Pablo Torre and Rachel Maddow look back at the midterm elections, starting with Amy Acton's win over Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio and the reported mansion deal that drew mockery online. They discuss how trans-athlete politics played in campaigns, how Democrats might keep their new coalition together, and how billionaire spending fared in Texas.
The conversation then turns to Maddow's new book about the Justice Department, examining how the department has changed under Trump and why she argues it matters for accountability. Listeners will hear her analysis of corruption, affordability and the rule of law, presented as her views rather than settled facts.
In this episode Pablo Torre, Rachel Maddow
This Rachel Maddow conversation on the midterms and the Justice Department was made with the same technology behind HappyScribe's AI note taker for Teams.
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Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, brought to you by Apple Card. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.
Wow.
Right after this. I'm really excited to talk to you about all this stuff.
Of all the people who I'm going to talk to about the election and the book and everything, you are the person that everybody in my life is very, very nervous and excited about. You're the, um, you're the big star in the Rachel Maddow verse.
Oh, sure. Well, we do have a couple of surprises for you, Rachel, I hope.
What?
You didn't foresee me wanting to begin this conversation by talking about Vivek Ramaswamy. Um, I do want to start there for a second, though. And thank you again for being here.
Of course.
Um, what a delight for me. To recap what you got the call in a very, very, I would say, like, almost NFL red zone-adjacent manner on Tuesday.
We have a big election alert for you. This is a governor's race very closely watched for all sorts of reasons. In the Ohio governor's race, the Associated Press.
Wow.
Has called it. Democrat Amy Acton has defeated Republican Vivek Ramaswamy to become the next governor of Ohio.
You got the call, Vivek Ramaswamy losing to Amy Acton by 52.31% to 44.38%. And I don't know if there was more bipartisan delight.
Yeah.
Around any single outcome than that one. And I wonder if it felt that way to you.
I think that Amy Acton is a very good candidate for governor. I think that she is, uh, she communicates in a way that is, like, moves people, and it's also really real and authentic, and she conveys real information. I thought, like, her, you know, her acceptance speech, you probably saw it.
Ohio has chosen unity and decency over division and hate.
She's talking about, you know, a win for decency and looking out for each other and just a, just a fundamentally decent person. It's a big deal for Democrats to win Ohio, which they thought was right. All of that is true. All of that absolutely pales against how people felt about seeing Vivek Ramaswamy lose this race in this way and to be punished by the voters of Ohio so resoundingly for having been so morally repulsive.
He was never even allowed to compete. He, he didn't get anywhere near her. And again, red state Ohio, right? What used to be red state Ohio. And he's been wor-he's been running for governor since the, since he ran for president.
Look, we've, we've investigated Vivek on this show. People know the lore. You know, I was his classmate in college, which means that I have a particular psychosis, I guess, around this and a particular delight around this. Um, the U.S. Tennis Association has no records of him being a nationally ranked junior tennis player. Um, but, but my favorite detail about Vivek is one that I haven't even mentioned yet, which is, I don't know if you know this. So last November, this is according to, uh, The Rooster, the blog which broke the story of the ad against Amy Acton and, and using her, her mom by Vivek.
November 2025, The Rooster reported that Vivek Ramaswamy agreed in principle to buy a $15 million mansion less than 1,000 feet away from the official Ohio governor's residence. So if you're wondering, Rachel, what does his property look like?
He wanted to live on the on-ramp.
Yes.
He wanted to perhaps just be able to occupy the nicer building that he could also have access to while becoming the governor a year later.
And this property has a maze, a Japanese garden, a dozen lawn sculptures, 16th-century French urns, a tennis court, naturally, according to the Columbus dispatch. Surely this $15 million agreement in principle will not become a thing a podcaster I went to school with laughs about on November 6th. That's what we're dealing with.
Did you say a maze?
Perhaps the, the coup de grâce on, on the reporting is that his realtor reportedly is Tina Husted.
Husted's wife. Senator Husted's wife.
Wife of John Husted, who I guess is now we've found the one person who can consensually enjoy his ass. There's a lot of ass appreciation in the story of the Ohio gubernatorial collapse.
I actually think the ass talk, forgive me, uh, the ass talk about John Husted.
You said it.
I think it kind of helped him. Like, I think that, yes, Sherrod Brown beat him by, I think, five points, but I think probably Sherrod Brown would have beat him by more points had the Republican Party wholesale not turned its eyes to the shape of his rump.
It occurred to me that, like, last election, we almost anthropologically go out as I'm speaking about people in the press. Um, we go out and, and talk to, uh, you know, the Rust Belt.
Oh, God. Yeah.
And now I feel like the anthropologists must come to you. They're studying Rachel Maddow. Please explain your people.
Let's go find a childless potbellied lesbian. In Western it has to be Western Massachusetts.
Correct.
Yes. The, the, the subject may be fishing at the time that we're looking for this person.
Yeah. This is a David Attenborough documentary now.
Check at the, um, EV charging stations at the local Whole Foods.
So, so actually, I do want to clarify, um, and one of the things I, I do need to bring up to you is that you were an athlete.
Yeah. In a galaxy far, far away, Pablo. I mean, it's yeah. Look at me. Come on.
Well, I, I am looking at you, and I'm also looking at her.
Wow.
Could you please describe for those not watching on YouTube who you are looking at?
Can I give you alt text?
Yes. Woke three demands alt text.
Let's just start with the fact that there is a pink backdrop and there are pearls and pearl earrings. Um, there is still a black shirt, which is in keeping with where we are today. But, uh, yeah, that's my high school graduation photo, and I had long blond hair.
What sports did you play?
My main sport was volleyball, but I was volleyball, basketball, and swimming. And, um, I started off actually as a little kid playing, playing soccer too, but I had to decide between basketball and soccer and went with basketball. My claim to fame in basketball is that I believe, I believe and memory's fuzzy when you're as old as I am, but I believe I fouled out of every single game I ever played.
Were you a physical or a clumsy player?
Yes. Exactly. Exactly. You nailed it. The, the most important thing about me, both in soccer and in basketball, is that I'm very slow. And so I'm big, I'm tall, and I have big limbs, and I look like I could be, like, bestride the pitch or bestride the court, but then I start moving, and it's like, what's wrong with that child? Um, and so I would try to make up for that just with my elbows. Um, and so lots of, lots of getting thrown, thrown out of games. I was pretty good at volleyball in part because you don't, um, unless you're really, really good at volleyball, you don't have to move large distances.
It's more of a small, small distance quick response kind of thing. And I was very tall, and so I went, I was like middle blocker or, or, uh, right side hitter. Um, and I, you know, part of, part of what was being good in high school-level volleyball was just being in the way of other people trying to do things. And it turns out that's my skill.
The mental image, again, for those just listening, like, you looked like the prom queen.
I know. Why are we talking about high school? It makes still I'm like, I can feel the hives rising in me.
I was going to say you had palpable discomfort.
I dislike myself in high school so much. I only, like, we could talk about middle school too if you want to go real self-loathing. Um, but yeah, I was, I did, I was a three-sport varsity athlete.
How much did your athletic career help you when you were calling? How many hours of live television on Tuesday?
The athletic career helped not a bit. I mean, one of the things, um, that has more defined, like, my physical being as an adult is that I have the spine of a 115-year-old. Like, I, I can't even, like, during the course of this interview, I will get shorter just sitting in this chair. I'm a complete physical wreck. But there's also a, there's definitely a, um, an adrenaline thing that kicks in for these nights, for these long nights covering election results. I mean, like, the first hour, you're really thinking very carefully about who you're going to book and what the structure is and where the breaks come and what the plot is and what we, what we have to tease ahead.
And then after you get through the first hour, you're essentially just running. You're just running the whole time. It's like the dinner rush if you wait tables. You know, you just don't think. You just, whatever strategy you had is gone. You just go.
At what point in the course of you hosting this thing, uh, did you start noticing, like, the memes on the internet?
I actually don't even think I've seen them yet. I don't think I've seen them to this day. Do you have some? You have, you have a folder full of memes.
I was passing a folder full of memes.
Alt text.
To Rachel. These are some of the tweets that are, I think, representative perhaps what you could not see from the desk that I was seeing at home.
We're putting clavicular on estrogen. Yeah. Uh, Mark Zuckerberg got to change his whole look again. Very good. We are going to deep fry RFK Jr. in beef tallow at a tailgate for the Washington vaccines. And then for the last one from you. Tonight, the couch you. Yes. God bless you. My favorite one that I have seen was, um, effective, I'm going to paraphrase it, but was like, the Pope votes in one election and look what happens.
That was, like, my Catholic lib meme of the day.
One of the sort of, like, issues that I also just was tracking, have been tracking for years on this show and elsewhere is one that ended up not, um, it turns out, winning the election for a lot of these right-leaning sports figures who ran for office, like former NFL kicker Jay Feely.
Mm-hmm.
Um, and that's the trans athlete.
Yeah.
And I'm wondering how that issue feels to you as it was, as many have said, an 80-20 winner for the Republican Party and simultaneously the thing that did not work as Jay Feely lost to, by the way, the Democrat who was his team doctor on the New York Jets.
I did not know that.
In one of the just more small-town, yeah, election cycles, it turns out.
The trans athletes thing, I mean, there's a lot of actual very serious elements of it. And number one is just seeing this national, insistent, now years-long political project to scapegoat and vilify and try to direct violence and hate towards a tiny disfavored minority, which is trans people. Like, that is something that has profound, profound impact on some of our fellow Americans.
Yes.
Um, and it is repulsive and it is politically as transparent as any other exercise like this has been in any other, from any other authoritarian movement in politics in any country in the last century and a half. Absolutely true. And politically, it is a fantasy to invent a fake problem, to invent something that has literally no contact with the real lives of 99.99999% of Americans and say, this is the problem that the American government must be reorganized to prioritize and to solve, to, to never solve for you so we can continue to run on it forever, um, is pitiful, a sign of profound political weakness and something that I think has now been exposed as the, um, fantasist BS cop-out that it is.
And so, yeah, I think the hard thing and the responsible thing is to keep both of those things in mind, the profound unseriousness of this as a political tactic and the profound, dangerous, life-threatening harm this is causing to real Americans who are trans Americans.
It is startling to see we did a poll with YouGov and the bulwark that we commissioned trying to figure out what does a bipartisan sample of Americans think about this stuff. And this is ahead of the election, obviously, but a combined 15% of Americans thought that more than 5% of NCAA athletes identify as trans.
Oh, my God.
And we called the NCAA and we said, hey, how many trans athletes are competing in women's sports or at all? And the NCAA told us there are effectively zero. They can't find them.
Wow.
It was less than 10. That was what Charlie Baker, the president of the NCAA, said a couple years ago. Now it's zero. I do think the human cost of this is what is lost as I try at every turn to, like, make this also something that we can laugh at.
Mm-hmm.
And so that tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny population of people who just want to, like, be bad at sports like everyone else, like Rachel Maddow arguably apparently was.
Yes.
Um, the fact that they become the, the cudgel that gives a party credibility so that they can do everything else that's truly unpopular.
Yes.
It's so redeeming that America didn't fall for it this time.
Although the, when, when there were trans-related ballot measures on the ballot in multiple states this week in this, in this incredible blue wave election, a lot of them still passed. And not everywhere, but a lot of them did. And I'm, I'm glad that you're talking about this the way you are because it, I, again, you got to think both, both of these things at the same time. This is the equivalent, I mean, if the Republican Party were out there saying, you know, the real problem is that we're all getting bludgeoned because it rains microwaves every day.
Like, microwave ovens are falling from the sky and crushing us all and putting holes in our roofs. And that's what we need. And it's just a thing that's not happening that they've invented. You would wonder, like, A, why do they think they can get away with saying this crazy thing that's not happening? But B, why do they want to be in office? They're talking about a problem that isn't a real thing. So the real thing that want, that, that they want to work on, that they want to effectuate change about when they get an option, when they get an office has to be something different. That's the one thing that we'd wonder. But in, in this case, because it is about real human beings, I mean, the thing that we've learned over generations in multiple countries, in multiple eras about scapegoating disfavored minorities is not only to pay attention to what it does to their lives, but also what it does to the rest of us.
If you are taught to believe that some disfavored minority is the cause of everything that's wrong in your culture, everything that is not attainable within your economy, every right that you believe is yours that you can't grasp, then not only is that disfavored minority being targeted and, and subjected to violence and subjected to all the things you were just talking about, but we're taught to look at each other and to try to suss that out, to try to find that quality in our fellow citizens so that we can misdirect toward them all of our grievance.
And trying to get us to see some of our fellow citizens as subhuman is trying to get us to erase our own moral core so that we can do horrible things.
The other, of course, like tack that got pressure tested was what if we accuse everybody on the other side who is brown with a foreign name of being a jihadist?
Yeah.
Of course, we're here in New York City. What Zoran Mamdani has done here as, as a mayor, leave it to the side, even though that's metrically, just by the evidence, a rousing success, safety and otherwise. The rhetorical framework of how he has talked about politics as that figure who gets, has been, you know.
Demonized.
Demonized, truly, almost literally, just like he's a demon. I don't know if it was this clear to you, but it seemed to me that was, there was a playbook there for a lot of national politicians that seemed to work. His approach to how to respond to this stuff. And Abdullah Al-Sayyed, not, they're not the same person. Anyone who's watched them long enough knows they have very different sort of, uh, characters in some meaningful ways. But it, it just seemed like the attempt to make this the Islamophobic election.
Yeah.
Didn't quite work.
When people use ham-handed tactics against you, one option is to defend against them earnestly. And the other one is to point and laugh at those ham-handed tactics and to refuse to play their game, refuse to let them frame either your character or the discussion around you. And that's what I think Mamdani did with such elegance, um, in, in his, his campaign, um, culminating in his, you know, triumphant ascendance to be Donald Trump's most favorite son.
Which is just continually hilarious to me.
It's just amazing. I mean, Trump gets like hearts in his eyes when he sees him.
It's John Husted's ass and Zoran Mamdani's smile.
You are building Donald Trump's dream date. And then there's the dud, JD. But then, but the way that, like, look at Al-Sayyed's victory speech.
JD, Habibi, there is this delicious irony in the fact that you're constitutionally obligated to swear me in in January.
When he called JD Vance Habibi, I just, I lost it. I mean, the refusal to, um, exceed to their framing is a, a political flex that, again, if done elegantly and if done with good cheer and confidence is, I think, um, I just think it's politically bulletproof. I think it's, I think it's, it's the way.
JD Vance in his postmortem, again, not to make Twitter a central document here, but he has the whole thing about how he has consulted all these pollsters and the smartest people he knows on the right are saying that there are four bullet points. One, end the war. Two, focus on cost of living slash inflation. Three, put America first. Four, change our relationship to Israel. When you read that post, this is after, by the way, he tried to take credit for the lower crime here in New York, by the way. When you read his postmortem, uh, what did, what did you think as actually a political analysis?
It sounds like JD Vance might have been listening to Democratic politicians who are running for high office this year and winning. I mean, do the list again.
Yeah. End the war.
End the war.
Focus on cost of living slash inflation.
Affordability.
Put America first.
America first, whatever that means.
Change our relationship to Israel.
Yeah.
To, to translate it to like what, what have, what have the Democrats been saying that he is now trying to like ape, um, what if you actually prioritize the interest of Americans?
Mm-hmm. I mean, contrast that with, um, Donald Trump's diagnosis of what went wrong for the Republican Party. And even setting aside the, like, had I been on the ballot and everything, his first political diagnostic after the election results were in was that Greg Abbott would have won in Texas had he not been such a rhino, meaning had he not been such a Republican in name only, meaning if only Greg Abbott had seemed more Republican, then the Democrats definitely would not have won Texas.
My favorite piece of analysis thus far, uh, was actually in a journalistic piece from CBS News under, under Barry Weiss. I literally laughed out loud when, um, I read this yesterday. And they're just like reporting what the White House is telling them about the election results. And I quote, "Some White House aides have predicted that some of the blame for Republican midterm losses will be trained on Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Kane, who both played big roles in guidance on the Iran war."
Two guys that everybody definitely knows. You know, Brad.
Brad Cooper and Dan Kane. That's who did it. That's who did everything else actually is fine. Pete, Pete, can you fire some? I mean, the idea that that's the problem, um, or that they could, or that they could literally try to blame the active duty U.S. military as the reason Gina Inohosa beat Greg Abbott. I mean, forgive me for agreeing with Ron DeSantis, but I think the approaching an extinction level event.
Well.
Um, feels, feels right when you look at that kind of analysis.
But speaking of meatball, Ron, for a second.
Hmm.
There, this was like a bit of a, I mean, to borrow the terminology of baseball, a bit of a, like a meatball of a pitch. It's like, who, and, and Thomas Massey was ahead of this and got also defenestrated.
Yeah.
Um, but Ron DeSantis, I give him extraordinarily little credit, but nonetheless, he can plausibly be the guy saying, "Yeah, of course."
Yeah.
When you're looking ahead, "Yeah, of course," you know, them not realizing that he would have the ability to say that, I don't know, this sets that movement back to what?
I mean, DeSantis did lose a bunch of, uh, Republican members of Congress. And the, um, redistricting effort in Florida was as much of a splat there as it was for anybody else. And Ron DeSantis still has, I mean, I don't know if he's going to run for president or if he's going to try to, like, assume the mantle in the Republican Party, but he still has what I think of as the Jared Kushner problem.
Hmm.
Which is that on, on paper, when you hear about Ron DeSantis or when you see things written down that Ron DeSantis has done, you sort of get this sense in your mind of, of who he might be as a political figure. Um, same thing with Jared Kushner in his first term. I continue to think this is one of the most crystalline moments of the first Donald Trump term, which is that Donald Trump has appointed his son-in-law to be the minister of everything. And he's in charge of the Middle East and he's in charge of COVID and he's in charge of the economy and he's, wow, he's really the power behind the throne.
Jared must be the brain of the operation. Maybe Jared is the heavyweight here. And then Jared, for the first time, walks up to do a White House press conference and nobody's ever heard him speak before. And he steps up to the microphone and everybody's like, "This is the guy. This is the brain. This is the heavyweight." And he steps up to the mic and he goes, "Hi, I'm Jared."
Together, we will unleash the creativity of the private sector to provide citizen services in a way that has never happened before.
Like, there's that same problem with Ron DeSantis. You get to him in the flesh and it's the guy eating the pudding with the fingers. And, um, you know, "Hi, I'm Ron DeSantis."
But let's just be clear, uh, about what happened last night. Uh, this is close to an extinction level event for Republicans in many parts of the country, as we have seen probably in the last hundred years.
There is a, uh, a corporeal problem with some of these guys who might otherwise reasonably step up and take the mantle of Republican politics in a way that's just never going to work.
Yeah, I do think, I mean, again, what, what has Trump had his finger on the pulse on purely superficially, I guess he has a strong sense of like who I would cast.
Until they must be cast out.
It is interesting when you assess vengeance as one possible political approach here. And, and I'm not going to sort of put everything under the category of vengeance, but I want to just frame it at extremes. One is Robert Garcia saying, "Lawyer up," you know, as the chair of the House Oversight Committee.
Yeah.
Um, and the other is the James Talarico slogan atop the victory dais, where it's, "Love thy neighbor."
Mm-hmm.
Because there is no love of God without love of neighbor.
How do you assess that alleged choice? How do you assess the tension between lawyer up and love thy neighbor?
I really don't think that they're at odds. I don't think that they're opposites. Um, I think that Donald Trump's going to be president for another couple of years. And that means the Trump administration is going to be in place for another couple of years. And when it comes to love thy neighbor, um, one of the things that Democrats are going to need to try to assure is that neighbors are not getting absolutely ripped off by a ruling family that's picking up the U.S. government by its ankles and shaking it till the change falls out.
Um, I think there has to be a strong message sent by the Democrats and the Democrats with Robert Garcia's committee and Jamie Raskin's committee and others can, can do this. There needs to be a strong message sent that you can't get away with this stuff anymore. You can't keep doing this for another two years. And to the extent that you did get away for it for two years, that's now going to end and you're going to be held accountable. And so I think it's really important, really, really important that Todd Blanch be impeached, for example.
And not because there needs to be a spectacle of Todd Blanch being put in the stocks, you know, but because of what Todd Blanch has done. Like, you can't have somebody pay a million dollars to go to a Mar-a-Lago dinner with Donald Trump and then less than three weeks later, her son gets a pardon. You can't have that. You can't have, uh, the parent company of Crypto.com giving $5 million to MAGA, Inc., and then 25 days later, the Department of Justice intervenes in a federal lawsuit on behalf of, of Crypto.com.
You can't have, um, days before the election, the Justice Department filing absolutely frivolous, totally unfounded, not even procedurally sound, harassing investigations and lawsuits, um, and legal filings against not only election officials, but, um, but candidates for election in that next office in direct contravention of Justice Department policies. You can't do those things. And so there needs to be a message, you can't get away with this to the extent that you've done it already, you're going to pay for it. And with the Democrats in charge right now, with a mandate from the American people to clean this stuff up, you are going to be barred forever from public service.
And we are going to do that by impeaching you. And it doesn't need to be a spectacle. It doesn't need to be revenge. It needs to be about making sure that we don't live in a kleptocracy anymore.
It occurs to me as you say all of that, that, yeah, that's, that's what the trans athlete stuff was trying to distract from.
Yes.
It's like World Liberty Financials over here, but what about the swimmer over, over there?
The one, the one swimmer a few years ago.
Yeah, when they, when they tied for fifth. The point, the argument here is, can you show that corruption and affordability are actually.
Yeah.
Interwoven.
Yeah.
Via this political project that we're now, yeah, by mandate, asked as a country to reckon with. And I suppose the other issue here is who becomes a, a subject of those investigations and how do you prevent that from being politicized? I mean, we're here to also talk about your book, which is excellent, your new book, Department of Faith.
Thank you.
And, and so this is a topic that I want to understand historically in a second, but just from a present-day perspective, there are more billionaires than ever and yet not that many of them such that the politics should bend towards them electorally. Where do you start when it comes to, you know, what Talarico has also said in his rhetoric, which has been very effective of like, this is top versus bottom.
Well, look at the spending in Texas. I mean, I, when you're saying like when I made the call about various, like when I made the Amy Acton call for the Ohio governor's race, when it came to making the Gina Inohosa call for governor in Texas, I kind of shouted it out in a way that makes it a totally unusable soundbite because I think I was distorting on the mic.
Gina Inohosa will be the next Democratic governor of the state of Texas. I'm saying it so loud so you can hear it over the crackling of the burning piles of hundreds of millions of dollars set alight by Elon Musk.
What's the last accounting of it? How much money approximately?
I mean, he spent a half billion dollars roughly in the election, but at least, I mean, approaching, at least approaching $200 million just for the Ken Paxton race, just for the James Talarico Ken Paxton race, in which Ken Paxton lost by 12. And so I do think we're in, we're in a little bit of an, um, a flex period in terms of the politics of money and politics. Um, seeing Republican billionaires, right-wing billionaires, you know, from, you know, Miriam Adelson to Jeff Yass to, to, to Elon Musk, to all of, you know, Andreessen, all of these guys, to see all of this spending just like in no other midterm election we've ever seen before, and to see it all just curdle, to see it go nowhere, um, is very satisfying.
But it also, it raises an interesting question as to whether that kind of takes the foot off the gas in terms of people trying to make sure that we get big money out of our politics. In normal elections, of which this was not one, having that much money on one side of any political fight will be determinative. Um, and it just so happened that the political winds were blowing so hard in one direction here, it didn't matter. But does that mean that the pressure to try to fix the money and problem, money and politics problem eases up? I, I hope not. Um, I think practically it might.
Yeah, it also just seems like a true bipartisan coalition that's available.
Mm-hmm.
That like this election was about a lot and this was kind of the subtext, as you just put it, but it hasn't really, well, perhaps now it can be, it hasn't been foregrounded as like the, "Hey, those who remain."
Mm-hmm.
Let's talk about how we can all agree that Citizens United.
Might be a really important thing to tackle if we only have a few things to tackle.
And I think that hierarchy of what do we tackle.
Yeah.
Now that we have, again, this strange new coalition, it's like, how do you, how do you maintain it? Like, 'cause the cynicism, of course, and I fall prey to this sometimes, is just that we're riding a pendulum.
Mm-hmm.
And they pushed it so far in one direction that we got it swung way back by the midterms. But there is the opportunity.
Yes.
And that's what's exciting. And that's where the whole like rhetoric, look, I love every tweet that you read.
Mm-hmm.
I do. Um, but if you're going to also now be like political strategist guy or gal, you're thinking to yourself, yeah, like we should be talking about that.
I think the biggest difference between the two political parties in the United States right now is that Democrats have ideas about using the political process for policy purposes that are designed to make people's lives better. Like Democrats have this idea that they should use the oversight function of Congress to oversee the federal government. And they should make policy that tries to make things cheaper for people and that gets people, um, to have health insurance who don't have health insurance now and to get people who have health insurance to not lose it.
And there's, there's, you know, and people who are overwhelmed by the, uh, repayment cost of their student loans should get help from the government to deal with their student loans. And, um, farmers shouldn't be punished for international trade policies they have nothing to do with that they couldn't have known about when they decided what to plant this year. Like it's very, like practical, boring policy stuff.
Classic nerd.
Yes. And Republicans are like, how can we end Alzheimer's research? I know that transgenic and transgender are two different things, but I don't like mice either way. And so therefore, the National Institutes of Health needs to be dropped from a helicopter in Chile. Like the Republican Party has a different kind of agenda. They really want to change the form of government. They want a monarchical, royalist, presidentialist form of government where the other two branches fade away.
They want judges to be browbeaten into serving as political servants to the great leader. They don't want elections to be the grounds on which we move forward with different politicians or not. You know, they, I, I, regardless of the fact that they just lost an election in every conceivable way, it remains the gospel of the Republican Party that if Democrats win an election, it must have been cheating. I mean, it's just two different projects. And now that Democrats are going to be governing not only the legislative branch, but also state governments from coast to coast, the question is, can we return to government that is about nerd shit?
Can we return to government that's about policy and not just about warfare?
What you said was something that, again, as of last week, could be dismissed as classic Rachel Maddow. But now the anthropologist is looking at you through binoculars being like, oh my God, there's more of them. They're multiplying. What if this is not quite the pendulum, but they're trying to build a different device? The physics of this don't need to be the same.
What if one of the ways the pendulum swings is people care about their country or they don't? People care about participating in the political process or they don't. I mean, to see the, um, turnout numbers and to see the early turnout numbers and to see the turnout numbers among African-American and Latino voters in particular, um, yes, everybody's looking at that in terms of what the outcome was of those votes. But to see that participation level go up is also a swing of the pendulum toward people believing that the democratic process is the means by which they can choose a different future.
And part of the authoritarian project is to make you disbelieve that. Um, and people reject it.
Which brings us to your book.
Oh.
So, Department of Faith, The Promise, The Power, and The Collapse of America's Most Consequential Institution, aka the DOJ. Um, we are the sports show that talks about the DOJ a lot. Um, turns out we investigate NBA gambling scandals, which are born out of the Eastern District of New York. We do these investigations in the Steve Ballmer and the Clippers. The.
We win Pulitzer Prizes for that.
And, and by the way, we are grappling with what's the DOJ's interest in this as they now have an interest in that also out of the Eastern District. Um, we've interviewed the teammates of Kash Patel's Rec League hockey team, the Dons. Again, a little on the nose. Nonetheless, why and how is the big picture arc of the DOJ something that you want people to understand?
I think the DOJ is a different kind of cat. I think that it is an institution that is just different than everything else in the U.S. government and different than everything else in the country. I also think that I was really wrong about what was going to happen at DOJ under Donald Trump. At the end of the first term, we had, remember Bill Barr was the attorney general at that point, and we had like the Durham investigation, which was this terrible thing. We had, um, U.S. attorneys being pushed out or resigning over White House demands to bring specific prosecutions, like this botched effort to prosecute John Kerry.
Oh, right.
And, uh, Obama's White House counsel, Gregory Craig, right? We had demands from President Trump for the prosecution of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and all this stuff. And before he ultimately bailed at the end, actually in the 2020 election, we had Attorney General Barr bring the Justice Department on board toward trying to bolster Trump's false claims about election fraud. And because of that, I and a lot of other people very confidently predicted that in the second Trump term, the Justice Department would just be a nuclear weapon, that the Justice Department would be the most important story of Trump's first term.
And that's the thing that he would supersize and turn into the, the, the instrument of his revenge. And instead, we have not seen that. The agency that they supersized is Department of Homeland Security and ICE and HSI and all of those guys. That's who's turned American streets into, you know, scenes that look like civil war. That's who's shooting people in the street and running them down and everything. And instead, with the Justice Department, it's kind of turned into this joke. I mean, the U.S. attorney in DC is the one Fox News host who had a worse reputation than Pete Hegseth.
Like the, the less impressive Fox News host than Pete Hegseth got U.S. attorney for Washington, DC. He put not one, but two different podcasters in charge of the FBI.
You're talking about Jeanine Pirro.
Yes.
Dan Bongino and Kash Patel respectively.
Yes. I mean, the Justice Department, rather than being supersized the way Homeland Security was, they lost literally thousands of headcount. They shut down the public integrity section. They shut down the National Security Division. They shut down the tax division. They just ended it. And why is that? You would think that he would want to use the Justice Department as the biggest, most powerful weapon that he could. And instead, it's a mess and a clown car and a joke and everything they do fails. And I think that's important. I think we should see the Justice Department now as dead.
And I think if you look back historically, we should recognize that what the Justice Department does more than any other institution, it sets the course of the nation. Sets the course of the nation for what's allowed politically. It sets the course of the nation economically for who's allowed to have legal standing to conduct themselves in our economy. It sets the grounds of who counts as a first-class citizen and who doesn't. The Justice Department's really, really important. And it can be used for really, really good ends, like it was when it was founded just after the Civil War.
It can also be used for terrible reasons when you want it to. But it's important right now that they've effectively killed it.
It's such a joke when I investigate these stories and part of the end game of any reporting process is the question of, well, what will the DOJ do about this? What will the feds do about this? And every answer you get as an analysis of the evidence has the giant footnote of, unless they hire the lawyer that can strike a deal with the DOJ and Donald Trump personally.
Is there somebody involved in this case who can buy a million-dollar dinner ticket to Mar-a-Lago who will then unwire the entire case?
I, I have had so many conversations with former federal prosecutors who've sat in that chair and the whole thing is moot. The whole conversation is moot if that's the end game anyway. And so I say this just because what we're saying in this whole conversation is that there is the opportunity to be a country that really does nerdily care about the rule of law.
Mm-hmm.
And the constitution, the thing that people who once ran for office on the right would carry pocket-sized versions of little constitutions. And their approach to this has been of a piece with the whole general corruption in which it's like, yeah, keystone cops.
Yeah.
And so the question of why, why did they do this? Is it because they wanted the ATM more than they wanted the weapon? What, how do you assess it?
I think what's going on here is that you need a Justice Department to effectuate the rule of law and the protections of the constitution. And when the Justice Department acts that way, it can be very, very righteous and very noble and can, it has incredible power. But I also think equally that because that's the role of the Justice Department, if you want a dictatorship, if you want a kleptocracy, if you want an authoritarian rule by fiat, steal anything you want kind of country, you need to not have a Justice Department.
It's just not handy in that kind of a government structure to have a building full of skilled lawyers. It's not.
Who are, just by the way, watching.
Yes.
Who are on email chains, who have access to computers. It's probably best if they all leave.
Exactly. With subpoena power and the whole thing. And if, yes, it is, it is great to try to turn a building full of lawyers into your personal law firm, which is the way that people shorthand what Trump has done to the Justice Department, to try to turn them into your weapons or whatever. But that's a sort of a ham-handed small tool. Like just, it's just as handy to have a masked secret police force that will go, you know, raid Ilhan Omar's home or whatever it is. If you want an inward-facing Praetorian Guard secret police paramilitary force that answers without accountability to the president, they have built that inside the Department of Homeland Security.
They did not build that at the Justice Department. They instead have essentially decided to shut down the Justice Department because if you want a rule by fiat, you can't have a government agency that runs well, that has say a public integrity section, um, and have it be operating and running on all four cylinders while you are trying to rob the country blind. You just can't have it. And so the Justice Department, I think, was, um, in a way that we don't appreciate, fundamentally broken.
Like I think that, I think it was stabbed in the heart in the first Trump term by, by Bill Barr. And the book sort of makes that case. Um, and I think that it's effectively dead now. And I think we need to appreciate how important it is to the survival of the constitutional republic. And we need to rebuild, refound the Justice Department in a way that appreciates how important it is and that never allows it to be either killed off or corrupted again.
You mentioned Bill Barr a couple of times and there's a section of your book which I greatly enjoyed because it also has to do with sports. There is, I have it here.
Oh, good.
Um, if you could just tell us the story of William Barr through the lens of his personal athletic career as a young person.
Back in his intramural football days at Columbia, an opponent had thrown sand in Bill Barr's face at the end of a play, momentarily blinding him and causing, quote, "searing pain," according to Bill Barr's own memoir. The behavior was unsportsmanlike and worthy of payback, but Barr's teammates had wisely held him back from retaliating in the moment and maybe inviting a costly penalty or even ending the game early. Barr explained to President Trump, quote, "As we played on, both teams kept a close watch on me and my antagonist to ensure we did not come to blows.
By the time the game ended two hours later, the matter seemed forgotten and both fraternities set out together on the walk back to campus. At that point, I walked over to my assailant and laid him out stupefied on the pavement with a bloody nose." The moral of this parable, as Barr explained it to the famously hot-headed Donald Trump, was that sometimes you had to control your emotions at least for a time and wait for the right moment to exact your revenge lest you risk blowing the entire game. My way, the game was finished and justice was meted out in the end.
The other obvious takeaway that Barr did not spell out was this. It's a lot easier to win a fight when your opponent is unaware that he's in one and has no chance to put his guard up. Sucker punches are the best punches.
Yeah.
A moral portrait.
That tracks.
Of Bill Barr.
That tracks. That's, that's a plausible scouting report, as Bill Barr himself wrote in his own book.
He's bragging about this.
That's the best part.
The Justice Department is supposed to protect, supposed to effectuate the protections of the constitution, protect all of us. We're all supposed to benefit from those protections, not only against other people in America who might try to define, who might try to, to, to encroach on those freedoms, but against the government trying to encroach on those freedoms. The Justice Department is supposed to protect us from all comers in terms of our constitutionally protected individual rights. But the Justice Department can instead join with the most powerful forces in the country, the ones who are trying to, uh, deprive other people of their right, other people of their rights.
And in so doing, they can become incredibly damaging and they can set the course of the nation. It's just the Justice Department has power that no other institution in the United States does. And we should, when we refound it, 'cause we're going to need to, we need to refound it in a way that is cognizant of those powers and, and treats it specially in terms of how careful we are about, about installing its political leadership.
Here we have the connectivity between corruption and affordability.
Yeah.
Here we have the Very Venn diagram that maybe isn't this binary, but the same thing.
And the person who's been best, I think, able to articulate that heading into this mammoth election we just had is John Ossoff, right? So John Ossoff wins by, what did he win by 17 or 18 points or something ridiculous.
A zillion points.
He won by roughly a zillion points in Georgia. And the reason he went from the most vulnerable Senate Democrat, the most vulnerable senator standing for reelection in America to the guy who won by nearly 20 points, I think was because he's had an incredibly disciplined message saying they are robbing you blind and that is why you are poor. Those things are connected. When the government serves the purpose of people who give the president millions of dollars, the government then is turned against your interests.
And not only are things not getting better for you, but things will continually get worse for you as long as we are governed by kleptocrats.
Right. It's not the, the undocumented immigrant. It's not the trans athlete. It's not the alleged jihadist that goes to school with your kid. It's perhaps the people with all the money.
Yeah.
That, that might be a good.
And when the government sides with them and against you, it is your obligation as a small D Democrat to stand up and throw those bums out of the government.
Rachel Maddow, thank you so much for doing this.
You're awesome. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm like, I just, I think you're great and it's really nice that you asked me to be here.
It's just a pleasure to talk to a three-sport athlete.
I'm getting fouled out of this one too.
The elbows have been pointy.
Exactly.
The elbows have been pointy.
Thanks, Pablo.
Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Averoma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Nealey Loman, Rob McCray, Laura Newcomb, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tuminello. Studio engineering by RG Systems. Sound design by Andrew Bersik. Digital strategy by Bailey Carlin and Andrew Northern. Theme song, as always, by John Bravo. And we'll talk to you next time.
After the so-called "blue tsunami," we turn to the MS NOW anchor, fresh off NFL RedZone-ing the midterms, with a new book in tow. The former three-sport athlete sits down with Pablo to wash up the election — from Vivek's mansion and memes to trans-sports panic — and look ahead at accountability for Trump, billionaires and the DOJ.
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