, and he has nominated someone

to head the FBI who has made similar statements about what various people in law enforcement

deserve. But when you're in charge of those institutions, presumably you also want to make sure that

the kinds of things that happen to you do not happen to other people.

So to some extent, when we view law enforcement as a weapon that you, if you're the one who has it, you wield it without concern for consequences down the road, that just seems like a very dangerous situation for trying to have a rational

system where rules are applied equitably and reasonably.

Yeah, it really is.

I mean, look, we are all potential victims of a fundamentally out-of-control criminal justice system that,

first of all, criminalizes vast swaths of fundamentally non-wrongful conduct, whether it's just

growing the wrong plant on your own property or, you know, mischaracterizing the entry in a business record,

which was one of the crimes that he was prosecuted for.

This is not conduct that a sane society responds to with a full-blown criminal prosecution.

We do that a lot.

And then it's not just that we over-criminalize, of course, then there's the

problem of our approach to resolving criminal charges, which is described in extensive detail

...