The FRONTLINE Interviews
Carl Hulse
Author, Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington’s War Over the Supreme Court, From Scalia’s Death to Justice Kavanaugh
Carl Hulse is the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times and the author of "Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington’s War Over the Supreme Court, From Scalia’s Death to Justice Kavanaugh."
This is a transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on January 8, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.
This interview appears in:
TOP
Carl Hulse
Chapters
Text Interview:
Highlight text to share it
The Death of Justice Scalia and Mitch McConnell’s Gamble
Let’s start with [Antonin] Scalia.Scalia dies, and very quickly Leader [Mitch] McConnell (R-Ky.)—
Within minutes.
—yeah, makes an announcement.So tell me the story.
So McConnell is actually in the Caribbean on a—it’s a break.I think it’s a Presidents’ Day weekend break.And he gets the word that Scalia has died.And this is actually a really—it’s an emotional moment for McConnell.He knew Scalia.He kind of considered Scalia a mentor.He was in the Justice Department as a low-level person when Scalia was over there, and also Robert Bork.So he had a relationship with Scalia.He would go to dinner with Scalia occasionally.So this was an emotional moment for Mitch McConnell.Here's a guy that he considered someone in the league of John Marshall, a major Supreme Court figure.
So first he’s like: “Wow, Scalia’s dead.What a loss to the country.”Instantaneously, “How am I going to stop Barack Obama from replacing Scalia?” not only because he didn't want Scalia replaced by a Democrat, but he wanted Scalia replaced by someone deserving of it.I mean, this was a personal decision.
So he’s sitting down there talking to no one.He decides to put out that press release that came out about 6:00 that night, I think, and say: “We have decided that we're going to let the next president fill this seat.The people need to speak.”So it was very instantaneous.He turned political within minutes of Scalia’s death.
It’s the same night that there's a GOP debate.
There is a debate, right.
Donald Trump’s Nominee List
Set the debate up for me.Put Trump at the center of whatever you're going to talk about there, and then factor in McConnell’s press release.
Well, that was an interesting aspect of Scalia’s death, that that night there's a primary debate in South Carolina for the big South Carolina primary, and Trump and his people realize this is going to come up.So they want to be prepared.So he’s in conversations with his people and says—they kind of decide that, one, they're worried about Ted Cruz (R-Texas).Ted Cruz is, at this moment, Trump’s closest rival for the conservatives.Ted Cruz was a former Supreme Court clerk, knows about the Supreme Court, and they figure he’s going to show off his expertise that night about the court.
So the Trump people decide to come up with some names to throw out at this debate.And if you look at the debate, Trump mentions a couple of people that he would nominate to the Supreme Court if given the chance.And he also urges McConnell to stand firm.He says that, of course Obama’s going to try and fill this seat, but Mitch and the Senate Republicans need to stay strong.So this is all happening very quickly.Instantaneously, everyone’s grabbing onto the politics of this, both for the Senate, for Obama and for the ongoing presidential primary.
And it’s not territory that Trump is particularly known for.
Though his sister is a federal judge, and she is on the court, and there was some talk that people thought his sister was seen by Republicans—and Ted Cruz made some comments about this—as a potential pro-choice person the court, so they started to raise the specter of maybe Trump’s going to appoint his sister to the Supreme Court and to gin up opposition to Trump that way.So Trump wanted to get out ahead of that.But you're right: It’s not an area where he was particularly conversive, but in some ways more than some of the other areas of the presidency due to his sister.
My sense is for conservatives, conservative Republicans, I mean, the people who care about the Supreme Court in a kind of fundamental way, this was a litmus test about Donald Trump for that?
Yeah.I mean, this was a huge deal, as it turned out, for Donald Trump.The Scalia vacancy, I don't think there's any Republican that you could talk to who doesn't think this was a key ingredient to Trump being elected.This was it.Evangelicals, other conservatives who didn't like Trump knew that they could—they needed to back Trump, because if he’s going to become president, then he can fill this vacancy.So this was a huge advantage for Trump in the presidential race, and probably was the single most thing that got him elected, honestly.
Mitch McConnell and Control of the Courts
Let’s go backward for just a minute.Tell me about Mitch McConnell.Give me the sense of who this man is who gives this gift, whether he meant to or not, to Donald Trump on that day.
Yeah, it’s a complicated thing.Now, Mitch McConnell is somewhat obsessed with federal judges and the Supreme Court, and the reason he is is because when he came to Washington as a junior staffer to Marlow Cook, senator from Kentucky back in the late ’60s, Marlow Cook gets on the Judiciary Committee.There's two big fights on the Judiciary Committee over Nixon Supreme Court appointments in 1969 and ’70: Clement Haynsworth, I believe, and Harrold Carswell.These were two Nixon nominees who were both defeated in these huge fights in the Senate.Both defeated—there was no filibuster or anything.They were voted down on a bipartisan basis.Haynsworth—both were Southern judges; both had questions about their support of segregation.There were some ethical questions surrounding Haynsworth.
McConnell was there for this.This was a big, formative moment for Mitch McConnell about the Senate.He went back and wrote a big law review story on this nomination fight as a junior staffer to Marlow Cook, who became important in this fight.So Mitch McConnell has a lot of ideas about the courts and who should be on the courts and the Senate’s role in the courts.This is a big thing with him.
He ends up going to the Department of Justice at some moment, where he works, as you've already mentioned.Give me a little more detail.Who does he work for?What does he learn?How much access does he have?
He's a junior person, but he gets to sit in the staff meetings.And he’s told me in interviews, you know, he would just sit there and listen to Bork and these other big figures in the Justice Department, Scalia, you know, in the morning meetings and their wit and how sharp they were.And he was just super-impressed and a little cowed by these guys.But then he gets elected to the Senate, and he gets to help put Scalia on the Supreme Court.So it’s a great, great moment for him.
But when it comes to the Scalia seat, he’s got a couple of reasons that he wants to stop this from happening.One, he’s, you know, just reveres Scalia and wants—and like a lot of the conservative legal elite in Washington, they want Scalia replaced by someone like Scalia, not someone that President Obama’s going to put in there, even though there was 11 months left in his term.
Two, Mitch McConnell, for all his conservatism, has been distrusted by some of the conservative movement over the years.And he’s too accommodating, too much of a dealmaker, not really a super-strong conservative.So this is his chance.Maybe this won't work; maybe he won't be able to stop the seat from being filled; maybe Hillary Clinton is going to win anyway.But he’s going to appease them by showing, “I'm going to stand firm.”So in some ways, he couldn't lose.He’s telling the conservatives he’s on their side; he’s going to do whatever it takes to stop Obama from appointing a replacement.
And two, if he wins, …if Trump somehow wins—and at that point it was nowhere near a certainty or even a probability in most people’s minds that Trump would win—that if Trump wins, then wow, we've really won, and we get to fill this seat.This is a huge seat on the court, because if Obama gets that replacement, it’s going to be his third; he’s going to shift the ideological balance of the court.This is a big thing.The Republicans really dig in.McConnell sees all sorts of advantages.
…So how unusual, Carl, was it, for him to take that step?Is it unprecedented?
No.I mean, yes, it’s unprecedented in some ways.For McConnell to take that kind of step, usually you would talk to your members before you did it, but he wanted to do it right then.No, this had happened.In fact, Anthony Kennedy, though he was nominated in 1987, was confirmed in 1988, the presidential election year.The reason that they could say this doesn’t happen very often is because, guess what?It doesn't happen very often.Justices don’t die in presidential election years.Justices typically time their retirement to a moment when they know that a person of the party that put them in will probably replace them.
But there had been other instances of this.I mean, Mitch McConnell was making up a standard as he went along.And then saying that the Democrats—and he has said this many times—he did this because he knew the Democrats would do the same thing if they were in the same position.They’ve never been in that position, but they had made comments in the past, [then-Delaware Sen.] Joe Biden in particular, Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who then was the Democratic leader, had said, “If this comes up, we're not going to go ahead with it.”So Mitch McConnell latched onto that as his justification.Of course, we’ll never know.
The Political Evolution of Mitch McConnell
Before we get too far down the road, let me go back to one thing in his biography.There's a lot of talk, and when you talk to people who knew him really well, you read the books about him, they say he was a sort of civil rights advocate; as a young person goes to the Voting Rights Act signing in the Capitol Rotunda.But there's a metamorphosis that takes place, primarily around busing and other things, where he suddenly—Mitch McConnell is not that same civil rights advocate that he was.And in fact, it surprises a lot of people when I say to them, “You know, Mitch McConnell was a big civil rights guy once upon a time.”
Well, and this is a point of pride with Mitch McConnell.This is something he still emphasizes to this day, that he was a Kentucky Republican when actually there weren't a lot of Kentucky Republicans, and that he was someone who stood up for civil rights from the beginning.You're exactly right.He was here for the signing of the Voting Rights Act.But, you know, he became more conservative.And in fact, he broke with Marlow Cook, who was his mentor, and I think Marlow Cook—you could probably look [it] up—honestly had said some things about how he was surprised how McConnell changed in later life.
What do you think caused the change?You just want to win?
Politics.Yeah, Mitch McConnell wants to win; he really does.I'm not saying he abandoned that civil rights view that he had, because he still emphasizes that.But Mitch McConnell is about winning, and he will fight and fight and fight.And he just doesn't care for the criticism that he gets.It doesn't bother him.I don't know if he still has it, but in his office in the Russell Building, his district office, or state office we would call it, he has a wall filled with really all the originals of really bad editorial cartoons about him.So he has the cartoonists send them to him and then puts it up.He just doesn't care.I mean, he wants to do what he thinks is right.
And he will—you know, the Senate on these judicial issues, one of the more interesting [things], and it’s kind of funny, is depending on whether you were in the majority or the minority when these come up, you say exactly the opposite of what you'd said when you were on the other side.Both sides do it.As soon as the power flips, they completely change their position.
…Trump, it’s election night.Mitch McConnell is about to find out whether his big bet is going to pay off, and it does.
It does, to the surprise of everyone, including Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, by the way.No one thought Trump was going to win.The Republicans didn't think Trump was going to win that night.I talked to Mitch McConnell’s people the night before the election, and they presumed they were going to lose both the presidency and the Senate.So this is a total shock to them and to Trump, and to Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who also—the House speaker at that time—thought that Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) was coming back to the Senate for Wisconsin.He’s said that publicly.
So here's this big shock: "Oh, my God, now we get to put in this Supreme Court justice."I think one of the big things election night that hit people who know about Washington and what's going on in Washington was that the Supreme Court seat that Obama was going to fill, and really had the right to fill, certainly to nominate someone and the Senate confirm that person, was now going to be filled by Donald Trump, but by Don McGahn and the people around Trump.And they were moving very quickly, then, to figure out who their candidate was going to be.
Donald Trump’s Nominee List
So let's go back now to the spring of 2016.The maneuvering over creation of the list that Trump uses and waves in front of conservatives, …
…So Trump, there's this formative idea taking place in the mind of Trump and his advisers to get out there with a list of nominees, potential nominees.So he’s meeting at Jones Day where Don McGahn was the lawyer, his campaign lawyer, who would become his White House counsel, and they kind of collected some of the conservative operators in town—Newt Gingrich was there; Bob Livingston, the almost-speaker of the House who’s a big lobbyist, but not really Republican leadership; but Leonard Leo is also there from the Federalist Society—and they're talking, and Trump brings up this idea of putting out a list.And the reaction was—there were some uncertainties as to whether he wanted it to be just a list that they knew about, but then he says, “Well, I think we should make this public.”And everybody’s like, “Whoa, you're going to put out this list?”No one has ever done this before, put out a list.Usually people say, “I'm going to appoint justices in the mold of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” if you're a Democrat, or in the mold of Scalia if you're a Republican.The Republicans never say in the mold of [David] Souter, by the way.Still a bad memory for Republicans there.
So in this meeting, Trump commits to putting out this list.And it’s a surprise, and he actually—and you guys will find this—he actually went down to the Trump Hotel for a press conference after that meeting and talks about this.So he’s on the record saying, “I've got this list, and it’s getting a good response, and I'm showing it to a lot of people.”Of course at that point they didn't have a list.There was a few names that he had thrown around, and he really hadn’t shown it to a lot of people.But you could see that he was into it, and it was sort of this gut instinct of Trump that you see again and again with him politically where he comes out and says, you know, something that seems wild but works for him.And the list would end up working, but it was a while before they got it out.
The Rise of the Federalist Society
So let's talk about the Federalist Society while we're in this territory.From early days, right after the Bork failure—
It actually may have been before that, even.It started in Yale, and I believe it might have been 1982.There was a meeting on the campus at Yale.I think Bork might have even spoken to it.
That's right.And Bork and Scalia are sort of advisers, right?
Right.This is a move by conservatives to begin to play a bigger role in the judicial selection process and getting more of their judges in front of members.You know, up until the 1980s—well, Carter himself instituted some reforms in the way judges are nominated and what kind of credentials they would have.But judges, for decades, were really patronage jobs.These were jobs the senators wanted to install people back in their home states and hand out as political favors and work with the administration.It wasn’t sort of the more revered way we think about federal judges now, although they’ve gotten so political.
So it’s evolving, and the conservatives think their judges aren’t getting fair consideration.So this group starts to form on a college campus, Federalist Society, which is now a huge player in judicial politics, to get more conservatives, strict constructionists, people who are going to read the Constitution the way it was written.There's another phrase that's used now called “textualists” that it’s even sort of a step beyond the strict constructionists where they're reading the text of the law more closely as to how it was supposed to be related to the Constitution.
So the Federalist Society just grows and grows over the decades after Bork.There's this outpouring of conservative anger at the way he was treated.“We need to do better.”And in some ways—and Reagan with the Reagan administration, in some ways conservatives become much more invested in the nomination and confirmation of federal judges than liberals and progressives are.Liberals tended to think more about the policy, election in Congress.So the conservatives start to get the upper hand in the way these judges are moving through Congress.
And then I don't know if you guys are going to be talking to Brian Fallon, but he starts that group Demand Justice after the election to kind of get progressives and Democrats more fired up about judges and make them more of an issue.And this is why it helped Trump.Conservatives, evangelical voters, they vote on the Supreme Court.Exit polls show this every time.Democrats do not, not to the same extent.
So back in the creation of the Federalist Society, it grows up.It becomes thousands, tens of thousands of lawyers.So that by the time Trump is looking around for some way to populate a list, and he’s in a room at Jones Day—
Well, Leonard Leo is there.They had called Leonard Leo ahead of time and said: “Hey, would you come over and meet with us?We have this idea about the list.”
Who’s Leonard Leo?
Leonard Leo is the executive vice president of the conservative Federalist Society.He's the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, and he was going to help them put together this list.Along with the Heritage Foundation, the other conservative think tank, not quite as involved in actual judicial politics as the Federalist Society, but still pretty involved.But one of the funny things about this [that] everybody said, Trump knew not the difference between the Federalist Society and the Heritage Society; he just used them interchangeably and drove people nuts.Never really tried to straighten those out.So those two groups helped populate this list.
Don McGahn is a member of the Federalist Society?
Yes, he is.
Who is Don McGahn?
Don McGahn is a former campaign attorney in town, campaign finance attorney, who was appointed by George W. Bush to the Federal Election Commission and sat over there for a while, and then left, and he represented a lot of conservative groups in their campaign and political operations like the NRA, people like that.
Great, powerful lawyer?
No, I think Don is actually very interesting, because he wasn’t a big, well-known lawyer around town.But people knew him and knew him from the Federal Election Commission, where he, of course, tried to really thwart regulation.He’s a big anti-regulatory person.But he was looking for a campaign to get involved in; he ended up with Trump.Trump developed a lot of trust in him, so he became a major player in both the Trump White House and in the confirmation of Trump judges, along with Mitch McConnell.
And Jones Day is a largely conservative law firm?
Yeah, I think it is.I don't know that much about it, but I think it’s pretty Republican and mainly has Republican clients, although I'm sure they have some Democratic lawyers there.
The Failed Nomination of Merrick Garland
…Let’s talk a little bit about [Merrick] Garland while we're in this territory before we move on to [Brett] Kavanaugh.Obama faces a decision after McConnell issues the press release, which is, "I can go get the kind of kickass Democratic progressive, angry sacrificial lamb and throw him or her out there, or I can try to make it hard on McConnell inside the Republican caucus and give him somebody that a lot of his people, a lot of his Republican senators, might like."
Right.And they went through the process, but it was always pretty clear they were going to end up with Garland.And they did end up with Merrick Garland, chief justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, again, the so-called second most important court in the country.
The launchpad?
Right.This is where John Roberts comes from.This is sort of the place for looking first when you want to find a Supreme Court nominee.Merrick Garland, very well-known guy; considered a centrist, moderate, more moderate.He’s older, so maybe that won't—he's in his 60s.Maybe that won't make the Republicans so nervous, that he’s going to be there forever.But the big thing was that Republicans had asked Obama to nominate him before when Obama was nominating Kagan.And Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), in particular, who had been a chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said, “You know, nominate someone like Merrick Garland.”But that's when Democrats controlled the Senate, and Republicans were trying to get Obama to nominate a more centrist person.
So, of course, when Republicans control—well, Merrick Garland is not good enough for them.And there's an interesting point about this, that Merrick Garland—Republicans look and say, “Yes, he’s moderate, great guy.”They all like him a lot personally, the ones who know him, but if they look at Merrick Garland, they say, “Well, his opinions might be more moderate, but they're still going to come down on the side of the government.”They see Garland as pretty much a supporter of government regulation, which of course is what they want to get rid of.So they weren't going to go for Garland.It’s terribly frustrating to Democrats and the administration who think here's this great guy that we have nominated, super-upstanding judge and perfect for the Supreme Court, and you won't even give him a hearing.
So they knew going in it was going to be tough, but I don't think they ever knew it was going to be as tough as it turned out to be.
How does McConnell hold all of his caucus together?What is the power at that moment?
I think, you know what?They did not like Obama, the Republicans.Obviously, here's Mitch McConnell who’d said: “We're going to do our best to make Obama a one-term president.We're going to obstruct him when we can.We're not going to work with him.”Obama had been briefly in the Senate.The senators love their institution.They considered him kind of a drive-by senator, and they just weren't going to let him have that third pick.One of the reasons McConnell acted so quickly that night was to keep his members from going out and saying, “Well, we await the president’s nominee,” or “We're going to give him a fair hearing.”He didn't want any of that to happen.He needed to tell them right off the bat: “Don’t say anything.We're just blocking this entirely, and we have to do it before there's a nominee, because once there's a nominee, if you get a hearing, you know what?He’s probably going to look OK to most people, so we have to stop that.”
And they did not want Obama to get a third person on the court, and especially a third person who’s going to change the ideological balance of the court.And there were a few people—Susan Collins (R-Maine) met with Garland.Jerry Moran, a senator from Kansas, a conservative guy, but back home, he said at one point that maybe Garland should get a hearing, and they came down on him like a ton of bricks immediately—ads, warnings, he’s going to be primaried.So Jerry Moran clammed up pretty fast.So anybody who tried to sort of break away, they just pounded and they held together.
[Jeff] Flake (R-Ariz.) was one of those guys, too.
Yeah.But he’d said, “Well, maybe we’ll do it in the lame duck.”They were nervous about it.And this was a tough one for Hatch to defend.I mean, he had called for the guy’s nomination and then didn't do anything about it.
The Nomination of Brett Kavanaugh
…The choice of Kavanaugh, how does it happen?Why is it Kavanaugh?
Kavanaugh—of course he wasn’t on the original list, and he wasn't on the second list, but he was on the list that counted when it came time for him.Brett Kavanaugh has a reputation as someone who writes really powerful, anti-regulatory opinions, and that's the kind of people that McGahn is looking for.And he wanted Brett Kavanaugh.… Brett Kavanaugh had been around Washington forever.Born here, now famously attended Georgetown Prep.His family’s from here.He was with the Bush administration.He had two hearings as an appellate court nominee, again on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.They didn't think there could be anything in his background that they hadn’t heard about.It would have come up by now—Democrats have been after Brett Kavanaugh for years—so they thought this should be a pretty straightforward nomination.And they really wanted him not because of his stance on cultural issues but his opinions that he’s issued on government power.
He meets Trump once, and it doesn't go so well.He meets him again with his wife, and it goes a little better.Walk me through the arc.
Well, I think that McConnell is trying to wave them off Kavanaugh a little bit.He had his own favorites.McConnell knew it was going to be a problem, and because of his huge record here in Washington, he’s just had a lengthy paper trail.He handled all of George W. Bush’s papers, so McConnell was nervous about that.I think Trump wants somebody—he keeps saying he wants an outsider and somebody who is not of Washington, and I think Kavanaugh’s really a Bush person.He came up through the Bush administration.He worked for H. W. Bush and W. in a high-level position.So I think Trump, who’s not a big fan of the Bushes and vice versa, saw him as a little bit of another appointment of George W. Bush.But McGahn and others were able to talk to Trump saying: “This is the best available guy for what we want to do.Let’s go forward with that.”And McGahn had huge sway with Trump on these nominees.
What's that about?...
I think he delivered for Trump.He helped him with the list.He’s elected now.He's getting judges through.I think that Trump looks at McGahn and goes, “OK, this guy did what he said he was going to do, and he’s doing it very efficiently.”The [Neil] Gorsuch nomination pretty much went off without a hitch, and at that stage of the Trump administration was really the only thing that was going off without a hitch, right?Everything else was a disaster.So I think Trump looks at that and goes, “All right, I'm going to trust him.”
Is McConnell involved?Is that a three-way, those conversations?
In terms of the pick?
Yeah.
No, the pick is up to the president.I mean, they ask McConnell, and they do all sorts of things, but it’s up to McGahn and the president.And McConnell did, as I said, he tried to discourage them and say there were other people that might be easier to get through.But he's thinking about Kavanaugh.He’s known Kavanaugh forever, too, the Starr Report.He was around for Kavanaugh’s other hearings.He knows this is going to be difficult.
So let's talk about the clock that Mitch is facing.He’s got a midterm election coming in October.This is mid- to late July, I guess.They’ve got an August recess scheduled.What's he worried about, first in terms of just the time frame of getting this done?
Yeah, they just wanted to get this done in a hurry and get it over with because they didn't know exactly what was going to happen, and they also wanted him on the court.They wanted a person on the court.Here's Trump.Is he looking at subpoenas from the special counsel?They want to make sure they’ve got the people on the court who they think—now, they can't know, but who they think would help the president, and based on Kavanaugh’s own writings, you could see where he thinks that the president should be protected from these kinds of investigations.So he wants to get him on.
There's been a lot of discussion about how this played in the election.So McConnell’s looking at this like, “Well, maybe this isn't that good for us, but maybe we can use it against some of the Democrats who are running—Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).”So they didn't think it was helping them much, but with the blowup over the sexual misconduct accusations, they saw a spike a bit in energy in certain races where the Republicans think that helped them, but the Democrats also think in other races really helped the Democrats and helped the Democrats take the House.
…And the math for McConnell in terms of who he has to have?Which senators are in play as it begins?
So Collins and [Lisa] Murkowski (R-Alaska), and he also, I think at the time, you have to remember that John McCain (R-Ariz.) has just died, so that seat also is part of this.But they end up putting in Jon Kyl of Arizona, who not only was for Kavanaugh, but had been sherpaing him through the Senate.But I think it really came down to Collins and Murkowski in the main in the Senate.And Susan Collins was super-critical here because she is the representative of the centrists and she's a pro-choice Republican, one of only two, her and Lisa Murkowski.
So the way Collins goes on this is going to influence people, because other Republicans are going to get nervous if Susan Collins is saying, “I'm not going to vote for him over these sexual misconduct allegations or his position on Roe v. Wade.”
So the White House and Don McGahn focused a lot of their energy on Susan Collins and making sure that she was with them all the way.And at the end, she gave a long, 50-minute speech laying out her own case, and probably the best Republican case, for supporting Kavanaugh.Got her a lot of grief, but that was the way she felt about it.And they did want to get some Democrats to vote for Kavanaugh, because if you go on there, onto the court, with just a solely partisan vote, I mean, there's a bit of an asterisk by your name.So they wanted to get maybe Heidi Heitkamp, maybe Joe Donnelly of Indiana, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia to vote for Kavanaugh.In the end, it was just Manchin who voted for him of the Democrats.
So he’s really playing with a margin of about five people here and there.
Or even less, really.It was narrow, and they needed to keep them all on board.And even up to the last minute of the day of the vote, they were not sure how Murkowski and Collins were going to vote.And Lisa Murkowski herself wasn't sure how she was going to vote even that day and went out there and—we were all watching in the press gallery.When she said no, we could barely hear her, and it was quite a shocking vote.
Brett Kavanaugh and the Political Divide
So one of the things I've done is watch the videotape of the very first day of the hearings.There's a lot of—
Commotion.
Yes.But there's a lot of talk.We're looking, of course, back at the reaction to Bork and what was—when the Democrats attacked, there was no war room defense for Bork.Then when it’s [Clarence] Thomas, there is a war room for both sides, in a way.
…And you get up to Kavanaugh, and you start to say, “What are the lessons learned from Bork and Thomas that they begin to apply to Kavanaugh before they walk into that room that very first day?”Have you thought about that at all?
I think just to fight back.I mean, you cannot—they didn't let anything—they wouldn’t let anything go unanswered.I think the difference, though, in some of those hearings in the past, there was a little more open-mindedness on both sides of the dais, that people were still gathering information.I think in this case, everybody was locked in going in.I don't think there was any Republican on that Judiciary Committee who was looking, “Wow, should I really vote for Kavanaugh?” except for maybe Jeff Flake, but only after the sexual misconduct allegations.And the Democrats, they weren’t interested.They already knew Brett Kavanaugh.[Patrick] Leahy (D-Vt.), Schumer—well, Schumer’s not on the committee—Leahy—
[Dick] Durbin (D-Ill.).
Durbin, they'd been down this road with Kavanaugh before.They knew who they were—there was no way they were ever going to vote for him.I don’t get the sense that the outside war rooming and advertising were having a big impact here.But I do think that it’s just much, much more partisan.It’s hard to see a situation now where—look at it this way.Say there's a president of one party and the Senate of the other.I mean, I'm not even sure you can ever get a Supreme Court nominee through in that situation now, right?Are the Democrats—say they would have won this election.Are they going to take up a Trump nominee?I don't know.It’s going to be very difficult.This stuff is now intensely polarized and super-partisan.
The Republicans may have learned one lesson at least from Thomas, which is don’t say—and certainly from Bork—don’t say anything.
Oh, well, everybody’s learned that lesson.That's the Ginsburg standard.That's what the Republicans like to call it.Yeah, don’t say anything at all.Bork was the kind of guy who wanted to engage in the battle of ideas, and he thought he was smarter than every person on that committee.Maybe he was, but they're the ones who get to vote, and they voted him down.Actually, talk about Thomas.The similarities between the Thomas hearings and these hearings, it was kind of stunning.And at the end of the day, there wasn't a change.The accused nominee still ended up on the Supreme Court.But these fights are just so intense now.There's just very little room for compromise or give.
I think what we're seeing now—what happens if there's an opening in 2020, which is very possible.Mitch McConnell, in the past, made a big thing.You can't do this in a presidential election year, but I don't think that's going to stop him the next year in a presidential election year.And he’s already started laying the groundwork for that saying, “Well, that only counts when it’s a president of one party and a Senate of a different party.”So you're looking at a potential clash.
And I think this is all—it all weighs on the Supreme Court.I think people are losing confidence in the Supreme Court.I think it’s a very dangerous time for them.I mean, you’ve got Gorsuch on there, in some ways has an asterisk by his name because Democrats—that's the Garland seat.You've got Kavanaugh on there now, a little bit of an asterisk by him where a lot of Democrats think he got away with sexual misconduct and a showing of lack of judicial temperament in his appearance before the committee.So I think the Supreme Court is in a dicey time.
On that first day when you watch it, [Chuck] Grassley’s (R-Iowa) tapping his gavel and the photographers are moving out of the way, and suddenly the Democrats are just roaring at him about: “Why did we get the information last night?We haven't had time.”The Republicans are angry.
Yeah, that was a planned demonstration by the Democrats, in a way.They had had a conference call the day before and plotted out exactly how they were going to do it and that Sen. [Kamala] Harris (D-Calif.) was going to interrupt him as soon as it is—I think I've counted—I think Grassley is 13 words into his remarks when they start badgering him.Dick Durbin had walked in; I was standing at the press table, and I said, “Should we expect something different here than usual?”And he said, “Yeah, I think you should expect something different here.”And it was a very different hearing, and we got into John Cornyn (R-Texas) saying, “It was mob rule.”And Grassley wants to protect his reputation for fairness.He sees himself as a man of the Senate, treats all his colleagues equitably, so he was giving them their chance.
But there's no way the Democrats, with the changes in the rules—they can make a lot of noise, but they couldn’t stop it.And that was the way it played out.There were some delays and some stops and starts, but the Republicans were going to push that through.
Do you see it as a microcosm of everything else?
Yeah, it’s sort of the whole—the Capitol and the Senate writ large.The Senate used to be this place of—there was cross-the-aisle relationships and some compromise.Senators were willing to say, “OK, well the president is in; he gets some discretion in who he picks.”Obama did get two of his nominees on the court.But everything—the lines are so deep now that I don’t see this improving.I think what you're going to see is a lot of what you're hearing already, is people talking about.“Well, do we need to change the court?Do we need to put term limits on the court?Do we need to add members to the court to change this situation?” because what's happened is the Congress is so polarized and politics is so polarized that the courts have become these referees of these policy fights.ACA [Affordable Care Act] has passed on a partisan vote; Republicans challenge it.So the courts are being asked to referee these fights.So for both parties, it’s really important who they get on the courts because that's who’s going to ultimately decide these things.So all three branches have really been infected by the partisanship here.
And that's something McConnell knows.If you're losing demographically, like the Democrats are winning demographically, theoretically—
This is how you do it.And you've got people who are going to be on these courts for 30, 40, 50 years now.So way down the road, decisions on federal policy are still going to be made by Trump, McGahn, McConnell justices and judges who may at that point be very out of step with the demographics and ideology of the country.I think that's a big danger.
Allegations by Christine Blasey Ford
When the leak happens, Carl, and the FBI has it, what was that about?Is this Anita Hill all over again?Is this something else?What was going on?Why did it happen?
Well, I think that Dianne—
Because let me just say one other thing.Because we've heard all these Democrats yelling and screaming that, as you’ve said so well, they know they can't stop it with procedural things.They know they can't vote him out.They know they can't yell.They're not going to catch him in a mistake or a lie in interrogatories.None of that is going to happen.So suddenly, this happens.
…I will say that Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and her staff were very conflicted about how to handle the letter from Christine Blasey Ford and sat on it.And as the hearings were winding down, obviously there was someone, somewhere, who wanted this information known and kind of became kind of the classic Washington gradual leak of something: a little bit here, a little bit there.But it did get out and forced the hand of Dianne Feinstein to basically admit that there was some other evidence that hadn’t been talked about.So it kind of gradually came out through a series of stories.
And then still, though—and I wrote a piece saying this at the time—even after the letter came out, people thought Kavanaugh was going to be fine if the woman involved refused to become public.So on that Sunday afternoon, The Washington Post published an interview with her accusing Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her when they were in high school up in Bethesda somewhere, and that changed everything.And of course, it all unfolded.There are Democrats now on the committee who think that this was mishandled, and it would have been better to have it as part of the regular hearing; that this should have been treated just up front and do it and kind of avert some of the spectacle for both sides and the damage that was done to both sides.So I think there is a little regret about that to this day.
What did Mitch McConnell think when this happened?He's got the clock ticking.
…He has seen accusations like this come out against judicial nominees, that this is the way people involved in these fights will act.They're going to roll out every possible thing they could.So Mitch McConnell is looking at this going: “This is just what Democrats do.They're going to trash this nominee.And you wait: If we give them any time and we give them more hearings, there's just going to be more and more that comes out,” which is actually what happened.Some of those things were discredited.
Now, Republicans think that Democrats damaged themselves because, in pushing forward other allegations, that if they would have stuck maybe with the main account of Christine Blasey Ford, that they probably could have derailed Kavanaugh, but things got so out of hand and there were some obviously unfounded accusations that were made and it sort of muddied the waters, I think.
To think about the audience of one—that is, the president of the United States, not sophisticated about these matters, no real understanding, I'm sure, of the history of Hill/Thomas or Haynsworth and Carswell, anything like that, what do you know about what his reaction was?
I think the big moment for Trump was Kavanaugh’s interview on Fox.So Kavanaugh’s under a lot of pressure.There's a tendency not to let the nominees speak before these hearings.The Democrats thought about Merrick Garland: Should he do interviews on TV to try to build sympathy?But the main hearing had already happened.Kavanaugh’s under pressure.He goes on Fox and delivers a fairly weak performance.They wanted him to come out fighting.“I want to clear my name.I've been libeled.”Instead, he comes out and says something to the effect of, “I just want a fair hearing.”
So at the White House, they're like: “God, this isn't good enough.He's doing a terrible job defending himself.”That interview’s seen as a disaster.So Trump now is nervous, and so they tell Kavanaugh going into the hearing, when he’s finally going to testify, said, “You need to be forceful.”So of course he goes out; he's on fire and extremely, in some moments, belligerent to the committee, I think you could say.
But they also—the Republicans at that point, they liked that.They thought that was a good showing.She testifies in the morning.Republicans are worried.She's a credible person.The Republicans did not do a good job of undermining her credibility.They're worried.Kavanaugh goes in; they go, “Oh, OK, we're fine.”
When she talks, there's not a pin dropping in offices, in newsrooms, in homes everywhere in America and I would assume at the White House.Do we know what Trump’s response was to her testimony?
I think that they were worried.They were thinking, "Wow, do we have to maybe make a move here?"I don't think McGahn was.McGahn, the entire time, he’s just counting votes.He’s knowing where his votes are, and he’s pretty confident then that the votes are still there.
Even Collins?
Yeah, I think so.They were in constant, constant communication with her.And, you know, she is trying to get to yes.That's the way we would refer to it: She's trying to get to yes.So then you have the other incident where they get a week’s delay at the Judiciary Committee hearing, and that's to satisfy Susan Collins and Jeff Flake that they can at least say the FBI went and questioned these people.I think at that hearing, the main question was why hasn’t the FBI gone and talked to Mark Judge and some of the other people involved?Get their testimony under oath and see what they say.
And I had said at the time if there's no corroboration of Ford, then he’s going to be confirmed.And he was.
…The way the story goes, Trump calls McGahn, and McGahn sloughs the call and is literally firing up his guy, basically for what it looks like, saying, “You’ve got an audience of one, and that guy—”
“He needs to see you perform here.”And so he went in hot, as they say, and got hotter.I think that he showed Trump that he was willing to fight for this.And, you know, Trump stuck by him.I talked to—we all had different reactions to that, because for a Senate Judiciary Supreme Court confirmation hearing, that was a fairly bizarre performance where he says to Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), “Have you ever blacked out?”And I was in the Capitol then, and a House member I've got a lot of respect for walks through.I just wanted to get his sense, and I said, “What do you think?”He goes: “Home run.How could you not vote for him now?”So that was the first inkling that I got that Kavanaugh had probably saved himself right then.
The way it’s reported, Mitch McConnell is talking to the president saying, “It’s only halftime.”What does he mean?
Right.Because Kavanaugh’s getting the last word.But I do think the turning point in that hearing was Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). The prosecutor is doing this sort of oddball procedural questioning that wasn't working at all.She was trying to conduct a courtroom interrogation where you build up, build up, build up, and she wasn’t—they were cutting her off after five minutes, so it didn't work.So they get to Lindsey Graham.He’s going to speak for himself.
So tell us this story.
The whole thing was terrible.It was just awkward, and the Democrats were doing their own questioning.She's sitting at that little table.It just wasn’t a good scene.But they get to Lindsey Graham, and he delivers a rant about this process and really goes off.And he says, “To my Republican colleagues, if you vote for this, you're participating in a sham and a defamation of character.”And I think that resounded with them—not the people in the room necessarily, because they're already going to vote for Kavanaugh, except for maybe Jeff Flake, but I think to his other members who are maybe sitting out there watching this going, “Hmm, I don't know about this.”But Lindsey Graham delivered a wakeup call there to them, and I think it worked.I do.
Jeff Flake and the FBI Investigation
When Flake is in the elevator and—
That's before the next event.
Right.This is the next morning.
So he announces that he’s going to support Kavanaugh and is accosted—I don’t want to use the word “accosted”—he’s challenged by two sexual assault victims who grab him in an elevator and berate him, basically, and say, “How can you do this?”And they got him thinking about it.You can see his face in that clip.He’s staring aside, and he’s troubled by this.Jeff Flake, he's a man of conscience in his own way.I know he hasn’t always delivered what people think, but he does think about this stuff.He hasn’t done what people think he should do in terms of opposing Trump.
So he goes into that meeting, sits there, listens to the Democrats.Chris Coons (D-Del.), close friend of his and somebody he’s worked with across the aisle, who’s a divinity school graduate, also someone who thinks a lot about faith in the Senate, who says, “Can't we just have a week to have the FBI go look and get some testimony?” and Flake sits there and ponders that and works out a deal with Coons that he’s going to vote Kavanaugh out of the committee, but won't vote for him on the floor unless they get this extra FBI thing, so delays everything a week.
But the FBI went and questioned people.There was nothing—they didn't turn up anything new.And at the time I said that Flake had kind of done Kavanaugh and the Republicans a favor, even though they didn't want a delay, in that he gave them Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, other people that might be nervous the chance to say, “The FBI went and did what we asked them to do; there's no corroboration; we can now vote for Brett Kavanaugh.”
It’s political cover.
That's one way of putting it.
We talked to somebody from the White House who said Flake hates Trump and would have happily done this just to drive Trump crazy for an extra week.
Yeah, I think that he was sincere about it.I do think he was troubled by this.He’s a religious guy.I just think he also thought it was bad for the Senate.It looked bad for the Senate that they just had this big, emotional hearing, and now they're just going to jam this guy through?He didn't think that looked good without a—and the other Republicans on that committee, if you watch that hearing, they were very willing to go jam him through that day.Flake didn’t think it was good for the institution either.And all he wanted was a little bit more from the FBI.They were never going to get this full-throated investigation.That just wasn't going to happen.
McConnell’s probably sitting in his office watching all this.The clock is ticking and—
So they all come in there after the hearing, and after this and McConnell says: “You're just giving the Democrats more time.Trust me.And now you're putting Kavanaugh and his family through another week of this.”But they didn't relent, and McConnell had no choice.Collins and Flake and Murkowski, if they weren't going to vote for Kavanaugh, there was no confirmation, so he had to appease them before he could move forward, and they knew that.
In all of the moments like this that he must have confronted in his life, is this a moment of maximum peril for Mitch McConnell and his dream of judges on the court?
You know, I think he got behind Kavanaugh, but there were other people that they could have put on there if they had to.There was some other good candidates.They wanted Kavanaugh.McGahn certainly wanted Kavanaugh.But they would have been able to do it.Their worry was the election, because that is true, because if they don’t get Kavanaugh, then they can't do it before the election.If there's a Democratic win in the election, then that complicates everything.Who knows what would happen after that?Even though they might try in a lame duck [year] to do it, you never know what people are going to happen—but they didn’t lose the election.They actually gained a couple of seats.
But you could imagine him crossing his fingers and holding his breath and saying, “Oh, my God, let's get—”
“Let’s get this done.”Although he’s so methodical in some ways.You know, he’s like: “OK, we can do this in a week.We're not going to give them more than a week, and we're just going to go ahead and do it.”I think he still—because of the rules changes, the opposition is so limited in what they can do.He knew he could probably pull it off as long as Susan Collins stayed with it.He needed Susan Collins.When Susan Collins, on the day that she told them she was going to vote for Kavanaugh, they were in the Senate dining room, and Chuck Grassley actually cried.So it was emotional for everybody.
I've seen one piece of footage that sort of spoke volumes to me about who McConnell is.He’s at DCA, and he’s getting off the plane, and he’s walking down the thing.These women are just on him in a way that the women were on Flake in the elevator.And you talked about a guy who is in a zone.
Disciplined, yeah.I actually use that as a lead of my story about what McConnell is doing there, that scene.And I've been there.Yeah, he’s a disciplined guy.
So tell me the story.What was he doing?
Well, so he gets off the plane, and they all knew people were coming back in.So this group is sort of like—they want to do to Mitch McConnell what they’ve done to Jeff Flake and get him thinking and maybe reconsidering this.And they approach him in the airport, and he comes through at National, comes out of security, and they start the same thing.And McConnell just stares straight ahead and moves through there, and he pays not the slightest attention.Now, he is not Jeff Flake.There was a Times reporter standing at the end there when McConnell’s walking out, and he reaches over and shakes his hand, acknowledges him but just keeps going.
Mitch McConnell has steely discipline when it comes to dealing with the press.One of the funny things is years ago, he told me when he first arrived in Washington and he would come out and the reporters would, you know, come out of their private luncheons and reporters were chasing all the other senators, and he said, “I always just wanted to be that guy that the reporters were chasing for information.”Now he is that guy, but he gives no information.He really said that.
That’s an absolute symbol of who he was in those last days through the Kavanaugh moment, I suppose.
Yeah, he’s focused on the goal line, and he’s going to get there even if you have to run over a couple of defenders and leave some marks on them.
Kavanaugh, Politics, and the Court
…The big criticism of everything, of course, is that now because it was so politicized, the court itself is politicized in a way that maybe it never was before, people run and they're assessed on the basis of their character and their qualifications, not their ideology, not their politics.But now, over a series of moments starting with Bork, we find ourselves really with Kavanaugh as the starkest example of somebody who brings their politics to the court.
Yeah.I mean, Kavanaugh was a pure political operative for a long time in Washington.I think what you see with the court now is that there was always some crossover.There was always a conservative appointed by a Democratic president or a more centrist appointed by a Republican president.I think now what you see is that people in the big opinions, they're going to line up exactly by D or R, who they were appointed by, and that's a dangerous issue for the court.There's a famous line about the Supreme Court: We have no army to enforce our opinions.It relies on public trust and public confidence.If you start to dilute that, what happens in the future?What's the obligation to even listen to the Supreme Court if the majority of the public thinks they're so tainted and political that it’s not a fair hearing?I think the court is in a hazardous time.I think you'll see Roberts try and maneuver in there to make it look like the court is not so partisan.It’s going to be hard when these big decisions come, but Gorsuch has said we all meet in the same room; we don’t have those letters on our robes.But I think people know what those letters are.
Is this story at least as much about the Senate and the way the Senate operates as it is about the court and who’s on the court?
Yeah, I think it is.I think this is a big Senate story, because the idea of the Senate was on a nomination that a president would seek advice and consent because he knows he needs to get a supermajority in some ways.No matter who’s in charge, they're probably not going to have 60 votes, although Obama did briefly, so you need to find a person who’s acceptable to at least 60 senators.Well, that's gone now.It’s just acceptable to one side or the other.And I think that's a big, big breakdown in the Senate, and in going forward, this is just going to get more partisan.I think there's people who would love to see it get less partisan.
But my experience in this is that every time power flips, the next side escalates the fight slightly.So the Democrats will probably come in, and they're going to be back in power, and there will be a Democratic president at some point.They're going to say: “Wow, we really got railroaded during the Trump administration.We need to really step up our efforts to get our judges on here, no matter what the Republicans say.”
One thing we didn't touch on, either, was the blue slip.I don't know how much you guys are going to go into that, but the arcane Senate process that allowed individual home-state senators to block judges.Well, Chuck Grassley has very much weakened that.So that was sort of the last thing between pure partisanship on judges and some opportunity for the minority to step in, and now that's gone.So it’s pretty much down to straight partisan politics.
What did we miss?
I’ve got a few.But on this, since we're talking about this—
The blue slip?I can talk for days about it.
The partisanship.Kavanaugh’s response in that afternoon hearing, when he really invokes the sort of very partisan, the Clintons—
That this is revenge for the Clintons?
This is revenge for the Clintons and people upset about Trump’s election, and he sort of hits a very partisan-sounding theme in that response.What is going on there?
That speech floored people who have been around these nominations.And the Clinton thing came out of nowhere.I don't think anyone on that committee, on either side, had really been thinking about revenge for the Clintons because that's not what this was about, to them.There was a lot of revenge involved, but it wasn't Clintons.To me, and to the Democrats—Republicans wouldn't admit that—to me that exposed Kavanaugh’s partisan mindset.This is how he approaches things.You know, this is power politics and revenge, and you're getting even with me for things I did 20 years ago.So you can see it’s there in his brain that this is the way he thinks that the confirmation goes.
The big question is, and the next day the American Bar Association started rethinking its evaluation of him, and many people thought, of all the things that have gone on in this hearing, that was the moment that showed he doesn't have the temperament to be on the Supreme Court.Of all the things, that was it.And that he says he can separate himself from this, but boy, that's hard to do.It's hard to do.
Mitch McConnell’s Refusal to Consider Merrick Garland
As we were looking at how things were ratcheting up and the polarization, how when we look back at McConnell’s decisions to not even hold hearings for any Obama nominee, how important was that decision in this ratcheting-up?
It’s everything.Everything that's happened, including Donald Trump’s election, has come out of that decision that Mitch McConnell made that night on his own.Everything.That opens the door to Trump winning.That opens the door to Gorsuch being on there.That opens the door to Kavanaugh.And the Democrats are seething about that.All you have to do is listen, in both the Gorsuch and the Kavanaugh hearings, how many times the Democrats bring up Merrick Garland.Republicans are still mad about Bork, which happened in ’87.Well, Democrats are really mad about Garland; that happened in 2016.Very recent history.It is a really still open wound, and they are unhappy about it.And they're really unhappy that they can't do much about it.So it’s a big part of this.
But the entire cascading effect was set in motion by McConnell’s decision that he had no idea it was going to work out this way, by the way.
Spectacular.
President Trump’s Selection of Brett Kavanaugh
…Kavanaugh has some views that he’s expressed about, post-Ken Starr, about executive power, subpoenas, investigations of the president.When Trump’s making a decision, he’s under investigation from [Robert] Mueller.Do you have any insight into whether Kavanaugh’s views influenced him?
You know, I think that they obviously looked at that.I always thought it was interesting that a guy who did such a thorough investigation of a president and then came out and said, “Maybe that wasn't such a good idea,” I think that was a factor.But it’s more to McGahn and the Federalist Society, it’s more about regulation and what they call deconstruction of the administrative state.Kavanaugh is an anti-regulatory person.Gorsuch is an anti-regulatory person.And I think that's what they were looking at in these two nominations.
More than even the social, cultural—?
I do actually believe that, yeah.I think that they asked—I know for a fact they asked—Gorsuch says gay marriage, that's settled law.They're looking more at other things.And people don’t understand that, but in Roe v. Wade, that's going to be tough to overturn, but there are a lot of other ways you can work against the federal state.
McConnell’s worried about all the documents that Kavanaugh has.What is the strategy that he has in that the Senate Republicans have for getting him through despite all of that?
Well, it was a kind of a crazy, jerry-rigged system where a guy who used to work with Kavanaugh—his name was Bill Burck—and for [George W.] Bush, became responsible for vetting the documents that the Senate could look at.Super-irritating to Senate Democrats that there was this sort of ad hoc process of making public these documents, or, more truthfully, not making public these documents and that this was being determined by a Republican rather than the National Archives, which had done this in the past.
And if you watch the hearing, Dick Durbin really made some point of this quite a few times, that the Archives isn't involved.Well, the reason the Archives isn't involved is because it was going to take too long.So Mitch McConnell—so they came up with this other system.It was really a violation of Senate precedent and the way they’ve done this in the past.
Then plus, they come up with this idea of “committee confidential,” documents that the members could look at but that they couldn’t discuss or make public themselves.[That] became another big flashpoint in the hearings as Democrats started to make some of these public on their own, “committee confidential,” something in the past that had been very defined.It was not something that was used as heavily as it was there.Republicans used their muscle every time they had a chance to make sure this was going to happen for Brett Kavanaugh.
The Optics of the Kavanaugh Hearings
Last question for me is just to go back to that moment.We talked a little bit about where McConnell comes out and he says, “Well, we've hired a female assistant.”This is before the hearing happens and after the accusations.Can you help us at that moment—this is post the Anita Hill, the criticism that the committee got then—of just how difficult a position was McConnell in, were the Republicans in?
The Republicans, they knew that the idea of they're white men, many of them pretty old, sitting there questioning this younger woman about sexual assault, it just wasn’t going to look good.They remember Clarence Thomas hearings, the "Saturday Night Live" takeoff on the Clarence Thomas hearings, which was also bad for Republicans and Democrats.But they didn't want to sit there and have Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley question this woman about sexual assault, so they came up with this other novel approach of having another prosecutor come in and do it.
It still looked weird and didn't work.And now, anticipating this problem in the future, I think they’ve added two women Republican members to the Judiciary Committee.
Latest Interviews
Latest Interviews
Explore
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, with major support from Ford Foundation. Additional funding is provided the Abrams Foundation, Park Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, and the FRONTLINE Trust, 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.
