A Walkman and a Wire

Initially assigned to $100 million bank failure investigations, Mike German’s FBI career took a pivotal turn in 1992, when he went undercover to infiltrate neo-Nazi groups in LA. The years that followed gave him a front-row seat to the Justice System’s handling of domestic terrorism from the 1990s to his departure in 2004. When Mike left the FBI, it was after reporting deficiencies in the bureau’s counterterrorism operations in the wake of 9/11. And today he and his colleagues are taking on the FBI in the halls of Congress and in court. On this episode, Mike tells us how FBI leaders exploited America’s fear of terrorism after 9/11 to break free of regulations imposed on them in the wake of Hoover-era civil rights abuses. And how today, the FBI can’t even count the number of domestic terrorism cases it handles. And that’s before the Trump administration’s purge. GUEST: Mike German, Fellow, Brennan Center for Justice ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: Policing White Supremacy: The Enemy Within , Mike German and Beth Zasloff, New Press Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy , Mike German, New Press Justice Department Must Reveal the Real Scope of Domestic Terrorism , Mike German and Faiza Patel, Brennan Center for Justice.

You can listen to A Walkman and a Wire online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

A Walkman and a Wire is an episode from Things That Go Boom by PRX.

This episode is 32:29 long.

This episode was published on Feb 17, 2025.

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