The FRONTLINE Interviews
Mimi Rocah
Former Assisant U.S. Attorney
Mimi Rocah is the former district attorney for Westchester County in New York. Prior to that, she served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) from 2001 to 2017 and was appointed chief of the SDNY's Westchester Division in 2012.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group's Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on April 4, 2025. It has been annotated and edited for accuracy and clarity as part of an editorial and legal review. See a more complete description of our process here.
This interview appears in:
TOP
Mimi Rocah
Chapters
Text Interview:
Highlight text to share it
Trump’s Speech at the DOJ
One place we’re thinking of starting the film is the moment when President [Donald] Trump goes to the Department of Justice to speak at the Great Hall.Tell me what you saw on that day, what the message was he was sending, what it said to you.
So when Trump went to DOJ to speak, it was very jarring for those of us who sort of grew up in the Department of Justice as attorneys, and that’s for a couple of reasons.
First of all, it’s not totally unheard of for a president to go and speak within the halls of DOJ, which are kind of considered almost sacred in terms of the wall between Justice and politics, but usually, when presidents have gone in the past—for example, [Barack] Obama or George [W.] Bush—they were for ceremonial purposes, to praise or speak at the retirement of their attorney generals [sic] or something like that, and in this case, it was really not only a political rally in terms of the substance.They talked about things, mostly, that had nothing to do with justice or the Department of Justice.They talked about tariffs and immigration—and not in the criminal way—very political issues, even Ukraine, but not criminal justice or even civil rights or civil issues.
So just the fact that he went there and the whole purpose of it and tone of it, but also, as I said, the substance was really jarring.And not—even before you get to Trump speaking, I was really taken aback by [U.S. Attorney General] Pam Bondi’s speech.I went back actually, and I wrote an article on this, so I was looking at some past speeches by attorney generals [sic] at—in that location, not just anywhere but in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice, and every one of them, from John Ashcroft, who’s not exactly someone who—John Ashcroft is about as different as you can get from, for example, Merrick Garland, right?1But looking at their speeches, looking at [Eric] Holder, looking at Janet Reno, looking from Republicans to Democrats across the board, when they’re in those walls of the Department of Justice, they talk about the lofty ideals that DOJ at least tries to attain.
… The people within it are by no means perfect, but it is an institution whose goals have uniformly been revered by its employees and its attorney generals [sic] as a place where you try to at least achieve your vision of equal justice, unbiased justice and depoliticized justice.
Bondi didn’t even try to talk about those things.Instead, she really just talked about Trump and sort of her admiration of him and her loyalty to him and the department of “We are going to be loyal to him.” And that was just really, really jarring. …
You said he talked about a lot of other things, tariffs, but he does talk about the Justice Department.He had been a defendant prosecuted by that department just a few months before.He talks about weaponization of the department and sort of a belief it had been used against him.What do you make of what the president said or where he was coming from in making those remarks?
Well, yeah, he talks about the Department of Justice in very political, personal tones, but certainly not really about the policy goals that most presidents would talk about or most attorney generals [sic] would talk about.
This whole idea of the Department of Justice having been weaponized against him, it’s politically brilliant.They’ve now said it, and he has said it so many times that people don’t even bother to argue with it anymore, and so it’s accepted as this premise that DOJ was weaponized against him for political purposes.
In fact, that is very far from the truth.You could take issue with some of the merits of the cases or whether they should have been brought as a policy matter, but the idea that they were—they were anything but political.First of all, they were brought by a special counsel who was independent, actually, from the attorney general, a career prosecutor.There was a grand jury that indicted him of peers, of regular American citizens.
There’s all sorts of reasons that the weaponization argument doesn’t work, but as a political matter, it doesn’t matter anymore, because they have repeated it so many times and really since before he was indicted.Trump started this tune about the deep state within the Department of Justice and the FBI back in 2016—2015, actually, while he was running—and then throughout his first term.2
And so it’s now become so accepted that they can use that now as a starting point to say, “Well, we’re going to de-weaponize it.We’re going to turn it into this neutral body.” And in fact, what they’re actually doing, what he’s actually doing is completely, utterly, I think very clearly, using the levers of power of the Department of Justice throughout the country—the U.S.attorneys’ offices, the FBI—to prosecute those that he considers his enemies and to pardon or give breaks to people that he considers allies, or people who have done favors for him or can do favors for him.
As you said, Pam Bondi’s there.The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, is there.And he names individual people.He names Andrew Weissmann as “scum.”3He says Norm Eisen is “scum.”4He describes him as “vicious” and “violent.” What do you make of that, of calling out what he sees as his enemies by name in the Great Hall?5
It’s so unheard of.It’s so dangerous.The fact that the president of the United States is using his bully pulpit at all to call out particular attorneys, you can disagree with them, but to call them out in that way is dangerous.To call them out in the halls of Justice is really trying to, essentially, ask for—he doesn’t have to say it out loud, but he sort of is saying it out loud, that these are people, it’d be great if someone looked into them and investigated them and see if you can find something.
He’s trying to discredit, at a minimum, and I think, more dangerously, hoping that there will be someone who will take up the mantle of trying to find something to actually prosecute or sue or bring some kind of legal action against these attorneys because they are examples of people—Norm Eisen right now is someone who is actually finding ways to, through civil lawsuits, to slow down the illegal actions that Trump and his administration are taking.
And his whole goal, always—Trump’s whole goal, always, is to diminish anyone or anything, if not destroy anyone or anything, that can hold him accountable in any way.That is, I think, one of the major through lines of everything he does.
You said there are examples.Do you think he was sending a message to others besides Norm Eisen and Andrew Weissmann?
Absolutely.There is always that playbook of, “If I call out one or two, or I bring an executive order against one or two law firms, or in some way try to damage the reputation or limit the actions of a judge, a lawyer, a law firm, then others will be afraid that that will happen to them.” And it’s very effective.It’s not particularly original or unique.I think it’s been used throughout history by dictators, bullies, whichever way you want to look at it.
And it does seem to have an impact, because people get afraid of being called out or targeted in some way.
Trump’s Executive Orders
So let’s go back to the very first day when he comes into office and signs a flurry of executive actions, of executive orders on everything from birthright citizenship to, there’s one about investigating weaponization at the Justice Department and creating DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency].What do you make of that, of the way that he comes in on that first day?Was it different than other presidents, the signals he sent from the beginning?
Look, I think every president comes in and issues executive orders.It’s kind of always the most—in some ways, the most tumultuous time of a presidency in the sense of there’s a lot that a president can or cannot do, but they’re always going to try and sort of push the envelope and issue orders that may or may not be upheld, right?
So I don’t want to say that that never happens to a certain extent.But I don’t think we’ve ever seen the—first of all—number of executive orders in such a short period of time, and the tone of every one of them from not just the executive orders but to the pardons very early on of the Jan.6 defendants who were convicted by courts, juries, sentenced by judges.6
And the signal from day one till now, and will continue, is, again, “I reward those who are loyal to me.I reward those who will do things on my behalf whether they be legal or not.And I punish, or I at least try to punish, and take action against or embarrass or intimidate those who try to slow me down, stop me, oppose me and my administration.”
And that is not something we have ever seen so consistently from any president because it’s really not presidential.Again, it really is more in the model of a dictator, a bully.Frankly—I prosecuted organized crime for many, many years as a federal prosecutor, and it is very mob boss-like.
What do you mean by that?
That the way they achieve and then hold onto power is through rewarding those who will act on their behalf, regardless of laws, principles, scruples, and making examples of some and punishing those who will not and who try to resist them.And that’s classic mob tactics, and it’s effective because, again, people, I think, do get intimidated and afraid of that being wielded against them personally.
And so you get submission even before action maybe has been taken against a certain industry or a certain entity or a certain individual.
You said that you thought there was a message that was sent by the pardons of the people involved in Jan.6.The type of things that some of them were convicted of that he ended up commuting or pardoning, that he did that, what specific message does that send?
Well, I think that the Jan.6 defendants as a whole—I’m generalizing because, obviously, in criminal law, we do look very individually at the facts, but as a whole, this is a group of people who he knows—Trump knows—even though he says it’s not true, but he knows very well that they are perceived as a group as a whole of people who were willing to go beyond certainly the norms of protests, of legitimate, valid protests, some of them using violence, including against police officers, damaging property, running amok in the halls of Congress and our sacred institutions, and that they were willing to do that on his behalf.
Even if he continues to say he had nothing to do with that, he knows what their message was.He knows that their message was, “This election is illegitimate, and we’re here to protest that,” in all the ways I just described.
And so the message is, I think—the example is, “I’m going to protect you.I’m going to help you if you’re willing to do that on my behalf.” And it even really goes so far, I think, as to condone violence on his behalf because many of them did use violence, were convicted of that, and he didn’t distinguish those who used violence from those who maybe did something slightly less extreme or nonviolent.
He said it was too hard to make that distinction, and it would be too time-consuming, which, of course, it would not.Even assuming that anyone should be given a pardon, which I don’t agree with, or their sentences commuted, but you could draw those distinctions, and he just did not, very intentionally, I think.
That’s interesting, because I guess that’s a message to his supporters but also maybe to people who are not his supporters, that he’s going to have the back of those kinds of—
Absolutely.And to prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on these cases, were doing their jobs.We haven’t even talked about the fact that in addition to pardoning them, the defendants, he also, through the Department of Justice, through [then-acting Deputy Attorney General] Emil Bove, [Deputy Attorney General] Todd Blanche, Pam Bondi, they have fired and/or demoted, penalized prosecutors, FBI agents who were just doing their jobs, first of all, and who don’t really get to pick and choose what cases they work on, but more than that, who were actually prosecuting violations of federal law.
And grand juries again, judges, all the usual checks and balances agreed with that, and he’s saying, “Don’t do that.You shouldn’t be bringing those charges.Those aren’t the cases.”
… And this has, I think, come up in other forms as well, but these were very loud messages that if you are thinking about investigating or prosecuting allies of Trump, you’d better think again, or you’ll at a minimum lose your job.
You sort of described it in personal terms of somebody who’s operating almost like a mob boss.Do you think there’s also a larger legal strategy?Is he testing the limits of what he can do with all of these actions?Maybe not the pardons necessarily, but with the other executive actions.
Absolutely. In fairness, as I said, I think all executive or many executive orders by many presidents are sort of testing what will hold and what will not.They don’t always know, because they’re usually kind of unique, maybe actions that haven’t been taken before.
But he is, through the executive actions from day one until now, I think, continuing to push those boundaries and try to consolidate the power in the executive branch.And part of doing that—who are the biggest threats to that?Who are the biggest obstacles to him being able to just consolidate power?Right now, it appears that it’s the courts, judges, federal judges and the attorneys who bring those cases to the courts and argue them, and it could have been people within the Department of Justice who investigate actual criminal cases.
I think that’s pretty much been eliminated, the Department of Justice arm of it, because not only through actions he’s taken that we just discussed but also because the leadership of DOJ is absolutely not going to tolerate anything like that—they’ve made that clear—so it’s really left to the judges and the lawyers who are bringing civil suits or asking for temporary restraining orders, etc., in the courts to stop all sorts of executive actions and the executive orders.… Everything he’s doing is designed to slow that process down, and eventually, I’m sure he would like to completely stop that process.
The DOJ
So let’s talk about the Department of Justice, starting at the very top.When you see somebody like Pam Bondi—you talked about the speech that she gave at the Great Hall—what is the message sent in her appointment?She seems to have the types of qualifications somebody for attorney general might have.But what do you make of her at the top?
I think on paper, Pam Bondi has the qualifications to be attorney general.She’s not the most qualified ever, and she’s probably not the least qualified ever, but she’s certainly—she’s been a prosecutor before.She’s done cases.She’s worked with agents, all the things, some of the things that you would want.
But she’s really there as a political tool, frankly, of the president’s, and I think they made that clear from day one.She sort of said all the right things in her confirmation hearings that, at least in normal times, would be enough: “I’m going to uphold the rule of law.We’re not going to go after political enemies.” She said all the things you would want one to say.
But of course, it’s what she’s not saying, because she’s not saying, “I’m going to stop the president from doing that.” And this isn’t—it’s not coming into this in a vacuum.There’s so much before this that came where he said he was going to essentially—well, the code word of “de-weaponizing,” which really means weaponizing the Department of Justice.
And so I think her words, if you just listen to them in a vacuum, sounded normal, but when you look at them in the context of her having said in the past that they were going to go after “bad prosecutors” and that—all the things that he said about seeking vengeance, it makes what she even said in her confirmation hearing just inadequate.
But beyond that, from day one—her swearing-in was in the Oval Office, not—again, not completely unprecedented, but usually it’s in the Department of Justice.But this was in the Oval Office.Trump spoke and made a joke about how she wasn’t going to necessarily be impartial and would go after Democrats.I can’t remember the exact quote, but something about—all in the guise of the joke that she would—“Ha ha, of course she’ll be fair and impartial to the Democrats.7Well, I’m not really sure she can, but, ha ha, I’m sure she will.”
To say at the swearing-in of an attorney general, if you think back to just throughout history, there have been much more minor examples where a president maybe overstepped or had the appearance of overstepping into sort of the sacred, invisible walls around Justice, and there was outrage and concern.And here you have a president really basically saying the quiet part out loud, and it’s just kind of a given at this point.
… She in her words and actions, and him in his words and actions, they aren’t even trying to pretend anymore that there is a divide, and in fact, some of the initial orders that Bondi issued very explicitly said this.8It said that rule, policy, tradition that leaders of the political branch, the executive branch within the White House don’t speak directly to the leaders of Department of Justice.Not a thing anymore.We can talk to each other.
8
The Washington Post: Trump White House says it can talk to Justice Dept. on criminal cases
So the no-contact rule, which I’m not going to sit here and say was completely observed to the letter, but it was observed in general, and there was a respect for this divide.There was an attempt to respect it, I think, throughout Democratic and Republican administrations, and now they’re just saying, “We don’t even need to try because we are talking to each other.And in fact, prosecutors, when you make decisions about cases, you need to take into account,” one of her orders said, “the results of the election.” It referenced the mandate from the election, which is—the fact that she’s even talking about the election in a memo to prosecutors is, again, very unheard of.There’s never been anything like that.
You know some of the other people who are at the top of the Justice Department.Emil Bove … Can you tell me about him?9
9
The New York Times: Justice Dept.’s No. 2 Targets Old Office Where He Rose as a Prosecutor
The one I know best is actually Todd Blanche.I know him very personally and very well.Emil I know more through other people; I never worked with him directly.But they both come from the Southern District of New York, where I worked for a very long time, almost 17 years, and so I know certainly, first of all, just kind of the environment and traditions in which they were trained and worked and really raised as prosecutors.
Todd I knew back when he was a paralegal, before he was a prosecutor in the office.I started in 2001, and he was a paralegal there in—and he worked on many of my cases.He was—and then he eventually came back.He was going to law school at night, and he eventually came back after graduating and working for a little bit as a prosecutor.
We worked closely together, particularly during sort of the last few years of his and my time there.I was chief of the White Plains division of the office, and I actually asked for him as one of the possible people to come and be my deputy chief and then co-chief.And he did, and so we worked, really, day in and day out for almost two years together.
It’s hard to square the person I knew then with the person I see now, and I’m not alone in that feeling.A lot of people from the Southern District who knew him, who know him, I think, feel kind of stunned, betrayed, really, at how he is being because he’s not—does not appear to be upholding or even trying to uphold any of the sort of principles that we all came to respect and value about the Department of Justice.
Todd was a very hard-working guy.As I said, when he was a paralegal, he was going to law school at night, and we were all sort of in awe of that because both are very demanding things.
And he, as a prosecutor, he wasn’t necessarily the smartest guy in the room or the best arguer to a jury even, but he was good, and he was really liked and likable and just a good guy.That’s part of what’s kind of shocking about all of this in terms of his turn, is that part of his appeal and rise in the office, in an office full of incredibly smart people—he was chief of the violent crimes unit.He, as I said, became chief of the White Plains Division with me.You don’t achieve that without something about you being pretty remarkable.
And with him it was sort of the team-player aspect of him, the likability.You wanted to be—if you had to be in a trench with someone, he was one of the people you wanted to be with, and he seemed to really believe in all of the principles of the Department of Justice that we all believed in.He would be tough on violent crime and give a break to someone who was deserving of a break because he had empathy and sympathy and compassion.
So again, it’s really hard to square that with this person who seems to be, first of all, saying, when he talks about the Department of Justice, like in his speech before Trump spoke in the Great Hall, it was so hypocritical, I thought, because he talked as if the Department of Justice has never prosecuted violent crime or drugs or gangs and that that’s what the great savior Trump was going to come and do.But in fact, that is exactly what DOJ, and certainly the Southern District of New York, has always done, and Todd knows that because he was part of that.
So he didn’t even talk about his time as a prosecutor when he gave that speech.If you’re now the deputy attorney general and you’re speaking in the Great Hall, you would think you would talk about your eight years as a federal prosecutor and talk to the people that you now are overseeing and how you can identify with them, but he didn’t talk about that really at all.He talked more about his time as Trump’s criminal defense attorney, and I just found that very sad, telling, revealing about his frame of mind.
… I didn’t work personally with Emil, but I know a lot of people who did, and I think he’s very different from Todd, is my impression.He is quite brilliant, not someone that people were dying to work with, not as much of a team player.People respected his intellect and ability to work incredibly hard and sort of devotion, but not well-liked in the way that Todd was, which I think is an interesting contrast.
Emil was chief of the terrorism and international narcotics unit, and I do think it’s worth mentioning, as has been reported that—and I know this from people I’ve spoken to who were there at the time as well—that he was not only OK with the Jan.6 prosecutions that were being brought or starting to be initiated by DOJ, but he was kind of arguing for, fighting for the Southern District of New York to get a role in those.10That happens a lot when there’s sort of high-profile cases around the country.Different offices, and especially SDNY, will say, “Hey, we want a piece of that; we should get a part of that, and here’s why.” And he was one of those people that was arguing for us, for SDNY, to get some of those cases.
So for him then to be at the forefront of firing, demoting, denouncing, slandering, really smearing prosecutors who worked on those cases at levels far below what Emil was at when he was trying to get those cases is—“hypocritical” is, I think, the nicest word I can use to describe that.
Do you have a theory on why either of these guys did it?
Armchair psychology is probably dangerous, but there is a similarity with Emil and Todd.They both did kind of come up through the office in slightly different ways.There is a type in the office of people who come from having worked at big firms, and they clerked for certain judges.Both of these guys actually did, so that doesn’t really hold.
But they definitely did kind of come up through different paths and also left—Emil left kind of under a cloud, from my understanding, had trouble getting a job at a big firm, which is really unusual for Southern District prosecutors.And I think there is this sort of—I don’t quite know the word for it, but both of them have a slight different—have followed a slightly different path than the traditional SDNY or even DOJ prosecutors from beginning to end and I think made them more willing to take a chance with someone like Trump when it was more of a gamble.But to leave stable jobs, or more stable jobs, and come be the defense attorney for him and in the hopes of a reward, which paid out.Neither of them are as experienced to be in the roles that they’re in, that people before them have been in.Let’s put it that way.
The Southern District of New York
So the reputation of the Southern District, what is it?Why is it different than other U.S.attorneys’ offices?
Well, I’ll answer that first, but then I’ll take issue with it a little bit.I think SDNY over the years has developed this kind of mythical reputation almost.The nickname is the “Sovereign District of New York,” meaning it was not as beholden or controlled by Main Justice as some of the other U.S.attorneys’ offices are in terms of what cases it should bring or not bring and just kind of a more independent, autonomous office in general throughout, again, Democratic or Republican.It wasn’t a political thing; it was just, we’re a little more independent.
I think that developed for a couple of reasons.One, it’s in Manhattan.The Southern District of New York, geographically, is in the place where the biggest, most important cases are going to happen because the way it works in federal jurisdiction is where the crime largely occurs is the office that it’s brought by and investigated. …
So in terms of number, in terms of the number of cases they’re going to get and have gotten that are just marquee cases, whether it be because of the financial markets; terrorism, because New York is a terrorist target; corruption, because whether it’s someone who’s in New York or someone who has had contact with people in New York, from local politicians to federal ones.But really, the, I would say, financial frauds, the terrorism cases, the narcotics trafficking and, frankly, organized crime, which has lessened over time, but in its heyday was, again, centered in New York.
And the Southern District goes beyond Manhattan.It’s Manhattan, the Bronx and everything north of the Bronx as well, so the only other sort of competing jurisdictions for cases like that would be—the main one was Brooklyn, the Eastern District, and there were often very heated turf battles between the Eastern District and the Southern District.
And I was involved in many of them where we would have to go to Washington and say—sort of each make their argument for why the particular office should get a particular high-profile case because sometimes there was jurisdiction in both, particularly if you’re talking about organized crime or terrorism.The financial markets cases tend to almost always be in Manhattan, and sometimes even cases like Worldcom that aren’t necessarily sort of based in Manhattan but touch enough of Manhattan that Manhattan was able to get that case, for example, which was a very big marquee case at the time.11
11
The New York Times: WorldCom's Audacious Failure and Its Toll on an Industry
So I think the fact of the size of the office, the FBI partner and the types of cases it got just meant that it was going to develop over time as this very high-profile office with an independent streak from the Department of Justice, where not every press conference was at Main Justice, but sometimes you even had high level DOJ officials coming to the Southern District of New York to have a press conference.Small things like that but that were signs.
I also think the U.S.attorneys that we’ve had over the years, again, whether appointed by Republicans or Democrats, have been just, for the most part, incredible leaders who managed to I think sort of rise above a lot of the politics.[Former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York] Mary Jo White was the quintessentialand one of the longest-serving U.S. attorneys.She was appointed by a Democrat, but she stayed through 9/11 and really was seen as very apolitical.
And it attracts some of the best lawyers in the country, that office in particular.I think a lot of U.S.attorneys’ offices and DOJ do, but I think SDNY does really attract and get the highest caliber of people, so the quality of cases that you have coming out of there is really unparalleled.
Thank you.So that’s sort of the background for the [New York City Mayor] Eric Adams case, which stood out to us.Can you help tell that story of what happened so we can start to understand why it might matter?
… So to set the table, the charges against Eric Adams were brought by the Southern District of New York under U.S.Attorney, at the time, Damian Williams, but, as has been reported, the investigation began even before Damian was U.S.attorney, and the charges that were brought against Adams were pretty historic.I think it’s the first time that there’s been a federal indictment against a sitting mayor of New York City.There have been other New York state and local officials charged and certainly investigated over the years, but it’s the first time a sitting mayor was charged, and charged with corruption charges, essentially with bribery, making deals with other entities and individuals to benefit himself in a personal way.12
So the nature of the charges, the subject of the charges are all kind of high-profile.Adams is a Democrat, or was elected as a Democrat to be mayor.Trump obviously is a Republican, and yet you saw early on Adams starting to send signals, first subtle, then not so subtle—going to Mar-a-Lago; making kind of ingratiating statements to Trump; clearly angling for some kind of relief from Trump because the charges were pending; a trial was going to be scheduled; he wanted to run again, for all sorts of reasons, obviously, and understandably, Adams wanted these charges to go away.
He started talking about the charges in a way that, frankly, I can’t even articulate and don’t make sense, but he tried to put them in the context that Trump likes to talk about, of these were brought against him because of a weaponized DOJ by [former President Joe] Biden.Somehow, Biden was behind these charges because—or the Biden administration—because he had spoken out against or been critical of Biden in some way, his immigration policy.
That’s just utter nonsense.Of course there are local politicians all the time that critique administrations, even of their own party, and they don’t get criminal charges brought against them.Also, as we just discussed, the SDNY is incredibly independent and has never, that I know of, brought charges against anyone, let alone an elected official, to make some political points.
So it’s just an absurd claim, but it’s one that Adams very craftily started using, knowing it would appeal, I think, to Trump, who he wanted to help—he wanted Trump to help him get out from under these charges.
What happened ultimately, is, not only did Trump, through his Department of Justice, try to sort of get Adams out from under these charges but to do it in a way that is, quite frankly, corrupt, to try to use the leverage of those charges in a way to get Adams to go along with whatever it is they needed him to go along with in terms of their policy, priorities, implementations, particularly on immigration, which is obviously a big issue in New York City.
And so at the time that this all started to come to a head—Trump could have just pardoned Adams, right?That would have been the simple way to do this, either preemptively, which there’s some precedent for, or let him be convicted and then if he was going to be convicted and then pardon him.Wait and see what happens; maybe he would be acquitted.If he just wanted to give Adams a break, because whatever motivation—he felt sorry for him, he thought it was politically motivated, anything like that, there were ways to do it that would have still been very objectionable and something you would critique, but not utterly, totally corrupt in the sense of trying to use the criminal justice process to obtain and achieve political ends, which is what he ended up doing.
So at the time, there was the acting U.S. attorney, Danielle Sassoon,13who had been appointed by Trump, a very credentialed, conservative attorney, member of the Federalist Society, clerked for Supreme Court Justice [Antonin] Scalia, someone who had worked in the Southern District of New York as a prosecutor, known as very smart, capable, a rising star, really, and was appointed in this sort of temporary position until Trump’s pick for U.S.attorney would be confirmed and take over.
13
During this time, we started seeing signs of it before it became completely public, when, for example, a group of people from SDNY, including Sassoon, went to Washington to meet with Emil Bove, who was then the acting deputy attorney general because Todd Blanche was not there yet.And you could start even just putting the pieces together, right?Adams ingratiating himself and appealing to Trump, talking about the prosecution as this weaponized DOJ, Biden.Trump, of course, stating all of that as well and saying that he felt sorry for Adams, and he, too, had been the victim of this Biden-weaponized DOJ.It fits into his narrative.
And then people starting to go down to D.C.to have these meetings at DOJ, and it became clear that what was happening was there was something.Someone at DOJ, Bove and, I believe also Bondi and Blanche, as later was confirmed, were telling them, “You’ve got to get rid of this case.” And the people in SDNY—Sassoon, the main one, but others—were saying, “There’s no reason to get rid of this case.It’s a case brought by a duly empaneled grand jury.The evidence is strong.The charges are legitimate.There’s—well in advance of an election, the mayoral election.There’s just no reason to drop these charges, no legitimate reason to drop these charges.”
And eventually what came out was that they weren’t asking her to drop them for any legitimate reason.In fact, what Bove’s eventual letter, which was reported by the New York Times, said was, “Yeah, we’re not taking issue with the merits of this case.14There’s nothing wrong with the merits of this case”—this was the initial Bove letter—“We are saying that we need Adams to be cooperative with us about certain policies, and the best way to achieve that is to dismiss the case, but dismiss it without prejudice, meaning we can reinstate it, you can reinstate it, we can direct you to reinstate it at anytime.” And then it’s just hanging over his head as a literal hammer, a literal noose around his neck ready to be pulled if he doesn’t do what we want him to do.
14
The New York Times: Read the Motion to Dismiss the Corruption Case Against Mayor Adams
So that’s what the directive was from DOJ.When I saw that, when every former prosecutor I know saw that—and the DOJ alumni community is pretty well connected and large—everyone said the same thing: “This is outrageous and corrupt, and this is not what you use criminal prosecutions for.”
And so what happened is, Danielle Sassoon and others from SDNY tried to convince DOJ, appealing directly and sort of going around Bove to Bondi and saying, “This is not what we do.This is not how criminal law should be used.And here’s all the reasons why I can’t—I, Danielle Sassoon—cannot stand up in front of a judge, a federal judge, and say this case should be dismissed, because the reasons that you want it to be dismissed are illegitimate.There’s nothing wrong with the case.It would be dishonest, essentially, to the court.I wouldn’t be living up to my oath of candor to a court, which is something all lawyers, but particularly prosecutors, take very seriously.And it’s just not in line with the sort of public policy goals that we all have been taught and respect about how and why criminal prosecutions should be brought or not brought.”15
15
Department of Justice: Acting US Attorney Danielle Sassoon's resignation letter
Bondi refused to even meet with Sassoon, and in her letter, Danielle had said, “If you’re not going to meet with me, if you’re not going to reconsider this, then I will resign.” She then got a letter from Bove, which said, “OK, I accept your resignation,” and tried to essentially, in his letter and afterwards, call her insubordinate for not following these instructions; tried to make it sound like she and the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, who had worked on this case, had been motivated by politics, that the case itself had been motivated by politics, that she had lost her way, is, I think, one of the phrases from his letter.16They went after the people, again, who were in a position to sort of stop what they were trying to do that was clearly illegitimate.
16
Department of Justice: Emil Bove's Letter to Danielle Sassoon
And Danielle resigned after just a couple of weeks in the job.It was incredibly, I think, hard for her to do in the sense of—I’m quite confident, knowing how we all, again, were raised in the SDNY—and I view Todd and Emil as outliers—but everyone else I know from that office, frankly, from any prosecutor’s office around the country, any prosecutor with any sense of integrity at all would have looked at this order and said, “I can’t do that.” That is not what we use criminal law for.We don’t use it to achieve some political bargain, to hold a hammer over someone’s head, to make sure they comply with our policy goals.It’s literally the opposite of everything that we’re taught as prosecutors of how to sort of do the right thing through the criminal law.
And I think you saw that reaction.First of all, again, in the DOJ alumni community, there was well over 1,200 alums who wrote a letter supporting Danielle’s resignation and saying she had done the right thing.17You even saw it, I think, strangely, for one of the few times in this past decade, maybe, a somewhat uniform response throughout the press.Andy McCarthy, for example, who’s also an SDNY alum, very conservative, often defends some of the Trump policies—he criticized it.18Some of the more conservative media outlets either ignored it or even criticized what Bove had done and praised Danielle for sort of standing up for the rule of law and doing the right thing.
17
Justice Connection: News Coverage of Justice Connection’s Open Letter in Support of DOJ Prosecutors
18
So I thought that was somewhat remarkable.We don’t see that often, where, from MSNBC to The Wall Street Journal opinion pages, The National Review, that you saw a uniformity of “This was the right thing to do.”
So she resigned.After Danielle resigned, one of the chief line attorneys, Hagan Scotten, also resigned.Danielle’s letter was, I think, it was close to 10 pages.It read like a legal brief with case citations and citations of the professional rules of responsibility and quoting Justice Scalia, who she had clerked for, and others.Very eloquent, very well written.Hagan Scotten’s letter, by contrast, was sort of the—very short, one-two punch, just basically saying, a little more eloquently than this, but basically saying, “This is crazy.19No prosecutor would do this.We can’t be a democracy if we’re using the criminal justice process to persuade people to do something, let alone independently elected people.” And Hagan, in his letter, also alluded to the fact that he, too, comes from a quite conservative background, maybe even agrees with some of or many of Trump’s policies.Again, he alluded to that in his letter.He’s clerked for, I think, two Supreme Court conservative justices.He’s been in the Army.He, too, is a very credentialed conservative attorney.
19
The New York Times: Hagan Scotten resignation letter
And so this isn’t—this very clearly was not about politics for either of them but just about doing the right thing, which I think was what makes it so remarkable.
And then, to make it even more remarkable, Bove then tried to take the case away from the Southern District of New York, bring it to Main Justice, to their Public Integrity Section, to get someone there to file this motion in front of the judge, saying, “Dismiss these charges without prejudice,” to use it to hold over Adams’ head.
And I think five attorneys from the Department of Justice Public Integrity Section also resigned rather than do this.The uniformity with which prosecutors from all different backgrounds said, “Absolutely not.This is not something I’m going to put my name on in a court document,” I think in and of itself speaks volumes.That has never happened before, I don’t think ever in the history of the Department of Justice, where you had really seven, I think is the total—maybe it was eight—different prosecutors resign rather than take an action that the leadership of the Department of Justice was asking them to take because it was so clearly wrong and corrupt.
Eventually they got someone in the Department of Justice Public Integrity Section to agree to put his name on the motion, essentially by coercing them, with threatening the entire rest of the unit with firing them if somebody didn’t step up, and so my understanding is this attorney who agreed to put his name on it did it to spare his colleagues from all being fired because he was close to retirement anyway.
It so happens that at the end of the day, the motion that was actually filed, the only actual signatures on it, like handwritten signatures, were from Emil Bove and Todd Blanche, which, again, is pretty unheard of to have the deputy attorney general and his second-in-command being the one signing what normally would be a pretty low-level motion to dismiss a case.20
20
CourtListener: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. ERIC ADAMS
But here, not only couldn’t they get other people to really do it, but I think they wanted their names on it.I think this is part of their way of asserting their and Trump’s dominance over DOJ and over SDNY in particular.Todd Blanche was there at the hearing.
So Judge [Dale] Ho, who’s the judge who had the Adams case in front of him, called the hearing after the motion was filed.Emil Bove came from Washington to argue this motion and why it should be dismissed without prejudice himself.Again, very unheard of for that to happen.Todd Blanche was there in the front row watching, even though I don’t think he had actually been confirmed yet, but he was there, clearly as a sign of support, which I think was very shocking to people in the Southern District, to see him there in that way. …
Thank you.That’s an amazing rendition of it, so I appreciate it.I actually don’t have too many follow-up questions, but I think the big question is, what is the takeaway?Especially if you read the Emil Bove letter.As you’re describing it, there’s not a pretext in the sense of, “I reviewed the case, and I don’t think that it’s strong enough, and I don’t think we should go to trial.” They’re being blunt about the reasoning, and they push through despite the fact that all of these prosecutors stepped down, in spite of the fact that the letters get published.Despite the whole thing is out there, they push through.What is the message that’s coming from them, from the leadership of DOJ?
Yeah, they do push through, although I will say that during the hearing and in some—I can’t remember right now which subsequent communications—you sort of started to get this ad hoc reasoning of, “Well, it’s not just that we’re trying to get Adams to do something; it’s also that this was too close to the election, so it should never have been charged.It was politically motivated because of Damian Williams, the U.S.attorney at the time the charges were brought, his political motivations.Look at this article that he wrote afterwards about corruption in New York state in general.” So there was some ad hoc attempts to try to put a sort of more legitimate spin on the reasons for dismissal.
But they could never get away from the fact that the original letters and order from Bove said, essentially, “This is why we’re doing it,” and that Danielle Sassoon had put out there in her letter that in this meeting that they had had at DOJ this—I don’t remember if she used the word “quid pro quo,” but she described what was a quid pro quo, a, “We will drop these charges, leave them out there; you will cooperate with us.”
And that the notes at the DOJ meeting that someone on her team had taken, which is completely par for the course and normal—any attorney anywhere takes notes so they can have a record and memory of what was said in an important meeting, but that Bove instructed that those notes after the meeting be destroyed.21That’s the kind of thing that most prosecutors would look at as consciousness of some kind of guilt.Why are you asking for notes to be destroyed of a meeting that you seem to think is perfectly legitimate?
But I think the message that they—it’s hard for me actually to articulate the message, because it is so just out of line with anything a prosecutor at any level could possibly justify about dismissing charges, bringing or dismissing charges to achieve a political end.But that’s how far they’ve come and strayed from sort of the ideals of the Department of Justice, the principles of prosecution.These are things that are actually written in a DOJ kind of manual, if you will, the candor to the court, the rules of professional responsibility, all the things that really—and frankly, your oath to the Constitution that you take when you’re sworn in as a prosecutor.
So it’s hard for me to articulate, because it’s so sideways from all of that, what their message is, but it seems to be kind of in line with some of the other things we’ve been talking about, that “We will use criminal law,” probably the strongest tool available to any government; criminal prosecution which comes with it the risk of permanent criminal record, things like not being able to vote, not having certain rights as a citizen anymore and even being imprisoned, right?That is why criminal law is so powerful and potentially dangerous.
And they, Bove and Blanche and Bondi, seem to be saying, “We are willing to use that to achieve a political end, a political deal.” And I have no words for how absolutely corrupt—I keep using that word, but there’s really no other word for it—corrupt and dangerous and frightening that is, because in and of itself, this one case is all of those things I just said, but you can imagine it being carried to even more horrible extremes.That is what authoritarians do.They use the criminal law as one of their tools to go after people who they perceive as political enemies and to reward people who they see as helping empower them, and that is just not what the criminal law is supposed to be used for.
And for people who are in the U.S.attorney’s office or in the Department of Justice who have seen this, and in the past, when there was a mass threat of resignation, in the Bush administration, they would back off on a program, even in the first Trump administration.What do attorneys in the Department of Justice and the U.S.attorney’s office know after this incident?
Yeah, look, if you’re a prosecutor in any office anywhere in the country—Main Justice, any U.S.attorney’s office—it would be completely human for you to think twice now about opening an investigation of someone who is considered a Trump ally or Trump supporter, an elected official, a businessperson, someone who maybe has committed fraud, because you have been told, essentially, “We’re using criminal law to protect those people and to go after the people who we view as our political enemies.”
I can’t tell you how much, as a prosecutor—there’s this old joke of Republicans, Democrats, federal prosecutors, right, that there are these two political parties.This is old.It may not even quite apply anymore, but federal prosecutors were seen as so kind of down the middle, that’s how they thought of themselves, and I think that was kind of a pretty general reputation.I’m not saying there weren’t exceptions.This isn’t vouching for every prosecutor along the way, but in general—I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’ve been a Democrat.I was elected as a Democrat to be DA [district attorney].I was just as excited to get an investigation of a Democrat versus a Republican if it was a good, real, worthy prosecution, right?And I think that’s true of most prosecutors.
What you’re excited about, what you’re devoted to is the investigation of some possible corruption, and it doesn’t matter which party they’re from or what their background is or who their friends of.It’s the pursuit of trying to weed out that kind of conduct and see whether it’s illegal.And I think what they’ve done now is they’ve just erased that neutrality.
And while I think many, if not most, career prosecutors, line prosecutors, wouldn’t want to be thinking in that way, it would be completely human of them to be thinking that way now because otherwise, they’re going to not only potentially lose their job but maybe be called out by the leadership of DOJ in some smear way for being either insubordinate or something critical that can damage their job prospects, their career prospects, their professional reputations, depending on who’s hearing the message.
The Supreme Court heard a case about the prosecution, Trump v.United States, and part of the case they threw out was about pressure on the Justice Department.22Do you think that the Supreme Court decision affected some of what we’re talking about, specifically the DOJ, but in general, too?
22
Oyez: Trump v. United States
… I think the immunity decision by the Supreme Court has really—it’s just emboldened Trump, in the sense of—I don’t think he really ever worried too much about consequences but really now doesn’t feel that he has to at all because they’ve essentially given him very broad immunity for actions.
That doesn’t mean that the people all around him have that immunity.I don’t know whether anyone’s done anything criminal at this point or not or whether there will ever be anyone to look at that, but I do think it has emboldened him, and he’s surrounded himself with people who are willing to carry out what he wants to do.
Trump Takes on the Law Firms
So as we’ve talked to people about this film, there’s been the Justice Department where he’s sort of consolidating power.Congress has not really stood up.There’s no hearings after the moment that we’ve been talking about.And a lot of it ends up in the courts.In the midst of that, he issues an executive order about law firms.I was thinking about that question in terms also of your background.As you were saying, you’d prosecuted organized crime and other things.What do you make of the orders as he starts going after individual law firms?
I think the initial orders, really all the orders he’s issued, but starting certainly with the first few—Covington [& Burlington], Perkins Coie and Paul, Weiss [Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison]—were very much focused on firms where there were either people who had been attorneys at those firms or were still attorneys at those firms who had tried to hold Trump responsible in some way for past conduct, right?They either had been part of his prosecution, prosecutions against him at a state or federal level—Jack Smith, Mark Pomerantz, Andrew Weissmann—or had been part of lawsuits against him.
So it’s not just that he’s targeting law firms, he’s targeting law firms because of either clients or people who don’t even still, but used to work there, who, again, he perceives as political enemies.So he’s going after businesses—law firms are businesses—but also places where other clients who are not the target of his order are impacted by these orders.Again, that is just really unprecedented, really outrageous, so it’s not just that he’s going after the firms but the motivation behind them that is so dangerous.
And then the whole idea of targeting these firms in general.The way in which he’s targeting them, it really does impede on other people who have nothing to do with these perceived disputes and disagreements, real or imagined, on Trump’s part with their rights as criminal defendants, civil litigants, attorneys that they want representing them, not to mention livelihoods of people at these firms, beyond the partners at the law firms.We’re talking about the staff, the people who clean the halls of the law firms.
But none of that is remotely something that they think about or care about.It’s all just about vengeance.And I think it’s also now that we’ve gotten away from some of the initial orders, and we see he set this example in this mob boss-like way once he got law firms to be scared enough about, nervous enough about their existence, really.And Paul Weiss struck this deal, which you can criticize or not criticize, but the fact they capitulated now means so many other law firms are doing that in advance of the orders even being brought.23And so it’s that exact tactic of sort of intimidation and then advanced compliance by others.
23
The New York Times: How a Major Democratic Law Firm Ended Up Bowing to Trump
And it also has the impact of really chilling the number of lawyers and resources available to work on lawsuits and cases that were brought in the first Trump administration and would be bought now with the help of law firms otherwise in the courts to oppose many of the clearly illegal, unconstitutional actions by the administration.
So it has this multipurpose effect, right, of making him look strong, these big, powerful law firms capitulating, punishing his personal perceived enemies—Jack Smith, Mark Pomerantz, Andrew Weissmann—but also having a real practical chilling effect on resources that have in the past been available to not just oppose Trump but oppose actions that are legitimately being found by courts to be illegal in immigration, with respect to—there’s just a whole host of, whether it’s the executive orders or other policies that courts have now said, at least, “We’re putting a temporary hold on it,” which is quite a striking action for so many courts to do.
What you’re saying is it’s consistent with that idea of sending the message, “I’m going to reward my friends and punish my enemies.” And one of the phrases that Trump uses is he says the law firms are bending to him, and if you read articles about it, they’re saying "bend the knee." What does that say to you?Because the law firms say, “We have an agreement, and we’re going to change what our pro bono is, and we’re going to change our hiring practices.” I wonder if you see more to what they’re agreeing to than what their statements say.
Yes.It almost doesn’t matter what the terms of the agreement are.In other words, they can talk about it as consistent and things they would have done anyway.It’s the fact of the doing the agreement that is, in and of itself, so empowering to Trump, making him look powerful and them look weak, which I think is ultimately damaging to a firm’s brand, frankly.I think most people hire big law firms, especially New York law firms, to fight for them, not to sort of give in.But there’s a whole sort of philosophical, theoretical debate, I think, going on within the legal community about what is the best tactic and what the long-term consequences for their businesses are.
But there’s no question that the act of entering agreements, particularly when—Paul Weiss sort of had the gun to its head.It had the order issued against them.There was talk about people leaving the firm because they were so worried about the impact of the order on the firm’s business, at least one client talking about taking its case elsewhere.So Paul Weiss had a gun to—a sort of metaphorical gun to its head.
Many of these other firms, we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, but they’re not even waiting for the orders to come, and they’re entering into these negotiations and settlements.And I think that looks even more objectionable, in my view, in terms of—it’s one thing to decide to fight an order or not, like with any lawsuit that’s brought against someone.Do you settle?Do you litigate?They’re not even waiting for that, and that has been the most striking recent pattern.
And that’s more about the law firm side of it, though I think he, Trump, has sensed weakness.He’s smelling weakness, blood in the water, and he is just going after it.And I don’t know when it ends.Do they go after every—I don’t even know the rationale anymore.Again, in the beginning it was articulated by him, in these crazy ways, but nonetheless articulated, of, “I’m going after Covington because they defended Jack Smith.” OK, totally wrong, totally improper, unconstitutional.
… But now we don’t even—there’s no even stated rationale.It’s just, “Hey, get a law firm to pledge money to me.” And then what’s the actual—how do those actually get carried out?Are there written contracts?Are they enforceable?When he says, “OK, I want you, Skadden [Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom], to bring these cases on behalf of the Jan.6 insurrectionists to get money back, and I want you to do it pro bono,” are they going to have people to actually implement that?There’s so many unknowns here.
But I don’t know that that’s really the point of any of this.It’s, again, to make him look strong and them look weak and slow down and chill the number of lawyers that will go into court to actually oppose him.
And as a former prosecutor, is it like a protection racket?What’s the analogy that you see?
There’s so much about this administration that is a racket.It’s a little off topic, but Elon Musk getting contracts for himself and the enrichment.Even these pro bono pledges from the law firms, again, I don’t know who or how or where they actually will end up going, but if he has friends who need, or allies or people he perceives who need legal help down the road, is that when he’s going to turn to this and say, “OK, now’s your time to pay up”?Those are valuable resources.
We don’t know the details of how that will be enforced or which cases they’ll be forced to take, but that absolutely is something of value that he’s getting potentially for people he wants to protect.
The Courts
There’s lawsuits about these orders.There’s lawsuits about the attempt to take down government agencies like USAID.There’s lawsuits around—over 100 lawsuits around the government’s actions.Do you think the courts are adequate to deal with so many things happening at the same time?
Yes, I think the courts are doing their job, the district courts.There’s a debate going on about—well, the Republicans are trying to make a debate about whether an individual district judge should be able to issue an injunction that then is a nationwide injunction, so not just in their jurisdiction stopping a certain action taken by the administration but throughout the country.I think that’s going to—they’re going to try to target those kind of nationwide injunctions because those are the most damaging to what they’re trying to do.
But for now, that is how our federal court system works.The judges seem to be doing their jobs, whether they’re appointed by Republican presidents, Democratic presidents, conservative or not.For the most part, they are first of all, calling out representatives of DOJ when they’re in court and seem to be giving inconsistent answers.
We didn’t even talk about—sorry—Judge Ho’s opinion in the Adams case, how much he excoriated, really, the Department of Justice and Bove in particular for giving pretextual reasons about the need for the dismissal and giving ad hoc reasons afterwards, calling their conduct essentially what Danielle Sassoon had said about it, that it was a quid pro quo, and even if he didn’t use that term, it was a very disturbing bargain that DOJ was trying to make with Adams.24
And I do think it’s worth mentioning that Judge Ho’s opinion, which was much longer than it had to be, could have issued just a pretty short order saying, “I’m dismissing this but with prejudice, and here’s why: I don’t think this should be dismissed at all, but that’s not within my powers, separation of powers.Not up to the judge to tell the executive, tell DOJ, you have to bring a case.I can’t practically enforce that anyway.But actually, I’m going to make a whole lot of findings here based on all these written documents in the public record and statements that have been made, and I’m going to say that essentially”—and I’m paraphrasing, but he essentially said, “These attorneys who resigned rather than come before me and make these pretextual dishonest arguments about dismissing a perfectly legitimate case, they did the right thing.”
And I thought that was remarkable, that the judge went out of his way to do that.Not surprising because they so clearly did do the right thing, but in the long run, in the arc of history and how we all look back at this, I think that will be important that they were vindicated in that way by the judge.
So that’s one example where obviously you see people, Trump and people in his administration, trying very hard to delegitimize the courts as they’ve been doing and are doing more and more and more and saying that those two are just political arms, and they’re out to get him, and especially with someone who’s appointed by a Democrat and talking about impeachment and trying to ramp up threats against judges.
So they’re doing all of that, which is horrible but not unexpected, and yet the courts seem to still be doing their jobs, the judges.And I hope that holds.
Deportation of Venezuelan Migrants
What do you make of that?It seems like there’s a number of places where—they haven’t lost every case, but there’s a number of cases where the courts have said that they’ve gone too far, they’ve violated the Constitution or laws passed by Congress.And it almost seems like, from people we’ve talked to, that they’ve chosen an issue on this flight of Venezuelans to El Salvador to sort of pick out a territory where they think politically they’re strong and to really go after the judge with the full force of rhetoric.What do you make of that conflict over the flights, the conflict with Judge [James] Boasberg?
I think it’s politically brilliant, actually, to be honest, on Trump and his administration’s part, because on the surface, what you’re saying here is, “We want to deport violent gang members, and we want them out of the country, and all these technicalities that you’re holding up to get in the way of that are just impeding public safety.” That’s a pretty strong, appealing message to many Americans or people who live here, not just Trump supporters.25
And as someone who was a prosecutor for more than 20 years, I have been involved in prosecutions of violent gangs more times than I can count, and I am all in favor of that goal of targeting actual violent gang members or even gang members even if they’re not violent but they perpetuate the goals of the gang, etc.
But I also know that due process matters and truth about who actually is a member of a gang.We would spend months investigating individual members to prove to a court that someone was a member of a gang, either to bring a criminal prosecution or ultimately and/or for their deportation, and we had to do that as prosecutors for a reason, because otherwise we, as prosecutors, the government can just say somebody is a member of X—it could be a gang; it could be an organization they don’t like—and therefore, we can deport them.And that’s again, like the criminal prosecution power, that’s an incredibly dangerous power to go unfettered.
And I think Judge Boasberg has been incredibly consistent in trying to make that point, right?… Boasberg’s not saying—even the lawyers of these individuals are not saying, “No, bring them back, and let them all out on the streets.” They’re saying, “Bring them back, have them detained, and have some due process here, where the government has to show that what it’s saying is actually true.” And he tried to stop it by ordering that the planes don’t take off before it happened, and they disregarded that.26
And now the argument or battle, if you will, has become more about, “Are you making truthful representations to me here in court?” This kind of ties back to the Adams thing again.It is unheard of for representatives of the Department of Justice to come in and just lie or obfuscate the truth to a federal judge.People take that—prosecutors, in particular, employees of DOJ, really any lawyer—very seriously.Advocating for clients is one thing, but not being truthful with the court, that’s just—it’s a line that certainly most DOJ employees and prosecutors would not have crossed and would have been afraid of being reprimanded not just by the legal bars and the professional bar associations but by their own Department of Justice, of being OPRed, brought before the Office of Professional Responsibility.
None of that is happening now, obviously, but the fear has gone from being held accountable for what you say to a judge in a court to being called out or punished or fired by this administration.And that’s a very fast, remarkable swing.The main motto of Southern District, certainly—I can speak to that personally, but I think a wider net can be cast about Department of Justice—is, “Do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons.” That’s kind of the motto that we were taught.
And everything that this DOJ is trying to get lawyers to do, whether it be in the Adams prosecution or about the dealings and events of what happened with the Venezuelan individuals who were deported and other examples, is the opposite of that motto.It’s not doing the right thing, and certainly, even if the goal is right, it’s not doing it in the right way and for the right reasons.
And there’s a reason that was the motto.Your goal has to be worthy, whether it’s prosecuting bad people who deserve to be prosecuted—but not for political reasons, for the right reasons, right?—and doing it in the right way with candor to the court, with integrity.
And I think that kind of sums this all up in some way, that if you look at the actions of the prosecutors, who I think are on sort of the right side of history, they’ve been trying to live that out.And the wrong side of history, I think, are the ones who are blowing that all up.
And this is what’s happening inside the courtroom, and then outside of the courtroom there’s administration officials saying, “I don’t care what the judges think,” saying Judge Boasberg is a “radical left, lunatic judge,” saying some of these judges need to be impeached or their power taken from them.What is going on with that kind of rhetoric?Who is the audience?Is it the American people?Is it the judge?
I think it’s both.I think it’s definitely judges, right?It’s, again, part of this sort of, as we were talking about, intimidating law firms by setting examples.Now it’s intimidating judges: “You rule against me, I’m going to be calling for your impeachment.Your family is going to get harassed.” Just the very public nature of all of it.
Impeaching a judge actually is really, really hard, and the fact that they have life tenure is, I think, incredibly important right now.We’re sort of—that is what I think is, in some part, enabling judges to withstand this, and you have seen—and I do think it’s also the American public in the sense of what he’s been doing, as I said, since 2016, of trying to delegitimize, right?“Courts are not these impartial arbiters of justice.They are politicized and trying to get at me and my policies because they don’t like me, so you can’t trust any rulings that come from a judge, the same way you can’t trust cases brought by the Department of Justice or the FBI because they’re all corrupt.They’re all political.They’re all weaponized.And so you can’t trust the press.The press is the fake news.”
This all started so long ago.We’re so used to it.But it’s completely a uniform strategy of trying to delegitimize the authority and integrity of any institution, outlet, reporter, lawyer who might be critical of them, because then all of a sudden, their criticism is not legitimate and real and based in fact, it’s just what he said it was.It’s fake.It’s corrupted.
And to a large extent, it’s worked.These are very effective strategies that were planted, started long ago, starting with the [former special counsel Robert] Mueller report.Before it even came out, the Mueller report was doomed.It was delegitimized, and then [former U.S. Attorney General] Bill Barr did a lot to help with that.27But it’s been a really long-game strategy, and it’s been very effective.
27
The New York Times: Judge Calls Barr’s Handling of Mueller Report ‘Distorted’ and ‘Misleading’
I will say there have been some—I think it’s good to talk about some of the examples of people who both you might expect or not expect to stand up to this and speak out about it.We talked a lot about Danielle Sassoon, Hagan Scotten, the other prosecutors.I can’t overstatewhat I see as their integrity.Another saying that we learned in SDNY is, “Integrity is really hard to earn and really easy to lose.”
And so that’s kind of my message always now to prosecutors, in terms of, “Should I stay?Should I go?What do I do?” And I think, at the end of the day, you stay, you do your job as much as you can without feeling like you’re losing your personal integrity because that is something you can’t get back, and I think that was pretty clearly the line for the prosecutors who resigned.
We’ve also started to see—and there are many other examples.Those are just the ones I’m most familiar with.But there are people across the federal government who have taken stands, stepped down, spoken out.Career, low-level people, not just high-profile people.There was a high-ranking attorney in the D.C.U.S.attorney’s office who stepped down for a similar reason.28
28
The Washington Post: High-ranking D.C. federal prosecutor resigns over order to freeze EPA funds
And we’ve seen judges speak out.Justice [John] Roberts finally did make some statement in defense of the judges.29For him to make any statement is a sign, I think, of how bad things have gotten because he would just as soon put his head in the sand, I think, and say nothing, so the fact that he said anything means that he even sees the attacks on judges as worrisome for their long-term credibility and the institutions sort of thriving.And I still think he didn’t quite speak powerfully enough, and it was a little late, but again, he did.
We also have seen some conservative judges, for example, Judge Richard Sullivan, who was appointed by Trump.He’s a Southern District alum, so it caught my attention.He made a statement that “We don’t talk about impeaching judges just because we don’t like their rulings.30We appeal their rulings.That’s the process.Impeaching judges is—that is not a reason to employ that drastic talk or tool.” And he put out a statement with another judge whose name I’m forgetting, but I thought that was kind of remarkable.
We’ve certainly seen all sorts of the professional bar associations—the American Bar Association, the New York City Bar Association, a lot of the larger bar associations—speaking out about this as well.
So there are signs of people who still do not feel intimidated enough that they aren’t going to speak out about it.
Chief Justice Roberts and the Supreme Court
You talked about impeachment and the political threat and possibly threats to families.There’s another big sort of gun sitting on the table, which is, a lot of the president’s supporters talking about that it might be necessary to disregard a court order; that if the judiciary is so out of control and the president’s the commander in chief, he might have to make the decisions himself.Help me understand the stakes of that moment, especially as the Supreme Court and Justice Roberts, who you mentioned, are facing all of these cases.What do you make of that rhetoric and that threat?
Well, again, I think the rhetoric is somewhat intended to chill the divide, right?So judges maybe will be afraid to rule against them in the fear that there might be some kind of potential political violence or resistance, but I have never been one to see that as the ultimate—I don’t like drawing this line of, “Are we in a constitutional crisis?Are we not?” And only if they actually disobey a court order in some very explicit way, are we then in a constitutional crisis?I think the crisis is ongoing.Whatever we want to call it, we are there.We are in a crisis of the Department of Justice, the tools of the justice system, the courts, law firms, the legal profession being attacked and manipulated in a way that is very undemocratic and un-American.
I don’t like the lines that have been drawn about that.I also don’t know that it—there’s plenty of people who would say they already have violated court orders.Judge Boasberg has come pretty close to saying that.So I think people picture this very dramatic instance where a marshal comes to implement an order, and there’s resistance, and there is physical turmoil.I’m not saying that couldn’t happen.I think anything can happen under this administration.I wouldn’t put anything out of the question anymore.But I think we’re short of that and yet still in a real crisis is, I guess, what I would say.
Washington and the Rule of Law
… Describe this moment that we’re in, whether it’s a constitutional crisis or something else.What are the stakes?What is it that we’ve been talking about?
I look at this obviously through the lens of a former prosecutor, someone who believes in the rule of law, and I just—I see so many different aspects all at once being corrupted.I see so many people willing to cross lines that were never crossed before that we’ve talked about, the leaders of DOJ.And then we haven’t even talked about the other branches.Part of why this all feels so much like a crisis is that normally, even within one party, if there were a president trying to do such a power grab in so many different ways, you would have some people within that party in Congress who would say, “You know what?This is a step too far,” or, “I’m not going to confirm this nominee because they seem pretty radical or dangerous or because I don’t like a lot of the policies that this administration is trying to do, and so I’m going to hold back my approval of this nominee.” And there’s just a complete abdication.There is zero resistance from anyone in the Republican Party in Congress.
And so we’ve talked this whole time about everyone but Congress because they aren’t doing anything, and so it’s easy to sort of put the blame in a lot of other places for what’s happening.But it’s in part, in large part, because there is absolutely a complete abdication of any congressional oversight, check, power by the Republicans in Congress.
So that’s just one point I think that I almost forget to make because it’s so obvious, and it’s so easy to look elsewhere at what everybody else is doing or not doing, because we don’t even expect it anymore for people in Congress.We have no expectation that they’re going to push back in any way, members of the Republican Congress, and they’re in the majority, so they do have that power.
I’m the daughter of someone who escaped the Nazis in 1939 from Romania.I’m pretty lucky to even be here as a Jewish woman whose father and family did manage to do that, and many of my family members did perish there.And I know that the analogies to Nazi Germany and Hitler, it can get sort of blown out of proportion, it can seem extreme, but I cannot help but have this feeling of anxiousness that I know comes from that history and that I think really all Americans, I think, I hope, should have, because it just all feels so undemocratic.So much of what’s happening feels so contrary to what this country is about, even if we don’t like all aspects of it.
Should we downsize the government, make it more efficient, the federal government?Of course.Everyone would agree with that.I could probably come up with 10 ways the Department of Justice could be made more efficient just based on my time there.But that’s not what’s happening.What’s happening is an utter destruction of the federal government and the Department of Justice, decimating it from the random firings and laying off of employees with the real experience and depth to understand the serious problems that we’re facing, to cutting programs and offices within the federal government as a whole—but the Department of Justice, in this very kind of random, non-orderly, [non]sensical, organized way.
That, in and of itself, feels completely contrary to the goals that we all seem to want, which is to have a federal government that actually can work for us and protect us.
I think the decimation of the Department of Justice and the turning it into a tool of the president, of the executive, is going to have lasting damage if we can even undo it down the road.I think a lot of this is very long-term impactful in a very dangerous, negative way.
Latest Interviews
Latest Interviews
Policies
Teacher Center
Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation
Koo and Patricia Yuen
FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
