Welcome to Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Ashken Kazarian. Today we're going to talk about law enforcement as political weapon. President Donald Trump has been very vocal in criticizing many things, including those who he dims his political opponents.

However, this criticism often extend to threats of legal action, using antitrust or tax law

and government agencies to go after those who he criticizes.

How does this compare to past administrations?

How lawful is this kind of intervention?

We have Justin Florence,

legal director for protect democracy, joining us to talk about this, and our own leader of a free world,

I mean tech free world, president of tech freedom, Baron Zoka. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me. Before we dive in, Justin, do you want to share a few sentences about what protect democracy

does?

Your name is very vague.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

Your name is very vague.

So we tried to keep it simple when we name the organization.

It's a new nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, started a little over a year ago with the theory that some of the things that we've seen happen in democracies in other countries that were once stable democracies but have declined into more authoritarian governments, that some of those same trends could happen here in the U.S.

And that there was no organization focused on that threat.

So we formed with the mission of protecting our democracy, as our name says, from a decline into a more authoritarian form of government.

I wonder what happened around a year ago that prompted this creation. But let's dive into the Amazon Washington Post tweets speeches that President Trump has given that prompted the op-ed you co-offered with

Barron.

I've ever of you want to give me a little bit of a background.

Sure.

...