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- [00:01]
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This message comes from Capital One. Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com bank for details. Capital One NA member FDIC this is FRESH AIR.
- [00:18]
Dave Davies
I'm Dave Davies. The leadership team of Donald Trump's second administration is known for having some colorful and combative characters. Among that group, Attorney General Pam Bondi is a standout. At an April Cabinet meeting, she outdid others in praising the president by asserting that fentanyl seizures in his first 100 days in office had saved 258 million lives. That's roughly three quarters of the US population. Bondi and the Department of Justice, which she heads, have been at the center of some of the administration's most controversial moves its aggressive seizure and deportation of immigrants, its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, and the move to take over law enforcement in the District of Columbia. She's also spearheaded a determined campaign to fire and prosecute present and former officials involved in investigations and prosecutions of January 6 rioters and Jack Smith's cases against Donald Trump. Our guest, veteran Washington journalist Ruth Marcus, has a profile in the latest New Yorker about Bondi. She writes that Bondi has presided over the most convulsive transition of power in the Justice Department since the Watergate era, perhaps ever. She describes Bondi's rise to prominence in the Trump team, her fierce loyalty to the president, and criticism she's gotten from friends and foes of the administration. Ruth Marcus is a contributing writer for the New Yorker. Marcus spent 40 years at the Washington Post as a reporter, editor and columnist. She left earlier this year after disagreements with the paper's publisher, Will Lewis, and its owner, Jeff Bezos, over its editorial direction. Her latest New Yorker article is titled Pam Bondi's Power Play. Well, Ruth Marcus, welcome to FRESH air.
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Ruth Marcus
Thank you for having me.
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Dave Davies
You open this story with an anecdote about Pam Bondi walking into the Justice Department's National Security Division unannounced to remove portraits that were still hanging from the previous administration of the president, vice president and the attorney general. Here she is on Fox News after that, describing that little visit to Lara Trump.
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Pam Bondi
How's it been moving into your new office? It's been interesting. So I went up on the seventh floor, which is the National Security Division. So the entire floor is a skiff, so no one can get in there.
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Dave Davies
Oh.
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Pam Bondi
So I was able to get the code, open the door, and I look on the wall and see President Biden, Kamala Harris and Merrick Garland's painting still hanging.
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Ruth Marcus
Oh, wow.
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Pam Bondi
Someone didn't tell them that there's a new president. I did. I personally took all three photos down. I'm walking down the hall. You took them down yourself? Oh, I took them down. Oh, my gosh. I'm walking down the hall. I put them in front of someone who said to me, oh, well, maintenance is really slow here. I said, well, it took me about 30 seconds to get them off the wall. Maintenance is not going to be slow anymore, I promise you that. Yeah. And then he said, well, they don't like us touching anything. I said, well, I just did.
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Ruth Marcus
Wow.
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Pam Bondi
Well, good for you. That's what we've been dealing with. That's what's been going on in Washington, D.C. for a long time. No longer. No longer. It ends here. Ends with you. Sure does.
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Dave Davies
And that is Pam Bondi with Lara Trump on Fox News. Ruth Marcus. You know, this could be seen as a kind of trivial thing. I mean, the Attorney General walking out with portraits and arguably not such an important thing for you to focus on. I mean, what does this tell us about Pam Bondi?
- [03:48]
Ruth Marcus
Well, I focused on it for the reason that I think it tells us a lot about Pam Bondi and it tells us even more about the mindset of the Trump Justice Department and the people around her. As I understand it from the reporting that I've done, these photos were up there in this very obscure corner of the Justice Department where they're not seen by anybody because the facility staff had not gotten around to removing them. And the lawyers who work in this division, it's one of the most important and high profile divisions in the department. They deal with counterintelligence, counterespionage, all sorts of extremely highly classified things. They don't really focus on the artwork on the walls. So from their point of view, I don't think they probably gave a second thought to whose portraits were on the wal. They continue to do the same job they did day to day in the Biden administration and in the Trump administration, but from the Trump administration's point of view. And you can hear that in the sound that you played from Attorney General Bondi. Their understanding was that this was an example caught red handed, of the deep state seething with anger at Trump's victory and wanting to resist in any way possible. And I asked. The Attorney General would not talk to me for this piece, but I talked to her chief of staff, a guy named Chad Mizell, and what he said to me was this. This is the Same National Security Division that was responsible for a lot of the underpinnings of the prosecution against the president. The idea that it was, oh, sorry, mere oversight. I mean, come on, we're not stupid. And so I just thought that this story, as kind of silly and trivial as it was, showed how this Justice Department thinks about the department that it inherited. And she was really angry, as I understand it, the Attorney General, when she saw this, and I said another attorney General might have been a little chagrined that she was so upset and that it looked like she was focusing on something so trivial or picayune, but Pam Buns Gandhi bragged about it on Fox tv. So that's another important thing to understand about this Justice Department.
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Dave Davies
And the interesting thing is that apart from personally walking out with the portraits and then talking about it on the media, she actually then demoted the acting head of the division. Right.
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Ruth Marcus
For this terrible misdeed. And he was told that this was the reason for it. It's my understanding this is a lawyer you need to understand, who worked in the White House Counsel's office during the first Trump admin. He was a career lawyer. He was in line to. He was acting while they brought in their own head of the division. And he was supposed to be the principal deputy, but instead he was punished over artwork.
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Dave Davies
I want to talk in a little bit of detail about what's actually going on within the department, but first I just want to focus a bit more on Bondi's public presence. I mean, you note that she displays a. What would you call it, a belligerence, maybe in dealing with the media, even members of Congress, federal judges.
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Ruth Marcus
Yeah, it's quite extraordinary, having never met Pam Bondi, but watched her a lot and talked to a lot of people about her. I think, from my understanding, she's a quite nice, friendly person, the kind of person who talks to the cashier at the supermarket. But she has assumed, I think is the right word to use this Persona of kind of bristling belligerence in very surprising and unusual places. We saw it first in her confirmation hearings where she really took on some of her Democratic questioners. I saw it earlier this summer when I saw her testify about the department's budget. She was asked a perfectly reasonable and not accusatory question about the president's basically selling of access to people who invested in his crypto coins. And she just launched into Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, who dared to ask that question and talked to him in this very dismissive tone about how the department was doing its absolute best to help your liberal state, she said. But she doesn't just use that tone with Democrats. She has used that tone written and on television about federal judges. That is not normal. This is a sentence that I keep saying about the second Trump administration, but this is not normal. The attorney general of the United States does not talk about rogue federal judges. She doesn't file misconduct complaints against federal judges. She doesn't insist that they have to recuse themselves, you know, from case after case. So she has just decided, I think, that Donald Trump likes to see this counter punching, as he calls it, and she is just going to punch and punch and punch.
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Dave Davies
You write that Bondi is responsible for the most convulsive transition of power at the Justice Department, at least since Watergate, maybe ever. Let's talk about some examples of changes in the department which she has engineered. One of them. Well, what's happened with the Public Integrity Section, which has investigated corrupt politicians and all.
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Ruth Marcus
So on a substantive level, I don't think there's ever been as great a change in a Justice Department. And certainly when a Democratic administration takes over from a Republican administration or a Republican administration takes over from a Democratic administration, there is going to be a new sheriff in town and policies are appropriately change. What we're watching here is something completely different. On the criminal side, the Public Integrity Section, basically, they have decided that prosecuting public corruption cases is not a priority. This is state and local and federal public corruption cases. They've stopped enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration act, which tripped up some Trump administration officials during the first term. They've stopped prosecuting bribery cases from companies, both public corruption and private corruption. Off the list, really, for criminal prosecution. On the list dealing with illegal immigration. In some ways, the changes on the civil side of the Justice Department are even greater. I'll just talk for a second about the Civil Rights Division. Instead of enforcing the voting rights laws, instead of enforcing the police brutality laws, they are going after alleged violations and excesses of dei. On the civil side, they are going after doctors and hospitals that provide gender affirming surgery for trans kids. They're pursuing denaturalization proceedings. Substantively, it's a complete overhaul of what the Justice Department traditionally does.
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Dave Davies
And we've also seen a cataclysmic upheaval in personnel. Many, many employees, simply gone. You want to give us some meaningful examples?
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Ruth Marcus
This is, and we mentioned this at the start, with the demotion of this very senior National Security Division official. This is a Justice Department and in fact, this is an administration that believes that its constitutional Article 2 power allows it to. To ignore the normal federal civil service protections and to fire lawyers and other employees, as I was told by a department official, for any reason or no reason. So people have been fired because they worked for Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought the two federal indictments against President Trump. Chad Mizell, the Attorney General's chief of staff, said to me, well, obviously they prosecuted the president, so they can't continue to work for that is not obvious at all to Justice Department veterans. People have been fired for reasons as trivial as failure to remove their preferred pronouns from their signature block. This is all just. Just that ending up in litigation. And we'll find out whether this is in fact within their constitutional authority or not. I don't think it is. The civil service laws are very clear that if you want to fire somebody, you have to go through the normal steps of process. But nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of a Justice Department. And one of the questions that I raise in this piece is what comes next? Someday there's going to be a Democrat elected president and a Democratic nominated attorney general. Do we then just have this situation of tit for tat and you fired our guys, so we'll fire yours? That just seems like a terrible way to behave.
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Dave Davies
Although the sense that I get is that a lot of the people who've been dismissed weren't really anybody's guys. Right. I mean, these are by and large professional staff who are committed to the work of the department.
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Ruth Marcus
Yeah, thank you for making that point. None of these people should be seen as anybody's guys. The department has a layer, a very thin layer like most departments of political staff who turn in their resignations at the change of an administration. They leave, as is normal, and new people take over. But the core of attorneys that traditionally remain from administration to administration are career lawyers. They are dedicated to defending the executive actions of President Biden, even if those executive actions are sometimes hard to defend. And they're dedicated to defending the executive actions of President Trump, even if those executive actions, and I'll just editorialize here, are often hard to defend.
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Dave Davies
We were talking about some of the major moves that Pam Bondi has made within the Justice Department to rid it of people that she thinks aren't in accordance with her agenda. One of the things that we've read is that there is a weaponization working group to examine how the department has been used in previous administrations to punish opponents. Tell us about this. What's going on here?
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Ruth Marcus
Well, the Weaponization working group was really launched on day one of the new administration when President Trump issued an executive order that basically directed the Justice Department to examine the alleged weaponization that had taken place at the Justice Department under the previous administration. And he came to the Justice Department to give a speech, and he talked about the scum that had run the department in the previous administration, including Jack Smith. So Pam Bondi, when she came in as Attorney General, immediately set up this weaponization working group. It is now being headed by Ed Martin. Ed Martin, your listeners may recall, was the failed nominee to be the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, one of the most obviously important U.S. attorney's offices in the country. And he is now heading this weaponization working group. And he is doing quite a job there of at least launching the initial efforts to do precisely from my point of view, what the Justice Department complains happened in the previous administration, which is the people who are complaining about weaponizing are in fact doing the weaponizing themselves. He has launched investigations of Letitia James, the New York Attorney General who famously sued President Trump in civil court in New York for business fraud. He's launched investigations. These are both mortgage fraud investigations of Adam Schiff, who famously tangled with President Trump during the first Trump term.
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Dave Davies
Adam Schiff was then a congressman. Now he's a senator from California.
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Ruth Marcus
This is not done. There's a very famous speech by President Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt's Attorney General, Robert Jackson, where he talks about the role of the prosecutor. And he says, the role of the prosecutor is to go after the crime. It is not to go after the individual. But what we are seeing here and its early stages is precisely the opposite of Attorney General Jackson's admonition. They seem to be going after individuals because of who the individuals are and not because that what they did rises to the level of any crime, no less a federal crime. And I think the only word for this is scary.
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Dave Davies
Yeah, we should know that you can make a distinction between firing somebody who, in the course of their work at the Justice Department, engaged in cases that you found you didn't agree with, and then actually investigating and seeking criminal charges against them. And that's what's happening here in some cases. Pam Bondi declined to be interviewed for this story, but her chief of staff, Chad Mazel, did. Did talk to you. And on this subject, he said, I don't think you will be taken seriously if you don't acknowledge that prosecuting the former President of the United States was the single greatest shift toward weaponization that the Justice Department could have undergone. And so any sort of notion that anything else she does is even comparable to that just can't be taken seriously. It's laughable. What's your reaction to that?
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Ruth Marcus
This is the animating principle of the Trump Bondi Justice Department that I think, as far as I can tell, that Chad Mizell, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and many others in the administration, certainly the president, believe fervently and sincerely that there was this terrible weaponization of the department under President Biden and Attorney General Garland. But I think this conviction, and I do think it's a conviction on the part of Chad Mizell and others, explains very much what is happening now. I think that the point that you made about the distinction between firing Justice Department employees and investigating others criminally is really important. We will see if any indictments really come out of this weaponization task force. I worry that they might. We will see if any actual convictions come out of this weaponization task force. That is going to be kind of a high bar for the department to reach because obviously you need to have a crime. You need to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. You need a unanimous jury. But I think it's very important for people to understand that the mere fact of being investigated is so ruinous, both emotionally and financially. You need a lawyer. It's going to cost you thousands and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend yourself if you can't find a pro bono lawyer. It is hard in Washington these days to find law firms that are willing to represent prominent figures in the previous administration. This is even if nothing actually is produced by the weaponization task, for the mere fact of being investigated is very, very serious and needs to be taken seriously.
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Dave Davies
We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Ruth Marcus. She is a contributing writer for the New Yorker. Her new article is titled Pam Bondi's Power Play. We recorded our conversation yesterday morning. We'll hear more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH air.
- [20:51]
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Dave Davies
You write about Pam Bondi's background, which is interesting. I mean, she grew up in Florida. Her father was an education professor who was a city council member and the mayor of the city they lived in. Her father was a traditional Roosevelt Democrat. Pam Bondi herself got a law degree at Stetson University in Gulfport, then became a local prosecutor. What was her reputation as a, you know, as a line prosecutor there in Florida?
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Ruth Marcus
Well, her reputation was as a pretty good prosecutor. She rose through the ranks in the Hillsborough county state attorney's office. She did some very serious homicide and other cases. She became the spokesman for the department. And that kind of launched her almost accidentally on a political career path because she became quite a fixture even as a working prosecutor, which was quite unusual as a talking head on cable tv, eventually Fox tv. And though she didn't have any kind of political background, and to the extent that she did have a political background, she had been a Democrat for most of her life. She got tapped by a political consultant to run for state attorney general. And in a kind of outsider Tea Party ish year in 2010, she won that job against the state's lieutenant governor and another member of the state legislature and kind of senior state official. She was the outsider. Sean Hannity came to campaign for her. Sarah Palin endorsed her. And we saw a different Pam Bondi than people had known her to be as a career prosecutor in Tampa.
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Dave Davies
Right. She ran in the Republican primary, even.
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Ruth Marcus
Though kind of yes, she ran in.
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Dave Davies
The Republican primary one there and then won in the general election. But it's interesting that once she was in the Attorney General's office. She, as you tell the story, was not a hard edged ideologue really, was she?
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Ruth Marcus
She was a pretty well regarded state Attorney general. She hired Democrats, including one of the people who had run against her for Attorney General to work in her office. The work of state Attorney general is a sort of bread and butter, consumer protection, antitrust, other cases, so on that she continued as a pretty normal Republican Attorney general. At the same time, her tenure as Attorney General coincided with a time when attorneys general across the country were becoming much more political and politicized. And so she joined pretty enthusiastically various efforts to participate in national, much more kind of culture war issues. She was very involved in the state's litigation to defeat the Affordable Care act, which was Obamacare, which was before the Supreme Court at that time. And she got involved in everything from defending the state's constitutional amendment against same sex marriage. This was in the days before the Supreme Court decided that same sex marriage was a constitutionally protected right to gun cases to other things. So she was simultaneously run of the mill Attorney General and at times in this national effort, a pretty ruby red one. So she did both at once.
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Dave Davies
There was one memorable episode in 2013. This is, you know, before Trump ran for president. And it was when the New York Attorney General had filed a fraud lawsuit against Trump University. That was the business Trump founded to offer seminars in real estate and financial management, which was allegedly misleading its students. Bondi was the Attorney General in the state where Trump resided and could have chosen to join the suit. What happened here?
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Ruth Marcus
Well, what happened in this case was that Bondi's office said that it was looking into whether to join this fraud lawsuit against Trump University. Shortly thereafter, Pam Bondi requested, solicited a contribution from Donald Trump. Donald Trump gave her a 25,000 doll contribution. Pretty significant. He managed to give it from his charitable foundation, which was not permissible. So he ended up many years later having to return that and fix that problem. The office decided not to participate in the New York lawsuit, basically saying there weren't that many complaints about Trump University per se. And Bondi's defense, because this did not look like a very good set of facts for her office. The defense was that they didn't have adequate vetting procedures in place so that she had not realized, she claimed that the office was considering this Trump related prosecution or lawsuit at the same time she was soliciting money from him. The facts of this suggested, I thought, more just sloppiness on the part of the Bondi office than they suggested. Malfeasance because the career lawyer who was deciding whether or not to join the suit testified to an investigator that he had never discussed it with Bondi. So while it really smelled, but it was not clear that it was corrupt, right?
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Dave Davies
Not necessarily a quid pro quo.
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Ruth Marcus
Yes.
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Dave Davies
She initially supported Jeb Bush for president, but then when his campaign didn't make it, she did endorse Donald Trump in 2016. She later worked on the legal team defending Trump in his first impeachment case. When he was elected the second time, his first choice for attorney general was Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman who had to withdraw due to a lack of congressional support and that investigation into his personal conduct. What did you learn from your reporting about how conservatives and MAGA faithful, how they regarded Pam Bondi as a choice?
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Ruth Marcus
There was a large contingent of the MAGA faithful that were thrilled with the selection of Matt Gaetz. And I spoke to a number of people who were very skeptical about Bondi's ability to step into the vacancy that was created by Gates implosion and to do what was necessary to turn the department around. So she came in with a lot of resistance to and skepticism about her capacity. And I think that may explain some of her belligerence and some of her extremism. I have to say, when Matt Gaetz imploded and Pam Bondi was selected, I, like many other people who care about the Justice Department, was quite relieved. She was a state attorney general. She was a career prosecutor. One could imagine that she would come into the Justice Department and say, you all, you know, do important jobs and please go ahead and do your jobs. Her performance there has been anything but that. And I think it can be explained by the MAGA skepticism towards her and by the fact that, as with everybody who works for Donald Trump, your tenure is only as good as your usefulness to Donald Trump. And that can change, as we have learned time after time in a nanosecond.
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Dave Davies
We're gonna take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Ruth Marcus. She is a contributing writer for the New Yorker. Her new about Attorney General Pam Bondi is titled Pam Bondi's Power Play. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH air.
- [30:46]
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Ruth Marcus
It was so exciting to actually go into one of those stores. We had the end caps.
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Ruth Marcus
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Dave Davies
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Dave Davies
There's been a lot of criticism, certainly from Democrats and people in Congress and legal scholars about Pam Bondi. But the real threat to her so far, it seems, have come really from the maga, right? And this involves the administration's poor performance in releasing information to confirm their conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein. You say that Pam Bondi botched this matter from the start. How?
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Ruth Marcus
She botched it by promising more than she could deliver. It started on February 21, so she was confirmed on February 5. So very shortly into her time as Attorney General, she went, of course on Fox TV on February 21, and she said there was going to be a lot of information that was forthcoming, plane logs and names and things like that. And she was asked, what about the client list that, by the way, there has been a theory that Jeffrey Epstein maintained this super secret list of clients that he helped procure young girls for. This client list doesn't exist. It I don't believe ever existed. Pam Bondi was asked about the client list and she said, quote, it's on my desk right now. This was a dumb thing to say. And it's the kind of thing that if you had an effective communication strategy, you would have cleared up right away. Pam Bondi let that prospect of this long sought but illusory client list hang out there for four plus months, until finally in early June, she said, oh. And I said, it's on my desk. I just meant there's a bunch of things on my desk, including Martin Luther King files and JFK files and things like that. So pay no attention to what you thought. I promised you Megaworld. Forget it. Go away. There's going to be nothing more to see here. And that created the furor that we've been living with for the past month or so. As MAGA has said, we want to see it, we want to see it, we want to see it. The Justice Department's eventual response was, we're not going to give you anything else. Then when there was this uproar and revolt from maga, they said, okay, we'll try to get you grand jury testimony. That didn't work. We'll interview Ghislaine Maxwell. We'll see what happens about that. Now they're offering some files to the Congress. Jeffrey Epstein was going to be a problem even for a well managed Justice Department because it is such a obsession in MAGA world. But Pam Bondi's handling of it just made that pre existing problem, I think, so much worse for her.
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Dave Davies
Right. And one of the things she did was to release early on a binder of material about Epstein which people who were begging for more information were quite disappointed in. And a lot of it was already public. The interesting thing I didn't realize until I was preparing to speak to you, she actually gathered like 15 or so conservative influencers and gave them these bindings and had a photo op out which kind of only heightened their disappointment when the goods weren't really there. Again, not so well handled, but I.
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Ruth Marcus
Mean, it's an amazing story. She and Kash Patel, the FBI director, basically intervened in this White House event for influencers. They didn't tell the White House that they were going to be distributing these binders. These binders were not reviewed as they would be in the normal course of things by the White House Counsel's office. They distribute the binders, they serve to aggravate the White House, which hadn't known that this was happening. And they also even worse aggravate the influencers because no one likes to be played for a fool. And the influencers are handed stuff that they know is not news. And that was back in May and that was just the next stage of we are really mad. So people like Laura Loomer started attacking her as Pam Blondie and really going after her. And I think it's only her pre existing and quite close relationship with President Trump that has shielded Pam Bondi so far.
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Dave Davies
A lot of the conservative critics have dropped their objections, saying we trust the president to handle this properly. Has this largely blown over for Pam Bondi or is there big trouble ahead for her to you think?
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Ruth Marcus
I think that she is safe for now, but emphasis on the for now. The president, who often accepts suggestions from Laura Loomer, the conservative activist, about who he should fire, resisted Loomer's importunings to fire, quote, unquote, Pam Blondie. He has made clear his support for the Attorney General, but I think that retaining his support is going to require eventually coming up with some of what he wants. And what he wants is revenge. And what he wants is revenge in the form of indictments and prosecutions. He said just the other day he was talking about the Russia, Russia hoax. And he was at an event at the Kennedy Center. Pam Bondi was there because Trump put her on the Kennedy center board some time ago. And he said, and I'm looking at you, Pam, when I say Hillary Clinton should be investigated. So she is attorney general for one reason only, because Donald Trump wants her there. And if he doesn't get what he wants from her, that could easily change.
- [37:42]
Dave Davies
You know, the list of people who Trump would regard as his enemies, people his tormentors is long. I mean, it's Hillary Clinton, it's John Brennan, it's many, many others. Do you have any sense from your contacts in the Justice Department whether a lot of resources are now being devoted to these investigations?
- [38:00]
Ruth Marcus
Well, we have the Weaponization Working Group. We have the spectacle of the deputy attorney general spending two days of his time interviewing Ghislain Maxwell to see what can be extracted from her. This is, you know, not a normal thing for a deputy attorney general to do. I think they are frantic, desperate to come up with a crime, any crime that they could charge the Jack Smiths of the world, the Hillary Clintons of the world, the John Brennan's of the world with I think that is going to be very hard to do. And I think as the challenges of that become clear, and some of the challenges, by the way, are very basic technical challenges, like we have statutes of limitation. You know, under federal law, much of the grudges that the president holds are outside the statute of limitations. It's going to be difficult for them to bring indictments, no less secure convictions. But as that becomes clear, I think that the president is going to be increasingly infuriated.
- [39:15]
Dave Davies
We're speaking with Ruth Marcus. She is a contributing writer for the New Yorker. Her new article is titled Pam Bondi's Power Play. We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is FRESH air.
- [39:28]
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- [39:51]
Ruth Marcus
Pop Culture Happy Hour. NPR's Easy Breezy laid back pop culture podcast has brought you the best in culture for the past 15 years.
- [39:59]
ZipRecruiter/Advertising Voice
That means we spent the last 15.
- [40:01]
Dave Davies
Years talking about what exactly bad.
- [40:03]
Ruth Marcus
Reality TV actually good.
- [40:05]
Dave Davies
Marvel movies actually awful.
- [40:07]
Ruth Marcus
Marvel movies reboots, Pop music, prestige dramas, Netflix slop. That's 15 years of buzzy pop culture chit chat. And here's to many more. With you along for the ride, listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [40:23]
Dave Davies
You know, one other thing that Pam Bondi has been involved in, of course, is the effort to federalize law enforcement in the District of Columbia. National Guard troops are there. Other federal agencies are on the and there was this dramatic kind of comical moment last week where a Justice Department employee who disagreed with seeing all these federal agents on the street, taunted some and then threw a wrapped sandwich at one of them, hit him in the chest, and then was eventually arrested. He's now been charged with felony assault. Do you know, was Pam Bondi involved in that decision?
- [40:59]
Ruth Marcus
I believe she was involved in that decision. And I do not believe in sandwich throwing. And perhaps it is felonious sandwich throwing, though that seems a little bit of an overreach. By the way, this was a Justice Department employee who also lost his job as a result. I think that you have to look at the sandwich throwing in context. And the context of the sandwich throwing is the dismissal of prosecutions and the pardoning of so many people who were involved in so much more serious offenses against law enforcement officers on January 6th. And one thing that I think people should understand is that it's not simply the outrageous dismissal of these cases. Not just people who breached the Capitol, but people who were involved in direct and harmful assaults on police officers. But there is a man working for the Justice Department now on the weaponization task force named Jared Wise. He was about to go to trial. Jury selection was supposed to start on January 20th when Donald Trump came into office and the case against him was dropped. But this is a man who is a former FBI agent. He encouraged these assaults on D.C. police officers. When people were knocked to the ground in front of him, he's on body camera footage yelling, yeah, I'm not going to use the word F them. Yeah, kill them. And that is a man who is now working for this Department of Justice. So it's a little hard to take their unhappiness about sandwich Guy terribly seriously.
- [42:52]
Dave Davies
Before I let you go, I want to talk about the transition in your career this year. Very few journalists spend 40 years at one institution. You were at the Washington Post for so long, really loved the place. And you were there when Bezos bought the paper and his wealth meant that it had you know these resources to fund all this top notch reporting. Then there was his refusal to allow the Post to run its endorsement of Kamala Harris. And the presidential race stayed with them. Then Bezos contributed a million dollars to Trump's inauguration, showed up at the inauguration, and then he eventually decreed that the opinion section would focus on, quote, personal liberties and free markets. You had lived in the opinion section for a long time. You didn't leave right away. Tell us what made you decide. You simply had to go.
- [43:45]
Ruth Marcus
What made me decide that I had to go was that I wrote a column disagreeing with the new focus of the opinion section. And the publisher of the paper, as far as I could tell, for the first time in the history of the Washington Post, at least the modern Washington Post, spiked the column because he didn't think it was proper. I don't know exactly what he thought because he never deigned to speak to me. I had written after the decision not to issue the endorsement, I had written a column disagreeing with that decision. Newspapers don't have to endorse presidents, but the timing of it was terrible. It looked terrible. The paper ran that column. I was very proud to work for a paper that was willing to tolerate dissent. When I disagreed even more strongly with the decision to narrow cast our editorial outlook. And especially we have a very vibrant and wide ranging from left to right, or we did op ed section, which I helped to supervise for many years. And during the Bezos era, I wrote a column disagreeing with that. And when it became clear that that dissent was not to be tolerated, I knew I could no longer say to my readers that I was free to write what I thought. And if you're not free to write what you think, then you can't be a very good columnist. So that was the really sad end. And I'm sad about it every day of my 40 years at the Washington Post.
- [45:24]
Dave Davies
Yeah. Painful for you, isn't it?
- [45:26]
Ruth Marcus
Totally painful. But, you know, I want to say two things about that. First of all, what federal employees are going through is so much worse than anything that I went through. That's number one. And number two is the thing that I really care about is not who I get to write for, because I'm so proud to be working for the New Yorker and to have the time and space to do longer pieces like this Bondi piece. But I'm very sad that a opinion section that believed, and I believe that Jeff Bezos believed this because I had many conversations with him about this where I thought and had every reason to know from his own mouth that he believed in expressing this diversity of views, that we now don't trust our readers enough, apparently, to allow them to hear dissenting opinions. And by the way, I myself am a very big believer in both free markets and individual liberties. So it's really a shame, not for me, but for the institution.
- [46:31]
Dave Davies
There aren't many institutions that have the resources to do serious investigative and enterprise reporting. The Washington Post is still one and does a lot of great reporting. Do you advise friends to still read it?
- [46:43]
Ruth Marcus
Subscribe to it 100%. I understand why readers were so angry about the endorsement decision. I understand why readers were angry about the tragic decision to kill a cartoon by our former cartoonist and Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnay's I understand why people were unhappy about the change in direction of the opinion section. But the paper is a great paper. It's doing great work, and I happily subscribe to the Washington Post, and I will forever.
- [47:18]
Dave Davies
Well, Ruth Marcus, thank you for your reporting. Thanks for speaking with us.
- [47:22]
Ruth Marcus
Thank you so much.
- [47:23]
Dave Davies
Ruth Marcus is a contributing writer for the New Yorker. Her new article is titled Pam Bondi's Power Play. We recorded our conversation yesterday. On tomorrow's show, Robert Reich joins us to talk about his new book, coming up, A Memoir of My America. The former labor secretary reflects on his personal journey through five decades of American politics, the moments that shaped his worldview and the country he says he still believes we can become. I hope you can join us to keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews. Follow us on Instagram nprfreshair. FRESH air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thaya Challoner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and John Shee. Our digital media producer is Molly C. V Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Roberta Shorrock directs the show for Terry Gross and Tonya Moseley. I'm Dave Davies.
- [48:42]
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