Transcript of Justice Has Left the Building

Hi, everyone. Welcome to my new show, Runaway Country. We are less than a year into the Trump administration, and I don't know about you, but I barely recognize this place. National Guard troops are invading blue cities, citizens are being snatched off the street, and the East Wing of the White House is being ripped off and turned into, apparently, a corporate event space. What the hell is happening here? Everything is unfolding at such a rapid clip that it all just bleeds in together into one extended, chaotic moment and one that you might actually become a little numb to. When you hear the same voices weigh in on all of this, and when the cycle of outrage is never-ending, well, then we miss what's really going on. This show is about shaking that up. I'm Alex Wagner. I am a Pod Save America contributor and a senior political analyst at MS Now. On this show, I'm going to bring you voices you don't often hear from, people whose experiences at the center of these headlines will offer you a way to shake off that numbness and to better understand the seemingly incomprehensible moment we all happen to be living through.

Then we're going to pair that storytelling with analysis from some of the smartest people I know in order to put it all in context. All of this so that we can keep this country within our grasp. This week, we wanted to start with a minor development, President Trump's full-blown assault on the Department of Justice and the crumbling authority of rule of law. Between the President's political hit list and ICE agents in courthouse hallways, all of a sudden it feels like we are in an inverted America where justice has basically left the building. Faith in institutions has been sliding for some time now, but at the end of the day, it seems like most of us, Democrats and Republicans, were operating under the assumption that ours is a country that guarantees due process, a place where the courts and the political motivations of the White House were separate things. Well, not anymore. This is Runaway Country. In today's episode, we'll be talking about how Trump is abusing the government and specifically the Justice Department, to consolidate power, to target his critics, to purge his enemies, and to line his own pockets while he's at it. Here's the latest from CNN.

The New York Times is reporting this afternoon that President President Trump is moving to demand that the Justice Department financially compensate him for the various federal investigations into him. What exactly does he want? Nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. Two hundred and thirty million dollars, to be exact. We've seen Trump replace DOJ officials with lackeys and use bogus lawsuits to go after political adversaries like former FBI Director James Comey and New York General LaTisha James, and we've seen him threaten a whole lot of other people just for what they've said about him publicly, including former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman, who worked on the Mueller report and who we'll be hearing from later on in this show. Andrew shared with us his story about being personally targeted by Trump. I hope they're going to look into Weissman, too. Weissman's a bad guy. What it's made him think not just about his own future, but the future of the justice system and rule of law in America. But even Andrew's story has a lot more of his than what's happening much more quietly and much more insidiously every single day. The firing of not just career prosecutors, but the judges themselves, the very people who uphold the rule of law.

You almost certainly already know that the immigration court system here is a nightmare. There are masked ICE agents standing outside of courtrooms, terrorizing the people who are just trying to follow the rules. Those wrenching clips have gone viral. That was an ICE agent in a New York City immigration court tackling a woman whose husband was essentially stolen from her as he showed up for his scheduled court date. But that drama does not begin and end in courtroom hallways. The Trump administration is working to make the hearings themselves increasingly difficult, if not actually impossible. They're overwhelming judges with thousands and thousands of more immigration cases, and then they're pushing the judges to dismiss the cases so that the migrants can be put into expedited removal hearings. Then they have those ICE agents in the hallways ready to grab those migrants, almost all of whom have no criminal records. Judges see all of this happening, and they are in a bind. Most of these undocumented migrants, after all, have no legal representation, and judges are not allowed to give legal advice. If all of that sounds insane, there's also this. The Trump administration is firing these immigration judges at a rapid clip and working to replace them with military lawyers.

As of this week, there are only 600 immigration court judges left for a backlog of cases that numbers somewhere around three 8 million and is just going up. You can do the math here. The system, as it is now, cannot hold. To understand what's happening on the front lines of all of this, we're going to talk to immigration Judge Annam Raman Petit, who worked for the Executive Office for Immigration Review. That's the agency at the Department of Justice that oversees the immigration courts. Like many others in her line of work, Judge Petit was fired in September, seemingly for no reason or for no reason having to do with her actual job performance. But obviously, there is a whole lot more to this story. Here's my conversation with Judge Annum Petit. First of all, just Just based on the videos, it's been wrenching to see what's happening in these courtrooms. Let's start there, I guess, which is you were, up until very recently, an immigration court judge. What has this year been like at immigration court?

It's been a lot. Watching a video is one thing. Those are traumatizing enough just as a bystander, let alone imagining what that person is going through who's being detained, the family members who are crying on the sidelines. I mean, that's the principal person being affected by that, right? But then it widens. There are the immigrants who are appearing in court who are also watching this happening, which creates a chilling effect, right? It affects people's ability and willingness to come to court to show up for their hearings. It affects the interpreters who have to interpret really difficult discussions. It affects the attorneys, including the ICE attorneys who are there following orders and coordinating with ICE about the detentions. Then, of course, it affects the judge who's presiding over this hearing, which is supposed to be a neutral and fair and just proceeding. But then you have this, like you said, heart-wrenching, traumatizing incident that's occurring and disrupting what is supposed to be happening.

You're in there trying to give people due process effectively, right? These are huge life decisions. Do you stay? Do you go? Whatever. Children are screaming, people are sobbing, and it's your courtroom. What is that like on a human-to-human level?

Yeah. I mean, it's hard to wear all the hats that you need to as an immigration judge. There's the hat, which is the neutral arbiter who just needs to stay unbiased and give objective, fair advice and reasoning in a case. But you can't separate that from being a human. As a human, it's devastating. I've been a practitioner in this field for a long time. They never did this. There was never a risk of detention when you went to court. You knew that when you go to court, you have your hearing. There's a very low risk of detention, if any. The only people who really had a risk of detention were people who had really serious criminal issues or national security issues. But for everyone else, you knew that there was a protection there at the court and for you to just be able to appear for your case. So it's this new era of immigration court where enforcement is front and center, and what used to be a protected space for justice just isn't that anymore.

I mean, you talk about other immigrants, even ones who aren't being targeted by ICE. They watch people get seized in the hallway and ripped away from their families. Can you just describe what those reactions are like from people who are not even centrally involved but are just part of this same process?

I mean, I think the primary reaction is fear. When you see that happening, you don't know the difference between that person's case and your case or your family member's case. All you see is the detention. All you see is the crying. And so then when your case gets set for another hearing, that image, that visual, is going to be running through your head when you're deciding, Do I go back to court? I think that's an especially difficult decision when people have family members. In a lot of these cases, there are children who There are dependents or writers on a parent's claim. A lot of us judges waive the appearance of these minors so that they can stay in school. They don't have to come to court. The parent can focus on their hearing. For a mother or a father who has children at home, who's also in that case, it has to run through their head. I could go to court today, and I could never come home and see my child.

I have a question about the ICE agents. So these ICE agents are masked outside of the courtroom. Are they inside the courtroom? Would you recognize them from time to time? Were there familiar faces among them?

So you would see the same ones occasionally, but there are just so many ICE agents now that you wouldn't necessarily see repetitions. I mean, they just have a flush of money right now, and they're hiring ICE agents at such a fast clip. Generally, in my courtroom, if anyone was wearing a hat or a mask or anything, I would ask them to remove I think a lot of judges were in that boat as well. But there is this unsettling feeling to have anyone in your courtroom who isn't there for a case and isn't there to support someone on a case because you don't really know who they are. In these times where there's an increase in political violence, there were times where I was very uneasy and scared because you don't know if they're actually even ICE agents. They can be anyone. One of the issues at the immigration courts is that there isn't a high level of security. There aren't bailiffs in every courtroom like you have in other courts around the country. For a lot of these cases, it was just me and the people appearing before me. Oftentimes, I didn't even have a law clerk or a legal assistant.

You feel quite unprotected in those moments, especially when you hear the commotion in the hallways, which are quite disruptive to cases, not only to me and to the attorneys and interpreters, but also to the respondents who are here testifying about really traumatizing parts their lives, and they can hear someone getting detained right outside the courtroom.

Like crying and screaming.

Yeah. God.

I guess I'm wondering if the new dynamic in these courtrooms, you deny someone or you dismiss their case because that's what the law requires, and they walk out unsuspecting and get taken by ICE. Are there moments in that new dynamic that stick out to you?

I had one of the first detentions in the country. So this was when people didn't really know that this was happening and that this was going to be a new policy that really defined the Trump administration with enforcement. And so I showed up for a hearing, expecting the respondent, the immigrant, in the proceedings to appear. And instead, I'm told by the ACC, the ICE prosecutor, that they were just detained. Instead, I have to have a conversation with his sobbing, wailing, mother who accompanied him to court. I'm talking to her through a Spanish interpreter. And again, I have to be quite careful in what I'm saying because DOJ and the immigration court isn't a part of that arrest attention process. To just be able to answer her questions and say, You can follow up with ICE to find out where he's detained. I really don't have much more information for you. And just think this was a time where this wasn't really happening. So everyone at my court was surprised that this had even happened when a person was just showing up for their final day in Court. It was the last step of the process.

It was a case that had been pending for a long time. I had prepared the case, I had reviewed it. I would have almost certainly been able to make a decision that day. Instead, that person was detained. They were sent to the detained docket of the court, and then another judge would have to start that process all over again. In addition to the detention being what it is in and of itself, it's also just inefficient for a system that has a crushing backlog.

Can we talk about that backlog? Because you are one of many immigration judges who have been fired. The Seattle Times is reporting this week, I think that the Trump administration has fired more than 83 immigration judges since Trump took office. There are less than 600 immigration judges nationally to hear, I think, roughly 3. 8 million pending cases. You're talking about math in some parts of the country could look like one judge for 42,000 cases. Do you have any idea why you were fired?

I have no idea, and no reason was given to me. I was a probationary judge They were looking at my performance. I had multiple performance reviews over the two years. I received nothing but glowing feedback. And even after I got fired, I had a conversation with my Assistant Chief Immigration Judge, who was my direct supervisor, and he advised me that there was no performance-based reason for my termination. That leaves the agency needs bucket. There's no agency need to fire immigration judges. We had a crushing backlog. We received so much training, and by all accounts, I was a high-performing judge. I had a high number of completions.

I have a theory on why you were fired. I mean, it just... What we know is that in the absence of having enough judges, the Trump administration is calling up military lawyers who haven't been trained in the skill set that you were trained in, the law that you were trained in, to deal with the shortage of immigration judges. I mean, there They're decidedly less qualified. The requirements are lower. Perhaps they'll be more allegiant to the goals of this administration. There's no better way to creating crisis on the bench allows this administration to come up with a solution that serves their purposes. I mean, I guess I wonder if you think overwhelming the system was maybe the point of your dismissal.

I think you're right. The cynic in me believes that this is all being done very purposefully and that they're trying to break the system so that they're able to implement whatever reforms they see fit, which will be at the expense of due process.

It sounds like even when you were on the bench, the directives you were getting from the Department of Justice about how to adjudicate these cases was changing, right?

Absolutely. We are completely at the political whim of who is ever in the White House and then who the AG is. There were so many policy memoranda that completely undid what our prior guidance was on a full range of issues. We just have to keep up with all of the changes. But literally overnight, a decision could be issued and has been issued that completely upends decades of jurisprudence in asylum law or other areas of immigration law. So there's a lot of legal whiplash within judges and attorneys who have to appear in the system.

Did you at any point feel pressure to be more hard-lined because of the directives coming out of the attorney general's office?

No one ever explicitly told me, You have to rule on this case in my way, or if not, you'll suffer A, B, and C consequences. Thankfully, that never happened to me. There is an unspoken pressure to abide by the agenda of this administration. We are part of DOJ. Pam Bondi is our boss. You see the decisions coming out of the Board of Immigration Appeals or from the AG's office that greatly limit certain relief paths to immigrants and are just stricter in general on a lot of procedural issues. You also see and feel the unspoken pressure of a lot of the policy memoranda that are issued, which tell us to decide cases in certain ways and identify issues that they see and really put a lot of those errors on the backs of the immigration judges and not leadership or directives that control our docket. But I never was told to decide a certain way. When I look back on every case I've decided, there isn't one case that I ruled on because I felt like I had to rule a certain way based on leadership. I always decided every case based on the law and the facts.

I felt more stress and anxiety when I had a week where I maybe graded more cases than I had the week before, or if I didn't get every case done that week because I needed more time for testimony or decision, knowing the emphasis on case completions. So I've put more pressure on myself, and I worked my butt off all year just to make sure that my case completions were good. I worked so much more outside of hours than I ever had because I knew I was on probation, and I don't want to give this administration any reason to fire me. It turns out that didn't matter anyway, but there is that unspoken pressure for sure, and a lot of judges are feeling it right now.

Were you relieved when you got fired?

There was a slew of emotions, as I'm sure you can imagine. I was devastated. There were a lot of the day that I got fired. I was furious and angry at the injustice of it all, knowing that I was a great judge. I did walk out of that courthouse with my head held high. But I would be lying if I said that there wasn't a little bit of relief that was tinged into that. Because I lived the last several months with a lot of anxiety, with a heaviness, that any day I could be fired. I was thinking what that it would look like for me and my family. But I did feel some relief. At least I knew, right? At least I knew, Okay, I'm fired. I need to focus on the next chapter, instead of wondering whether that would happen on any given day, which was not a good place to be in.

What's your assessment of if you're in this country and you're trying to get due process? Is that possible? How much has this administration eroded that?

Due process still exists. It's getting harder and harder to maintain in a courtroom because judges are bound by presidential decisions and directives from the DOJ and leadership. What I worry is that the emphasis in this administration for case completions and the number of cases you get done are going to override those due process protections that every immigrant is entitled to under our Constitution.

Well, also maybe don't fire the judges if you want the cases to be completed. It's insane.

We need judges to get through the backlog, and we need qualified judges who have the experience and expertise in immigration law or litigation or administrative law, and they've gotten rid of all those qualifications. They're posting for immigration judge positions right now, and they have gotten rid of all of the requirements that have always been required for that So I'm a little worried about the folks that they're going to be hiring to replace me.

I mean, I feel like that's the point, right? I mean, what's your level of confidence about the rule of law in America?

Any public trust or confidence that people had in the immigration court system and rule of law in general in the United States has greatly eroded. The question I've been asked is, would you become an immigration judge again? And it was a dream job for me, but I would be so reluctant to accept that job again because it used to be such a stable position, and now it's just anchored in instability. I don't know if we're ever going to get trust back in that federal sector employment. Then I don't know if we're ever going to get trust back in justice and the rule of law and to know that all of the checks and balances and the levels of review are going to work the way that these democratic institutions are supposed to be working. Jeez. That's the cynic in me. You caught me at a bad time. I just got fired.

Judge Petit, thank you for answering these questions and sharing your wrenching experience. I started with the word wrenching. I'm ending on the word wrenching. Good luck out there.

Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

We reached out for comment from the executive office for Immigration Review, where Judge Petit worked, but they have not responded as in this recording. We should note that Defending Our Neighbors Fund is a sponsor of this podcast. When we come back, my conversation with Andrew Weissman. Runaway Country is brought to you by Zbiotics Pre-Alcohol. I know we have all tried ways to be functional adults after a night of drinks. I know I have. However, I have now found something that actually works and helps me be that functional adult. It is a pre-alcohol probiotic from Zbiotics. I I do not bounce back the next day like I used to, friends. So I have to make a choice. I can either have an amazing night or I can have an amazing next day. That is until I found Zbiotics pre-alcohol. So Zbiotics pre-alcohol, a probiotic drink, is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. This is how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in your gut. It is a buildup of that toxic byproduct and not actually dehydration. That's to blame for those rough days after drinking.

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Okay. Well, it's nice to be here.

We just talked to Judge Annam Petit, who is a now fired immigration court judge, who has let go for seemingly no reason at a time when immigration courts are in crisis, literally and figuratively. About 60 other judges have been fired or forced out over the last few months. That leaves, I think, roughly 600 judges nationally to deal with a backlog of nearly 4 million cases. In some areas, you're seeing single judges have a caseload of 42,000 cases. The Trump administration strategy here seems to be, overwhelm the system and hollow it out at the same time, which I don't know. I don't know you think about war strategy. I feel like Napoleon probably had this strategy. It's a full-on assault on the justice system. Immigration Court is housed at justice. Is it a foregone conclusion that this is all it's going to work, the strategy?

Well, yes. Let's start with it makes no sense whatsoever to sit there and say, We really, really want to get these people out of the country. There's an immigration process, and we're actually going to get rid of immigration judges. That's usually when you want to have more immigration judges. So the theory has to be on the most optimistic, positive Polyanish theory, which obviously you can tell I don't agree with, is that the judges who they let go of are somehow slow, not doing their job correctly, and they're replacing them with just more efficient and better judges. But that does not seem to be the facts on the ground. So that's the only positive theory. The other theories are you want people in there who are just going to do your bidding, and you're going to have the veneer of due process with that actual due process, and you're going to stack the courts. In some ways, putting Emil Bovet on the third circuit, in my view, is a way of hollowing out the courts in a way. If you think about, there's three parts of the government. There's going back to grade school, and you have the executive, the judicial, the legislative.

Well, they've gotten rid of Congress, right? Because they're just asleep at the switch as the Republican-controlled. And if you're trying to deal with the pushback that we're seeing over and over again by lower-court judges, whether any President has appointed them, including Donald Trump himself, if you're trying to deal with that, one way is to just put in people who are just going to do exactly what they're essentially hired to do. That's a terrible theory. Then the third theory is that it doesn't really matter if you have a court system because they're not really planning on using it. That is what we saw. I think it's a combination of two and three because I I actually think there's just so many times we've seen, as Judge Wilkinson, a very conservative judge in the Fourth Circuit said, is we're just seeing people being extracted. He wouldn't even use the term legally removed, like going through the legal process. He was saying they've been extracted and stashed in a prison because you don't even want to give it the veneer of the legal system. If you're not really planning on using the legal system, you can go ahead and fire good reputable judges like the person that you just spoke to.

Yeah, and they're bringing in, to your second point, they're bringing in far less qualified military lawyers to do the work of these judges and to expedite the process. I mean, it's the veneer of due process without the actual practical process itself.

The one thing I will say about military judges and military justice is, and I don't know if it will play out here, but I do want to speak up for jags in military courts, because sometimes people might think, Oh, they just railroad people, and, Oh, they don't really understand rights. That's not my experience. I do think that this could backfire. They may be planning to do all that, but you could end up with people who are very much like Mr. Ruveni, the attorney who was fired in that Brego Garcia case because he was not going to call Mr. Abrego Garcia a terrorist without there being evidence of being a terrorist, and he was fired for that. I think military people are trained in the rule of law. It's not exactly the same system as ours, but they may not get what they're thinking they're going to get, the Trump administration.

But it does get to your broader point that there's a question of whether they're actually that interested in the courts to begin with, right? Because you put all of this together. I was talking to this judge, and it's like, You don't even have to be one of the people that's on having a hearing. You could just be there in the courtroom and you see what's unfolding, both in terms of the judges being overwhelmed, the length of time it takes to even get there, and then these ICE agents who sit and prey upon people who are trying to work within the system to gain asylum. At one point, she says it's incredibly disruptive to the process to literally hear the screaming and crying on the other side of the wall as these families are ripped apart. If you're debating, do I stay in the system or go outside of it? The system clearly is stacked against you, or you're going to end up getting fucked in that system in ways you cannot even imagine. That then encourages people to just miss their court dates, and then we are left with the reality that we see now, which is people just getting snatched from on the streets, outside of their workplaces, on their way to drop off their kids to school.

Absolutely. We've had this situation where courthouses have said, and judges, including chief judges, have said, That's not happening in the courthouse. There is a legal process here. People should feel like they can come here and have their rights adjudicated without having to worry about being arrested outside. It's going to interfere with not just the peace of mind, but can you imagine if you're a witness? Exactly. That is something where we are seeing some pushback. I'm told the Southern district of New York, or I'd say heard that the US attorney there has a commitment that those kinds of things won't happen on his watch while he's the US attorney. We'll see how much that lasts. But with immigration, I think the administration is banking on the fact that they think that Americans won't care about due process if we're talking about people who they can label as bad people, and that they're not rich white Americans. They're people who are more disadvantaged or from Black and Brown communities. People will be thinking, Well, if they say they're bad people and they don't look like me, that somehow the Americans won't take it as seriously. I actually, and this is my Pollyannish part, I actually think Americans do care about that.

I can tell you, really, when I started out as a lawyer, I was not a prosecutor. I was just starting out at a law firm, and we had a death penalty case. Our client was on death row, and we were making this claim in Georgia State Court, and we were trying to get to federal court without unscaved because it's very hard. State Court we thought would be terrible for us, and eventually you got a federal court.

We remember the tension between Georgia courts and national courts.

This is a really interesting story that might be appropriate for today. We're in Georgia the Georgia State Courts, and we have dispositive proof that, and I'm going to use a term that we don't use anymore, but it was the term at the time, so I have to use it, that he was diagnosed, since he was eight years old, as mentally retarded. I know that's not the term we use, but it was the diagnosis that he was given. And even the state had to concede that, in fact, he was mentally retarded. But this is what the Georgia State Judge said is, You know what? In Georgia, we protect our communities. We care about crime, but we're fair. And the Georgia State Court said, It is unconstitutional under the Georgia Constitution to kill somebody who is mentally retarded. And so meaning that there was a sense of fairness, and it somewhat goes to my point about the military tribunals. A friend of mine had the first ever cooperator out of Guantanamo in the suite of 9/11 cases. And when he was sentenced, there was an advisory jury of just people from the military, and he described what had happened to him.

It's the first time ever, it was on the front page of the New York Times, described what happened to him on a black site. The jury wrote this lengthy letter to the judge saying that this was completely un-American what had happened to him and recommending that he be given leniency. It wasn't because they were embracing his acts, they were deploring what had been done to him. To me, that I do think that it questions if there are enough people like that. But I do think that there are people who are principled, who are sitting there going, That's not how we behave.

It's so It's so heartening and important to hear about your fundamental belief, which I agree with, that there are good people in the system and that the agreement we have about what it means to be in this democracy still holds even in corners that are under greatest stress, right? Yeah. There is, though... I mean, I guess you talk about the chasm that separates people who are the victims in a lot of these cases and the rest of the American public. The thing I worry about is that even if you aren't paying attention to what's happening to undocumented migrants, and you're not particularly engaged in how that's tearing apart communities where they're mixed families or people even who are American citizens, there's this unbelievable effort on the part of the administration to destroy the notion of trust in the justice system as being an impartial one and one that operates with integrity. I point you no further than that Trump is demanding the Justice Department pay him $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him. I mean, this is literally the dictionary definition of the fox guarding the hen house. I mean, Trump's own lawyers who now run the DOJ are the ones that I think have to sign off on this to begin with.

Donald Trump, not known to be a particularly introspective person, recognizes how on its face corrupt this is. This is what he said in the White House. Let's just take a listen to that sound. It's hopefully It's strange to make a decision where I'm paying myself.

In other words, did you ever have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you're paying yourself in damages? But I was damaged very greatly.

Any money that I would get, I would give to charity. Even Trump recognizes that it's awfully strange to make a decision where I'm paying myself. First of all, what was your reaction to that?

Why doesn't he just go rob Fort Knox? That was my reaction. He could just be like, You know what? Go to the Fed. I'm the It's all mine, right? And I get to decide. So you know what? That was his view in Mar-a-Lago, where the cases, when he had the document there, he was like, Well, they're all mine. As a friend of mine said, Why doesn't he just take out the portraits from the White House and take them with him and just say, Well, you know what? I just decide they're mine. And this is one where I have to say, I don't think Todd Blanch and Pam Bondi are going to do it, but they have no business sitting and deciding that. The idea this It happens a lot where people who are the subject of criminal investigations will at some point say, I'm entitled to money because I won. Now, he did not win on the merits, so he's not going to be able to claim that. The standard to be able to do that is not one he's going to meet. But this is where what I actually think should happen, it's not what's going to happen, is I think I would be, you want to make these claims.

Let's leave aside the statute limitations, the time to make some of these claims is run. But you want to make these claims? Let's have a hearing with evidence. You You put off, you didn't want to have the insurrection case, you didn't want to have the Mar-a-Lago case, but now you're the plaintiff and you're saying that you want to get $230 million. Let's have a factual hearing so the public can see and a judge can decide what's going to happen. That's the thing that would normally happen in these situations if you were making a credible claim. But I just can't imagine There's so many ways that this should not pass muster, and it's just such a wonderful example for any dispassionate person to understand the venality and the corruption that is going on. I mean- Right.

If the crypto hustle didn't get yet, this is- It's so easy to see.

It's like the plane. It is like the plane, but worse.

I thought the same thing. It's way worse. He's paying He's trying to pay himself.

Wait, and it's our money. Wait, let's just remember, this is our money. The funds that would be used, this is not Cutter giving the money. No. This is us.

American Tax Fair is lining the pockets of the President at precisely the moment that inflation is ticking up, groceries are more expensive, and people's health care premiums are about to go up.

Great political strategy. And there's a shutdown. Yes.

And we just said- Federal employees not being paid.

Right. So you have career people not getting paid where the President would get an unearned $230 million. And we just had seven million people approximately marching against having a king. And then you have somebody acting exactly like a king.

Yes, a king to go into wherever in the castle they kept the gold bouillon and saying, You know what? I think I'm entitled to all of this.

Just to be clear, with the countries, if you're thinking about Western countries like England and France, even a king couldn't do that.

I know. They don't have that much capital at their access. I mean, that is just surreal.

It is. Surreal, Alex. I mean, I'm sorry, but did anyone have this on their dance card? No. When it's like, this is what a President of the United States is going to do is be like an... It's an extortion artist, but he doesn't even need to do the extortion here Because he's on both sides.

He's writing a check on our account. I think the thing I worry about is if you're on the outside of this, it's disgusting, it's so Trump. But what does it mean the Department of Justice would sign off on this? This is to the larger question of the utter corruption of these institutions at the same time that they're launching political hits on Tish James and Jim Comey, and to some degree, John Bolton. There's a looming one about Adam Schiff. Can I ask you as someone with people who still maintains a line in, what's happening in there? What are people saying? How are they looking at all of this?

Well, for the career people who are still there, it is the most demoralizing thing ever. What people need to understand is these are people who have served under Republican and Democratic administrations, and they just put that aside. People are used to the idea that elections have consequences, policies change, there are priorities that might change. Sometimes you're going to do more drug cases or more immigration cases or more civil rights cases. That happens. People are used to implementing the policies within the law and within the ethical norms and constraints. But those just are not being followed. One of the things I was thinking about, if this happened in any other administration, and obviously this is a crazy thing because it's like, when would this ever It's never happened. But there would be a professional ethics officer who you go to at the Department of Justice who would say, Okay, these people are recused. They can't decide it. This has to go to an independent person, and it will be handled in an independent way. It won't be from a former defense lawyer for the President who's got a continuing duty of loyalty. Because when you've represented somebody, it's not like it ends.

You actually have a continuing duty to your client. This is just so beyond the pale. For career people, this has to be just unimaginable pain But I would say the same for... I do this podcast with Mary McCord.

Oh, yes, main justice.

Collectively, we were like, it's like a gazillion years because both of us are old, at least I am, or I make up for her as not being so old. It's incredibly painful to experience. But again, I actually think it's important to not have the story be just about the Department of Justice, because I think the bigger story is the Department of Justice, yes, it's terrible what's happening, but it's terrible because it affects the rights of people. The people who are being harmed, in this situation, yes, there's ideals and principles being harmed, but it's, in my view, if it goes forward, it's theft from the American public. I mean, you're creating victims. We talked about immigration and the issue that's going on with the judges there. Again, the issue is the people who are being affected by it. You're creating a class of victims. That's why Abrega Garcia is a great illustration of the problem of somebody who was extracted against a court order removed from this country, shoved into a prison, and his rights continue, according to different judges, continue to be violated. Sometimes you need an example of one to make people understand the systemic.

A little like you're having on a judge who's been fired so they can put a face to a huge problem.

Exactly. Yeah. I think that's one of the things that is most useful in this moment is having a real human being who's at the center of it explain to you what it's actually like and what it's like to hear those screams, what it's like to deal with families as they're being ripped apart, trying to manage a caseload of some 10,000 cases, and what it means when the system cannot hold, right?

Right.

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First of all, what? Amazing. But also, why did he do it? And what were you most surprised by in that conversation?

I don't know exactly why he did it, but I do think it helped that it was an academic institution. A lot of times, it really helps when there's students there and you want to impart to them and model for them normalcy and being upstanding. I'm not sure, but when I was deciding, when I left the department and I came to MSNBC, part of the reason was I was like, If I'm going to be vilified, I'd like to be vilified based on who I am. Maybe people won't like me, but I'd like it to be based on me.

People like you.

People assess me for who I am and not a caricature. The reason I thought it was so wonderful he spoke is that more than any substantive thing he said, and there was a lot, it was an hour long conversation, but I thought the most important is that people could get the measure of who he is. I actually think the department needs to be doing more of that and speaking out even when they're in the department.

Can they do that, though? I mean- Yes.

This is what They're crazy. This is like a little bit of a bugaboo. Obviously, they should not do the following, and we see it all the time now, but they should not do the Jim Komi. We're not charging Hillary Clinton, but let me just tell you why she's such a bad person. That violates the put up or shut up rule, which is you don't get to do that. You're not there to give your personal views and opinions. That is totally wrong. So you can't do that. But remember, Archibald Cox, during the Watergate investigation, gave a very famous press conference that you can still watch it, by the way, on YouTube. So if people who are not as as I am and don't remember it, that you can go and listen to it. And again, what was so great is it turns out he wasn't this horrible figure that was being portrayed. He was this very mild, manner, thoughtful Harvard professor who was explaining why the tapes were so important and why he was getting them. But at no point did he say, Let me tell you why Richard Nixon's guilty. This is the crimes he committed.

That's the line that you shouldn't do. But my example, which I wrote about, was I thought, for instance, that Jack Smith, when the Mara Laga case was indicted and people were talking a lot about, is the selective prosecution. I thought he could have talked about... I just want to talk to you in the public record about what the Department of Justice has done in the past. These are the kinds of cases that we have brought that are commensurate with what's been alleged here. Instead, Ryan Goodman and I at NYU did something like that for Just Security, this legal forum.

A great forum. But that's not quite the same thing as Jack Mick. No disrespect.

No, exactly.

To just security.

We were trying to make that point, but it's like that we don't have the megaphone. I thought both having him make that point and then also being himself in exhibit, in other words, having people be able to see him would be useful because all we were getting is one side of the story, in terms of vilification.

And Trump wins from the abstraction of the enemy, right? He just gets to superimpose whatever he likes on that person and says, Jack Smith's a wacko, a complete lunatic. He's off the rails. And then when Jack Smith is an out there showing us that he's quite clearly not off the rails. Some part of the American public accepts that.

By the way, I don't think I answered your question, which is what most surprised me.

What surprised you the most, other than him saying, Sure, Andrew, I'll do it.

Yeah, I was going to say that. That might have been the- You're like, Here goes nothing.

Hey, Jack.

I think that probably was the biggest surprise because he's a career DOJ person to his core. He comes off as an Eagle Scout because I think he is an Eagle Scout. I'm not sure I really was surprised by that. I can tell you something that moved me, which was at the end, I was asking him about what it's been like for his team or himself in terms of the aftermath once he ended. He choked up when he talked about Waltht Jordina, the FBI agent who was fired, in spite of the fact that senior people at the FBI pleaded with Cash Patel not to do it because his wife was dying. I know Waltht, he worked also on the Mueller investigation. I can't fathom the cruelty that goes into that determination. A lot of times you can see, Oh, let me try and understand why somebody's doing something. I just can't even begin to understand how you would make that decision consistently being a human.

I think it's maybe if you can successfully dehumanize other people. New York magazine has a spread of pictures of these immigrants at the courthouse as being ripped from their families. That, to me, is the same narrative, like disassociation that you have to do to be like, Walter, his wife is dying. He has served this country remarkably, but we're going to fire him because he's not convenient to our ends. We've successfully, as a monolith, the Trump administration, managed to make our enemies subhuman. We can dissociate the wrenching decisions we're making about their futures and their present and be completely cutthroat, I guess. I don't know. I don't know the particular and twisted psychology of all this.

The other thing that Jack said, because he was only talking about other people in his team, and I think I might have said something like, And you? He just said, Well, the one thing I will say is you really end up learning who your friends are. I could relate to that, this idea of the people who rise to the occasion and surprise you in rising to the occasion, even if they're maybe not people who know you that well, and other people who you are surprised the other way. It hurts because you always thought they were a different type of person.

I do want to turn to that because you have been single out by President Trump by name, saying he hoped that you would be... He hoped, a. K. Issued a directive that you should be investigated along with Special Counsel Jack Smith. First of all, how did that feel and how is it going?

Well, so it's interesting. So let me just first say, I generally try not to talk about that. I'm going to answer your question, but let me just tell you why I don't like answering that question is when I decided to work for MSM I see. Obviously, I'm not in the media. I wasn't a journalist. But I took seriously my role as a legal analyst in trying to be objective and impart to people what I think is going on. And that means you're not the story, and you're not part of the story. And I don't want Donald Trump to steal that from me. I get that. And so that's why I've usually just tried to explain that upfront as to why that's not front and center of what I deal with, because I feel like that's taking something from me that he has no right to take. And then that thing that makes it more targeted this time, because he has been saying that with respect to me, and frankly, a whole host of people, I'm an extremely good company, and there are lots of people with much more exaltet people than me. But is that you see it in action now?

I think of the three charges that we've seen in the last two weeks, The James Comey case in particular strikes me as no, they're, there. And that's why you saw not just every single person in the Eastern district of Virginia, every AUSA, every career person is not on this case. The people who say they need to speak up, oh, they've spoken up. If people aren't focusing on this, it's because we're not picking up what they're putting down, which is they are not on this case. They had to staff this case from another district because the career people could all be fired, and by the way, a number of them have been because they're not willing to do this. Even the Trump appointed US attorney resigned under pressure. If you ask the President, he was fired. And so he stepped down rather than do this. And so now the targeting becomes a lot more like, who cares? He goes off on all sorts of people, but there's no facts and there's no law to support it except but C, James Komi. But you know what? I still think let's take a deep breath because I think that the Komi case is going to implode.

I think from a Trump perspective, he wins no matter what because he gets to say, I inflicted pain. I have a chilling effect on people. And if it implodes, he'll just attack the judges or juries who rule in Jim Ferry's favor.

Another part of the justice system.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Well, but yeah, I'm so... Thank you for putting into context why it's difficult or why you're reluctant to talk about your centrality in this. I've talked to judges who feel the same way, right? They're impartial. They don't want to be the story. I've talked to reporters at the local level who've said, I'm not the story. I'm reporting the story. The discomfort, and I think the real apprehension that this moment requires people to get over is that people who are not in it for themselves and who don't want to talk about themselves, and don't want to be in the center of it, are increasingly, for the sake of the larger system, being forced to get personally very honest about and put themselves in the story. I think that it's an incredibly unfortunate development. You shouldn't have to do that. He is stealing that from you. He's stealing that from the journalists in the fourth estate, and he's stealing it from our blind system of justice. But Hats off to you for saying what you do say and doing podcasts and also going out there and being like, I'm going to interview Jack Smith, knowing full well that that could bring an unwanted attention on you, but that the words that Jack Smith has to share with those students and the world are important enough to warrant that event.

Yeah.

This is where what I would say is facts matter. I would say for people who are listening to this, you can go find it on YouTube, the UCL, the University College of London, was the sponsor. As I said, it was an academic event. Go listen to it and see just how incendiary it was. I mean, this is an hour that's quite... Alex, you know me well enough to know. It's quite polite. Well, it's a little dry. I mean, you have two people who are career DOJ people. Law owners. Yes, exactly. So it's not exactly made for TV. Fire and brimstance. Exactly. Exactly. So it's in many ways- But that's the point.

It should be boring. All of it should be boring. All of it should be very regimened. There are very clear rules of the road where all this stuff is concerned, and it should be in many It's not formulaic, but the parameters have been established. This is not a time for coloring outside the lines or like, ripping off the guardrails, as it were. Let me just ask you one more question. What's your level of confidence as we go through the erosion of due process, as we go through the corruption of the Department of Justice, at least at the top tier of it, as we go through the acceptance of the President executing on a targeted hit list of enemies? What's your level of confidence about rule of law here in America?

Not good. Let me just tell you the things I'm worried about. I know that I could be thinking I got this from a law point of view, and I know one answer deals with what to expect from the Supreme Court, et cetera. But I don't really think that's the... The more this past year I've been on, the less I've viewed... I always come on and talk about the one expertise I have, which is the law part. But I feel like that misses the bigger picture. I am particularly worried about whether will ever have a free and fair election again, and whether there will be steps to gerrymander, whether there will be the military called out in to press the vote in cities, in Black and Brown communities, whether arrests will be made that are illegal. But by the time they're adjudicated, the damage will have been done because it will be a deterrent for people to show up. I'm worried about the Department of Justice seizing ballot boxes claiming that they're evidence of fraud and the votes don't get counted. By the way, I'm not saying any of this is going to happen.

No, I thought the same thing.

I'm just telling you- I thought the same thing. That for the same reason that I was extremely worried in the past election, that I was thinking, You know what? If Donald Trump doesn't win this, he knows that there's a very, very good chance that he is going to go to jail. In the Manhattan case where he had been convicted, and understandably, there's an appeal, and he would have every right to say it was an improper conviction. But then he was also going to be, I think, facing not just the DC trial, but I thought the Mar-a-Lago case was clearly going to be resurrected because it was improperly dismissed by Judge Canon, in my view. I just thought that he had every incentive to not abide by the law and the rules. And let's remember, he's an adjudicated criminal. I'm always surprised when people just don't say that, which is... I mean, he is, at least until his appeal is over, he is currently a convicted felon. And so we're not dealing with the most upstanding person. And again, I'm just basing that on just taking what's been adjudicated. We can add in all of the things that we know, which is the Washington Post reported, was it 30,000 lies during just this first term?

Oh, I mean, good on them for trying to keep track.

Yeah, exactly. So anyway, that's a long way of saying there's a lot to worry about.

Okay. Well, I think the first step to getting a better solution is to be engaged in it and maybe to worry about it. So that's where we are going to leave it.

I totally agree. Well, this is my big thing. I'm constantly telling people, Stay engaged. Yeah.

Do not turn it off.

I don't think people understand. Even if you're in a blue state, there's speaking up is really, really important.

The immigration judges we're talking about are in New York City, so it is all happening right at our front doorstep. You're a busy person with a lot going on, and I'm so grateful.

You're welcome. It's my pleasure.

You're doing more important things. Thank you for doing this, and really good luck out there. It's great to see you.

Take care.

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