In this episode, former Justice Department attorney general Eric Holder talks about his early days in the agency, the early days of the civil rights division, and the challenges he faced as the first black attorney general. He also talks about what it was like to run the Civil Rights Division under President Donald Trump.
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00:00:30.000I think it's part of the promise of this administration under President Trump to reform the government in the way that the people voted for.
00:00:38.080I did my week of training after getting confirmed by the Senate.
00:00:41.700I was like, okay, guys, it's time to get to business.
00:00:43.520I want everyone to be very clear what the agenda is here.
00:00:45.800This catalyzed hundreds of lawyers to quit.
00:01:51.320So, your assistant attorney general, one of the greatest appointments, from my perspective, in this administration, running the civil rights division.
00:02:05.280Well, Tucker, first I'll say thank you for having me here.
00:02:08.140The civil rights division is the sort of the color revolution wing of the Department of Justice.
00:02:14.560You know, whether it's a Republican or a Democrat administration, there are career lawyers who are very focused on a particular agenda there.
00:02:25.620And so, when I showed up or when the president was elected, I should say, there are over 400 attorneys in the civil rights division and about 200 staff.
00:02:36.780And, you know, Kristen Clark, my predecessor, anti-police, you know, open racist, you know, got in trouble during her term for not being candid with the Senate during her confirmation hearings on some issues.
00:03:01.640Now, under the first Trump administration, my predecessor in that job pretty much left it untouched.
00:03:09.280You know, he told me kind of like there were career people there.
00:03:12.820If you wanted to get something done, they went to the U.S. attorney's offices.
00:03:16.500Well, you know, I came in with a different perspective.
00:03:18.900I think it's part of the promise of this administration under President Trump to fundamentally reform the government in the way that the people voted for.
00:03:27.360And so, that means in the civil rights division, we should be standing up for the civil rights of all Americans, not just some Americans.
00:03:35.200We shouldn't be weaponizing the law in a particular way.
00:03:38.280We should apply those federal civil rights statutes that many of which were passed by and signed by Republican presidents and Republican administrations evenly.
00:03:47.340And the government shouldn't be putting its heavy thumb on the scale in most cases.
00:03:52.320But in egregious instances, we should step forward and right these wrongs.
00:03:55.620But what I found there was a number of lawyers, I mean, hundreds of lawyers who were actively in resistance mode.
00:04:04.720You know, there were memos out there by former government lawyers telling current government lawyers in my department how to resist.
00:04:11.160If you're given a direct order, ask for clarification, send 20 emails, question it, slow down your response time, say it can't be done.
00:04:20.320And, you know, so I was actually looking out for that when I came and I did my week of training after getting confirmed by the Senate.
00:04:27.640And then the next week I was like, OK, guys, it's time to get to business.
00:04:30.920I want everyone to be very clear what the agenda is here.
00:04:33.100So there are 11 sections in civil rights and I drafted memos for each of those 11 sections for the lawyers and telling them these are the statutes.
00:04:41.320So, for example, Americans with Disabilities Act, this is a statute that we enforce or Title VII anti-discrimination or some of the other federal civil rights statutes.
00:04:50.960And then that's the baseline and then this is the president's agenda.
00:04:56.380These are his executive orders that he's put out there about anti-discrimination, about anti-DEI, about enforcing our laws equally.
00:06:21.420And so, you know, in response to my memos, of course, it began leaking to the press.
00:06:27.880Um, they began having unhappy hours, which they would invite supervisors, political supervisors to, to make their point that they were unhappy.
00:07:20.200You know, I come from the private sector, as you know, over 30 years in the private sector, 18 years successfully running my own law firm.
00:07:27.460And, um, you know, you get to work and, and you, you put things together and if it's not working out, you change tax and you try something else.
00:07:36.060But there's no, there's no accountability.
00:07:37.960And so that, that really has been kind of an eye opener of dealing with that culture, but we're trying to change it.
00:07:43.980There's, there are people left behind and I actually don't care what their politics are.
00:08:07.960Uh, so we are in a DOJ period here in the government.
00:08:11.720And so I haven't replaced the people who've quit as yet.
00:08:14.920So we're making do with who's left behind.
00:08:18.400Um, some of whom share the views of the ones who, who left, but perhaps weren't as able to get jobs outside and some who I think are willing to work with us.
00:08:26.040So, so my understanding was DOJ was going to be applied to like the fat in government, but like DOJ is kind of central, central institution in the country.
00:08:36.800And having lawyers who can equally apply the law and sort of end lawfare, be honest and, um, principled.
00:08:48.120And, you know, I've spoken to the attorney general about it and I'm confident that soon we'll be able to, um, hire some lawyers who are down with the program of getting the job done for the American people.
00:08:59.120So I'm looking forward to that troop coming in.
00:09:02.000But for now I have some political appointees who are extremely dedicated and passionate.
00:09:07.720Uh, I brought in lawyers of, of my vintage, quite a few experienced trial lawyers, um, and a few younger ones as well, but they're all dedicated to the cause.
00:09:15.720And so together, just in a few weeks, we have already made a lot of news nationally going after, uh, the mayor of Chicago, for example.
00:09:23.260So, so first of all, thank you for the, for, I was just thinking of you, I should say my former attorney and a great attorney.
00:09:31.160Um, going in to run the civil rights division.
00:09:34.420I mean, they must've just died when you showed up.
00:09:37.500Um, well, I didn't witness any of that, but the, the crying, the unhappy hours, the mass resignations, the leaking, there's a support group for former civil rights attorneys.
00:09:50.840Yeah, these are all leading indicators of, uh, you know, the stages of grief.
00:09:54.920And so one of the former attorneys goes on MSNBC regularly and, you know, kind of vents about the storied civil rights division of the DOJ is being destroyed.
00:10:05.400Someone heckled me at the DMV when I was waiting to get my driver's license.
00:10:08.820And so, you know, it is cutting to the core of the liberal ethos that we're actually trying to apply these civil rights laws, which I believe in, in an even-handed way.
00:10:53.740And so I'm, I get criticized by the main, the lamestream media, if you will, uh, for being perpetually online, but that's actually where I see a lot of the civil rights violations in our country being exposed because people, elected officials in our country feel very comfortable, um, acting with impunity and stating with impunity that they're going to discriminate.
00:11:12.980And so he said the quiet part out loud, which is in Chicago, according to his words, um, I hire mainly black people for the positions of authority.
00:11:25.000And, you know, he, then he listed out, he was at a church and he was in.
00:11:36.780Well, I had a reporter reach out to me saying, how did this come to your attention?
00:11:41.320I mean, as if it was some kind of secret, he had, I was like, I, I responded, well, the three angles of camera, I think suggests that it wasn't meant to be, uh, confidential or anything, but it wasn't like a, some kind of a sting operation.
00:11:53.580He publicly said, I find, you know, people have a certain description to be better and, um, I want to help them build their businesses.
00:12:03.860And so I'm giving them government jobs.
00:12:19.720The following day, less than 24 hours after I saw that video, um, my team, you know, stepped up and we've opened a federal civil rights investigation into the apparent violations of federal employment law that are occasioned by preferring one race over the other in, in hiring.
00:12:37.580His predecessor, Lori Lightfoot said at a press conference, I'm not talking to white people.
00:12:58.640Well, Tucker, every university administrator in the United States, even in the face of, um, uh, the, uh, students for fair admissions case at Harvard.
00:13:07.200So that's another project that we're dealing with at the civil rights division is, um, the absolute extent of the impunity with which campus administrators are continuing to discriminate and openly defy Supreme Court precedent.
00:13:20.500So we've opened up numerous investigations, uh, into that as well, but it's a pervasive problem in our country that racism has become institutionalized to the point where people just feel comfortable saying, yeah, I'm sorry, you're a white man.
00:13:34.120Um, thanks for playing and you, you don't get admission.
00:13:37.920You don't get a job and you don't get to, you don't get to have equal opportunity.
00:13:42.640Um, there's this blatant discrimination and racism in our country and our job at the civil rights division for so long as I'm in charge of it is to eradicate that, take it on, make examples and put a stop to it.
00:13:56.640Everybody wants freedom, but what is freedom exactly?
00:14:01.960You can't have freedom if you don't have privacy.
00:14:05.0401984, you may recall is a story about a total lack of privacy and a totally omnipresent government totalitarianism begins with no privacy.
00:14:17.620The problem is if you use the internet every day and everybody does, then you don't have any privacy because it's all open data brokers and big tech are recording and saving everything you do online and then selling it.
00:15:53.660The credit card companies are ripping Americans off and enough is enough.
00:15:58.300This is Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas.
00:16:01.040Our legislation, the Credit Card Competition Act, would help in the grip Visa and MasterCard have on us.
00:16:07.540Every time you use your credit card, they charge you a hidden fee called a swipe fee, and they've been raising it without even telling you.
00:16:15.760This hurts consumers and every small business owner.
00:16:19.200In fact, American families are paying $1,100 in hidden swipe fees each year.
00:16:25.080The fees Visa and MasterCard charge Americans are the highest in the world, double candidates and eight times more than Europe's.
00:16:33.040That's why I've taken action, but I need your help to help get this passed.
00:16:37.060I'm asking you to call your senator today and demand they pass the Credit Card Competition Act.
00:16:44.420Paid for by the Merchants Payments Coalition.
00:16:46.100Not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee.
00:16:51.320Every time I hear someone in the administration talk about this, they frame it around Israel, which I find infuriating.
00:16:59.560Not because I'm against Israel, but like what does Israel have to do with it?
00:17:02.660They're discriminating against American citizens.
00:17:04.200Why, from a public relations perspective, wouldn't it just be better to stick to the principle that in the United States, you can't use government money to discriminate against American citizens on the basis of race?
00:17:17.640Well, I think that there is a certain strain of anti-Semitism that's unique that we are confronting, but it's American citizens who are the victims of it.
00:17:26.220And so, religious discrimination is also illegal in our federal civil rights laws.
00:17:31.300And so, where you have students who are wearing yarmulkes and they're being blocked by their professors and their classmates from entering their classes, that's illegal.
00:18:32.220It is illegal now under the Supreme Court's clear direction.
00:18:36.660And Harvard is doing it and Princeton is doing it and all of these schools are doing it.
00:18:42.120I mean, so there's many different kinds of discrimination happening.
00:18:44.980There's foreign money coming into our campuses.
00:18:49.220And, you know, there was a report recently that Stanford is basically under control of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:18:56.540And so all of these problems are happening at the same time.
00:18:59.160And, you know, they've been allowed to drift and people have been bullied and people are – I was explaining to someone the other day that to do this job correctly, you have to not care what people think about you at cocktail parties.
00:19:13.280Well, clearly, but you're way past that.
00:19:16.380But can I just ask, like, I guess what I worry about, just to put a finer point on what I was attempting to express, I'm – like, identity politics is just bad kind of no matter who's getting hurt and no matter who's benefiting.
00:19:30.420Is there some way to just, like, deracialize the whole thing and just return to colorblind standards in admission, hiring, and contracting?
00:19:42.840And so that's what the Supreme Court ruled in that one case.
00:19:46.240But, you know, to take on the mayor of Chicago, we didn't do that four years ago.
00:19:55.880We didn't do that under the Bush administration.
00:19:58.420We just sort of – you know, people in power just sort of sat there and took it as if there was some need to atone for prior sins by discriminating against American citizens today.
00:20:11.440And, I mean, you know, Asians are discriminated against in hiring in Silicon Valley.
00:20:16.860I've taken on many cases of that and in universities.
00:20:20.800What did these recent immigrants do to deserve discrimination other than being successful and then being punished for it?
00:20:28.420And so you really can't right the wrongs of the past by being racist today.
00:20:33.940I think we really have to have that level of moral clarity and just say that and operate that way.
00:20:39.720Well, it's collective punishment is what it really is.
00:20:42.360You're saying someone who looked like you did something bad, therefore I'm punishing you.
00:20:47.060Or someone who looked like you was hurt, therefore you get the benefit now.
00:20:51.920I mean, the whole thing is just like it eliminates the idea of the individual, of the individual, the unique human soul.
00:20:58.200Right, which is counter to the very principles on which our country was founded.
00:21:05.660The entire Enlightenment was all about individual rights and responsibility.
00:21:23.600It does feel that way and it feels that way on campuses.
00:21:26.080It was, and I think back, I thought it was bad at Dartmouth when I was at Dartmouth more than, you know, 35 years ago, almost 40 years ago now when I went to Dartmouth.
00:21:33.580And it's so much worse today in most of these campuses, but like calling it what it is, naming it as racism and discrimination is a start.
00:21:45.940Now, we will follow through and we will bring cases.
00:21:50.440I'm proud of our president for spearheading, yanking money, our federal tax dollars away from the institutions that are the worst offenders.
00:21:59.540And I think you're going to see much more of that happening soon.
00:22:21.080I'm not the right gender, according to his descriptions.
00:22:23.780And so what the federal government has been doing over the years to ordinary companies is demand this data and then force them to hire according to a particular pattern.
00:22:38.920And then if there's a pattern of discrimination, which I think there is based on what he said, he's told us, we will leave him at his words.
00:22:47.440They'll have to take action to correct that.
00:22:49.760They may have multiple, I'm guessing that plaintiff's lawyers all over the United States are contacting plaintiffs right now in Chicago and preparing cases against the city.
00:23:00.580So the taxpayers are going to pay for this pattern and practice of discrimination that has been described by the mayor.
00:23:09.600He's just the one who said it out loud.
00:23:11.060It's been happening for decades in that city.
00:23:14.140At the same time, there's talk about reparations in multiple cities in the United States.
00:23:20.080I mean, again, that's just a wealth transfer from people who didn't do anything wrong to people who didn't have anything wrong done to them, really.
00:23:28.580And it's counterintuitive to what we believe in our country.
00:23:51.920But I do think the pendulum is swinging back in some places because these policies, these wealth transfers, if you will, the episodic rioting that you see in our cities, it is not conducive to a peaceful lifestyle or productive society.
00:24:08.980And so I think you actually are seeing, even in deep blue California, my home state, my former home state, you're seeing the pendulum swing back in ways.
00:24:19.620I mean, you know, San Francisco seems to be slowly pulling back from the brink of extremism.
00:24:25.200San Jose has a mayor who's talking some sense.
00:24:31.200And, you know, so I'm hopeful, but we can't be passive about it.
00:24:36.660First, you have to be willing to call it out and stand up and say, no, it is wrong to hire on the basis of race in America.
00:24:44.100It is wrong to discriminate against people based on what their theoretical ancestors did 200 years ago.
00:25:59.480The EEOC can actually subpoena them and do a commissioner's charge.
00:26:03.060And so eventually at the end of their parallel investigation, they'll have data that they can share with us as well.
00:26:08.240So we're working together in the university setting, in this setting, and in other settings with other branches of the executive.
00:26:18.020So, I mean, on any given day, I'm talking to the White House.
00:26:20.740I'm talking to colleagues of the Department of Education, Department of Homeland Security.
00:26:25.960I had a conversation yesterday and other conversations like that are happening.
00:26:29.800So, you know, the team is very focused on our common goals.
00:26:33.260I hate even to say this out loud, but, you know, one of the ways that, you know, someone like you rolls in, you've got, you know, a public career.
00:26:41.580So everyone knows exactly where you stand.
00:26:43.860You've been highly ferocious over the years.
00:26:48.100And so, like, there's no question what you're going to do when you get there.
00:26:51.000You're a known quantity and you're a massive threat to the way things operate there.
00:26:55.600You haven't worked in a federal agency before.
00:26:58.220There are all kinds of weird customs and laws, especially around classification.
00:27:01.320And so someone like you, they're like, ah, you know, let's trap her in something.
00:28:00.500I think it is best that people who have passions to do something that's opposite of what the president's current agenda is should do that elsewhere.
00:28:51.780Yeah, I was in law school at the time.
00:28:53.800And, you know, the police got blamed for, I think, some fairly rotten cultural trends in our society.
00:29:06.000The police got blamed trying to control that riot.
00:29:09.740I mean, you have people like Maxine Waters, you know, egging on the crowd and feeding the flames.
00:29:14.780And somehow the police got left holding the bag.
00:29:17.580And so what happened was the Department of Justice, of course, California as well, but the Department of Justice opened up investigations into police practices.
00:29:26.760And so the trend has been Department of Justice, particularly under Democrat administrations, opens up what's called a pattern and practice investigation.
00:29:37.720And they basically say that any time one cop does something wrong, it must be because there is a systemic problem in the police department.
00:29:56.520That's underlying most of these police consent decrees is racism.
00:29:59.920And I'll talk about current examples as well.
00:30:02.740But so cities, by the way, I mean, you've all seen this in prosecutions.
00:30:08.960When the federal government comes after you with its endless resources and its punitive scope of measures that it can apply, even America's biggest cities worth with tens of billions of dollars of budgets, they quake.
00:30:24.140Because it can become very expensive and it can become a politically charged football to continue to have these federal court hearings and judges and all of that.
00:30:34.920So what typically happens is the DOJ says, hi, we are from the government.
00:30:38.660We think that you're a racist and we'd like you to enter into a consent decree where you, the city, is going to pay Bob over here, who works at a big white shoe law firm, several million dollars to monitor your compliance with this.
00:31:09.800The lawyers in the civil rights divisions of the United States Department of Justice.
00:31:13.920They have a lot of experience policing big cities?
00:31:16.480They have no experience policing big cities.
00:31:19.320Some of them have probably never met a cop in the wild.
00:31:24.500You know, these are lawyers from good schools and they're very idealistic.
00:31:30.340By the way, most of them have never tried a case in their lives.
00:31:33.900And of all the consent decrees, one of the striking things I learned this week is of all the consent decrees that the United States Department of Justice has imposed, and there are dozens and dozens of them over the years, maybe hundreds, but certainly in recent decades, dozens per year in some years.
00:31:53.940And the Biden administration, they opened up a dozen investigations, and those are some of the ones that I've been examining since I got into office.
00:32:02.280They only took two of those cases to trial.
00:32:05.040In hundreds of instances of investigations, they lost one, and they lost the police part of the other one.
00:32:13.680There was a housing aspect of the second one, which they won.
00:32:18.020And so, in all the years that you've read about Los Angeles and Albuquerque and Seattle and Portland and all of these cities being under consent decrees,
00:32:28.700no federal judge ever looked at the evidence and found that the United States Department of Justice actually proved their case that there was systemic racism or systemic improper training.
00:32:42.000It was lawyers like the ones I described earlier, who don't have much trial experience, looking at a dry paper record, and by the way, over the last several years, sitting in their living room doing it because they were working from home during COVID.
00:32:58.480So, in their home, looking at paper and selectively cherry-picking evidence from these records that they forced the cities to turn over, reaching conclusions.
00:33:10.080Not reaching conclusions that a jury agreed with or that even a federal judge saw the evidence of, but simply bullying American cities into compliance and then presenting a fait accompli to a judge.
00:33:23.660And in some cases, most cases, the judges would say, okay, I agree.
00:33:29.660And what's particularly shocking is, in so many of the recent instances of police consent decrees in the United States, woke prosecutors in those cities and woke city councils and woke mayors went along with them.
00:33:45.720They wanted them because they, too, don't like the police.
00:33:48.700And so, it has been a sort of perfect storm of the taxpayer having to pay for monitoring.
00:33:59.460Some fat cat lawyer gets a big contract that goes on for many years.
00:34:03.420And crime skyrockets in cities with consent decrees.
00:34:07.600This is called the Ferguson effect, after Ferguson, Missouri.
00:34:11.920When a city's under a consent decree, cops have to suddenly fill out reams of paperwork every day.
00:34:22.620They move to cities where they do want policing to be done effectively.
00:34:26.260Crime goes up because criminals now know that the policing is not being done.
00:34:30.120And so, for example, and I'm not just saying this from a biased perspective.
00:34:34.500Axios did a review of cities under consent decrees.
00:34:37.880And I think one of the figures is crime went up by 61% in Los Angeles County as a result after consent decrees were imposed on the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
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00:37:27.740So, again, they don't talk about this much.
00:37:30.940A population that is strong, clear-minded, physically capable is a threat.
00:37:35.440But that doesn't mean you can't be all of those things.
00:40:01.780And then all of us were subjected to mob violence.
00:40:04.700And what called me was the police, 200-plus of them with riot gear, just stood there and watched.
00:40:09.880And I went and, during the course of my lawsuit, suing over the fact that American citizens were injured in a violent mob.
00:40:17.240I asked some of them, like, why was that?
00:40:20.420You get to the bottom of that lawsuit and it turns out that because of consent decrees and best practices of policing that are coming down from Washington, D.C. and the DOJ, the police are taught to basically, in a crowd control situation, stand there and watch and not do anything.
00:40:43.880And so, I have experience suing the police and, you know, trying to get them to improve their practices and be more aggressive on behalf of the taxpayers, which is the opposite of what they're usually asked to do in these cases.
00:40:52.780And so, you know, so we resolved that case with some agreements that they would do some training and be a little, you know, different than what they were.
00:41:01.740But what we're seeing in the Biden DOJ, which, again, I came in and I looked at the books here, is it's striking that, first of all, they took the four years to immediately begin changing course, opening investigations that the Trump DOJ had closed and shut down.
00:41:19.080And then, literally after the election, after the election where President Trump won in 2024, they filed several cases and made public several findings of fact in over, you know, over 10 cities in the United States.
00:41:35.100They hastily ran to court in December in Louisville, Kentucky, and in January, January 6th in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to file new cases.
00:41:49.260You know, clearly at the tail end, they lost the election.
00:41:51.400They're not going to be able to carry this through, but they wanted to make public these consent decrees.
00:41:55.100So, they put in front of two federal judges in these two cases in Minneapolis and Louisville, these factual findings.
00:42:01.920Now, these factual findings are done by lawyers sitting in their living rooms on a dry paper record, and the findings are, you know, we have reason to believe that these cities engaged in racist policing and also violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
00:42:21.080That's a common theme running through the dozen or so consent decrees and factual findings predating a consent decree that I've reviewed at DOJ.
00:42:29.540So, the idea is that if a drugged out or mentally ill person is the subject of a call to 911, somehow the police dispatcher is supposed to know, just based on a member of the public calling or somebody calling for help themselves, that they should have done, what, I don't know, dispatched a social worker instead of a cop to the scene after someone dials 911?
00:42:52.740Is being addicted to illegal narcotics disability?
00:42:55.340I mean, you might think so, or reading some of the factual findings.
00:43:00.220I am serious, based on the factual findings I've seen from DOJ.
00:43:03.340I thought it was a crime, or a failing at very least.
00:43:06.700Tucker, it's a mental health issue, and it's a Americans with Disabilities Act.
00:43:09.460Actually, so if I'm addicted to meth, I have special protection?
00:43:13.880Well, apparently the police dispatcher is supposed to know by that 911 call that they shouldn't have sent a cop, they should have sent a social worker.
00:43:23.360And the federal government is doing that?
00:43:24.820The federal government, DOJ, has been reaching those factual findings and then asking federal judges to impose thick, decade-long, minutely detailed consent decrees, out of which cities struggle to get out of.
00:43:41.000You know, the average consent decree, Tucker, when the United States Department of Justice gets, bullies a city into agreeing to it, is over a decade.
00:43:49.360So the problem isn't solved quickly by all the taxpayer dollars, the monitor, the police reform, the community policing councils and groups that are set up in these consent decrees.
00:43:59.720The judge overseeing it, the problem that was identified, isn't solved.
00:44:04.080In fact, it turns out that when you fund investigations and you fund monitoring, and a monitor decides when you're good enough and your performance has improved, you get more monitoring.
00:44:39.740And when we came into office, it was a priority of this administration to review all pending consent decrees, all consent decrees that had yet to be entered by a judge,
00:44:50.760all pre-consent decrees factual findings found by the Department of Justice and announced publicly shaming these cities.
00:44:58.080And look at the data and see, are these really justified?
00:45:01.760And our immediate conclusion, by the way, not just our conclusion, in the case of Minneapolis and Louisville, federal judges to which these were presented had some tough questions.
00:45:11.040And in the case of Louisville, the judge asked the DOJ lawyers, these DOJ lawyers I've described from the Civil Rights Division, to explain themselves.
00:45:44.420This is days before the administration is about to turn over.
00:45:46.900So we've asked for a couple of continuances.
00:45:50.240So what are the criteria that government lawyers use to, like, reach the conclusion that there's systemic racism that requires a dissent decree?
00:47:02.080Memphis, Tennessee is one of the cities that the outgoing Department of Justice issued some pretty lurid-looking factual findings in.
00:47:10.000And so when you start reading it, you look at, hey, the findings are, well, Memphis is racist and, you know, their arrest rates of African-Americans are disproportionate.
00:47:21.420I'm sorry, let me just say, anyone who's been to Memphis, it's such a wonderful place.
00:47:41.660The homeless population, which is the subject of this consent decree finding, pre-consent decree finding, is majority black.
00:47:49.080And so the idea that there's disproportionate arrests of, you know, people who are on the street and, you know, potentially committing crimes is racist.
00:47:58.040Black cops, black population, and black homeless population.
00:48:02.720How do you reach that conclusion that racism?
00:48:05.660You have to reach that conclusion because you are biased yourself.
00:48:09.120And the lens that you're looking through is a lens seeking racism.
00:48:13.060And if that's what you're seeking, that's what you find in each of these cities.
00:48:17.060And that is what they found in each of these cities.
00:48:23.100But, you know, in the end, like Memphis also has not only the country's highest murder rate or one of them, like the worst schools and like contaminated water and crumbling housing stock and like no businesses.
00:48:46.560And look, one of the things people need to understand as a lawyer, when I go into federal court, my name as the assistant attorney general for civil rights is on all of these documents that we file in court.
00:48:57.400Sometimes the attorney general's name is on it as well.
00:48:59.400But my name is on all of these documents where we charge somebody.
00:49:03.080And I have to be able to say to the judge, look the judge in the eye and say, I believe in these findings of my Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.
00:50:06.720So wishing it were so does not make it so.
00:50:10.140And so what's happening is these cities are having to agree to these things because they're afraid of the consequences or they have a woke city council that wants the hands of the police to be tied.
00:50:21.340That's the most corrupt thing is the cities were basically begging for these consent decrees to be entered.
00:50:26.600And, you know, in the case of Louisville, we're dismissing Louisville.
00:50:37.360I think it's the weirdest, most suicidal thing I've ever seen.
00:50:41.020No one's talking about it until we started looking at these.
00:50:44.100And so we're dismissing and withdrawing the Minneapolis and the Louisville consent decrees that were put in front of federal judges just a few months ago.
00:50:53.440We are telling judges that this is not something that the DOJ can stand behind.
00:50:59.240Now, in each of these cities, by the way, Louisville has already agreed to hire its own police monitor without the DOJ forcing them to do it.
00:51:09.160I wouldn't necessarily think that the problem goes to that degree.
00:51:14.260Someone's friend who's a lawyer is probably going to get paid out of that and, you know, good for them.
00:51:18.960But in Minneapolis's case, Minneapolis has already entered into a state consent decree.
00:51:27.820So why are they still, you know, going along with this federal one?
00:51:31.100Well, they thought the federal one would be worse and more onerous.
00:51:34.480And so Minneapolis has publicly stated that they're going to oppose the Department of Justice's attempts to dismiss the case against the city, believe that or not.
00:51:44.800That is like the craziest thing I've ever heard.
00:51:46.740I mean, you would think as a city leader, your job is first to protect your city and then deal with your problems yourself, which they're already doing in Minneapolis.
00:51:54.940They're begging to be punished by the feds for crimes that they probably didn't commit.
00:53:07.240Look, I knew that consent decrees were an abusive process.
00:53:10.620I did not realize the extent to which there was collusion in this process.
00:53:14.820I mean, we have perpetual monitors who have made decades of their lives getting paid up.
00:53:20.000Like there's one which a city that just closed up its consent decree, DOJ dismissed it after a decade.
00:53:26.240A single man got paid a million dollars a year to monitor a year to monitor a city's compliance with a DOJ consent decree that went on and on and on.
00:53:39.320And, you know, these consent decree monitors set compliance rates of 95% or 100%.
00:53:45.520And it's like it's like Zeno's paradox.
00:53:48.280You know, you never actually reach 100% because you never reached 94%.
00:55:23.220It makes you think like maybe we just burn the system down and start again.
00:55:27.300Well, what we're doing is one by one looking at every existing consent decree, and I haven't gotten through all of them.
00:55:32.700But, you know, we got to the point where six weeks in, I said, look, we have to put a stop to these.
00:55:37.300I mean, some of these cities, so Phoenix, Arizona, we're dismissing the findings, we're withdrawing the findings in our pre-consent decree efforts there.
00:55:46.340Mount Vernon, New York, a tiny police department with, you know, what I would say a couple of practices that I wouldn't necessarily agree are the best practices, but, you know, they've also agreed to stop doing them.
00:55:57.380So why is the federal government getting involved and putting together thick reports?
00:56:26.240So, you know, good for them having some integrity in their city government.
00:56:30.220I've heard from members of Congress in some of these jurisdictions who said this consent decree is simply, I mean, I'll give you the example of Phoenix.
00:56:37.880So Phoenix seems to be an attempt by the Department of Justice to go after a sort of purple, reddish jurisdiction and hold them accountable for trying to impose quality of life standards.
00:56:49.960So, for example, Phoenix has been called to account in the DOJ report that we're withdrawing as part of my investigation for moving the homeless along.
00:56:58.800And what law do they cite in this consent decree analysis?
00:57:03.860They cite the Boise, Idaho case that people are familiar with where the court, the Ninth Circuit held that it was unconstitutional for Boise to try to, you know, move homeless people off the street unless you had a nice housing to put them in.
00:57:21.080Well, the United States Supreme Court reversed that.
00:57:24.300And so they reversed it in the Grants Pass case.
00:57:27.480So we're even today in the DOJ's recent consent decree work simply ignoring binding Supreme Court precedent that says that what the police were doing in Phoenix is a-okay under the law and hoping to simply bully them into compliance.
00:57:43.380So this is not what our federal government should be doing.
00:57:44.440Do you want more people living on the sidewalk?
00:57:46.380Like, this is, if you take three steps back, it's like so dark, so diseased.
00:58:24.040And part of the answer clearly is what you're describing, which is an attempt by elements of the Department of Justice to, like, create these outcomes.
00:58:33.320Well, and on top of that, there's some corrupt rent seeking as well.
00:59:01.780Other cities have reported to us, lawyers, my colleagues in the DOJ, that if you dare complain about my bills, I'm going to keep you under a consent decree longer.
00:59:33.440Judges are busy and judges are not looking at them that carefully.
00:59:37.880So just to be clear, you have half of your staff attorney positions unfilled because you don't have the budget to hire new lawyers, ones who might actually want to follow the law.
00:59:49.860But we somehow have the money, even post-doge, to pay monitors a million dollars a year to oversee arrangements that lead to more violent crime.
01:00:00.400Well, the monitors are not being paid by the DOJ.
01:00:04.080So the cities that are under the lens of the DOJ are having these costs imposed on them.
01:00:11.560And there's, like I said, no accountability.
01:00:13.960There are annual conferences of the judges who impose the consent decrees, of the monitors who enjoy the fees and don't solve the problem, and the city officials who think it's all kind of a game.
01:00:29.020Let's have community policing, and let's have a bunch of, you know, random people who have no background in dealing with crime tell the police what to do.
01:01:06.480And we have been made to believe that riots, like after the, you know, Minneapolis incident with George Floyd, like the regrettable incident where Breonna Taylor was shot.
01:01:20.120By the way, my department is prosecuting the two cops who lied to get a no-knock warrant in that case.
01:01:29.340I mean, that is a serious offense, and we're going to hold those individuals accountable, which is different than holding the whole city of Louisville and all the taxpayers in that city accountable for mistakes that were allegedly made by two individuals.
01:01:43.480So, you know, what a concept, you know, individual responsibility for individual mistakes.
01:01:52.480And so, you know, we do that regularly.
01:01:54.200In each of these jurisdictions, Tucker, where the DOJ has been examining these police departments, there have been police misconduct cases, and cops have been punished, either at the state level or at the federal level.
01:02:08.500They're bad actors in every industry, you know, media and law and medicine.
01:02:14.360But asking cops, as a matter of a multi-hundred-page consent decree to sort of be doctors and predict Americans with Disabilities Act outcomes, adverse outcomes, is just insane.
01:04:03.240And yet you have corrupt monitors who are holding cities hostage, effectively, and all the taxpayers in those cities for their personal benefit.
01:04:11.840And then you have city councils who are elected to represent the people, and instead they would like to see the cops handcuffed and see the streets burning in their cities.
01:04:24.760It is a broken system, and at least the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, is not going to be participating in making that broken system worse under President Trump's leadership and under our current attorney general.
01:04:51.160So there's probably so many things that you're looking at that you're going to want to examine that have been going on that most people, including me, didn't know about.
01:05:03.560Well, there are 11 sections in the Civil Rights Division, and some of the things that we're going to be looking at in coming weeks and months include the rampant anti-Christian bias happening throughout the United States.
01:05:14.880And so there's anti-Christian bias happening within the government.
01:05:19.300There are chaplains in the military who are told to tone down their Christianity under the prior administration, and that's insane.
01:05:29.180And, you know, in America, we're founded on religious liberty, and specifically the Protestants who came here to be able to practice their faith freely.
01:05:36.880And so we're bringing back a focus on that.
01:05:43.240And it's important for all people of faith in America to be able to worship.
01:05:47.540And so we're bringing a number of cases under what's called the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which is when jurisdictions are discriminating on the basis of zoning against houses of worship, be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or any faith.
01:06:05.080That's happening throughout the United States.
01:06:07.480I don't like it when they hassle the Scientologists.
01:06:09.740I didn't like it when they hassle the Orthodox Jews in Borough Park during COVID.
01:06:13.640It's not about—I'm not, you know, Jewish or Scientologists, but, like, I agree with you.
01:06:18.060People of faith have an interest in religious freedom, period.
01:06:20.940And we have a federal law that gives them higher than First Amendment protection, that law that I mentioned.
01:06:26.260And so we're going after Forestburg, New York.
01:06:28.640We're going after other jurisdictions that are doing this.
01:06:31.140And so we are going after discrimination in employment, like the Chicago cases.
01:06:37.280People have been texting me all in the last 24 hours and 48 hours since we started this investigation, giving me other examples of other cities doing the exact same thing.
01:06:47.720So we have a lot of work cut out for us.
01:06:50.120The DOJ civil rights generally covers—not exclusively, but generally covers—government discrimination.
01:06:56.220I mean, occasionally it will aversion to private discrimination.
01:06:59.900Colorado is forcing a Christian camp to supposedly allow boys to be in the girls' changing rooms.
01:07:08.440That's a violation of the religious liberty of the kids and the families going to that Christian camp.
01:07:14.620We're going to be going after schools that try to take from parents their natural, God-given, and constitutional right to control their children's education,
01:07:23.620be it with sexualized curricula or transgenderism that's happening in our schools throughout the United States from the most unlikely places.
01:07:33.700And, you know, I kind of joke—I'll start the day at 8 o'clock in the morning or earlier sometimes,
01:07:39.420and throughout the day, one or the other one of my deputies jumps into my office, and I'm like, oh, what fresh hell is this?
01:07:44.420The sheer volume of violations of our civil rights happening by the state and local petty bureaucrats and wrong-minded private people throughout the United States is overwhelming sometimes.
01:07:59.900So if I had 400 lawyers plus at my disposal to go after them, we would keep them busy doing good work for the American people all day long.
01:08:09.520I think you're a hero, Harmeet, and I will say you're one of the only people in all of Washington, D.C.
01:08:17.160who doesn't really want to be invited to Politico's White House Correspondents Dinner Party.