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I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

In the last few days, we seem to have crossed a threshold.

President Trump is ratcheting up the authoritarianism and threatening to arrest his enemies in a new kind of way.

He's angrily hinting at arresting Barack Obama and other members of his

administration. He's openly saying that Obama committed sedition, and he's raging that Senator

Adam Schiff is also guilty of crimes, explicitly calling for him to be put in prison.

Critically, however, all this has been accompanied by a new type of manipulation

of the bureaucracy, one clearly designed to manufacture pretexts for the prosecutions of those

enemies. Ryan Enos, a professor of government at Harvard, put it all very starkly on blue sky,

saying that authoritarianism is right here in front of us.

Ryan added this. You either fight it or you accept that this is our future. So we're talking to

Ryan today about his warning. Thanks for coming on, Ryan. Yeah, thank you. I'm glad to be here

talking about this. So let's start with Trump's threat toward Barack Obama. The basic gist of this is that Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, put out this supposed finding that the Obama administration faked the conclusion that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.

A reporter asked Trump about Tulsi Gabbard, who referred this to the Justice Department

for prosecution. Listen to this. Tulsi Gabbard has submitted a criminal referral to the

Department of Justice. From your perspective, who should the DOJ target as part of their investigation?

...