Former U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling joins me to talk about his work in rooting out corruption in the college admissions process, and why it's time to ban all forms of corruption in America's most elite colleges and universities. We also discuss the fentanyl crisis and whether or not it should be prioritized in the same way as the opioid addiction crisis, which is the focus of today's episode. Music: Fair Weather Fans by The Baseball Project, Recorded live at WFMU and produced by Riley Bray Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Will Witwer Editing: Will Wade Wilson Special thanks to our sponsor, Caff Monster Energy Drink, Inc., for sponsoring the podcast and contributing to the production of the music featured in this episode. Please consider pledging a small monthly amount to support the podcast by clicking the link below, and we'll give you a shoutout in the comments section below. Thank you! Thank you so much for your support, and stay tuned for more episodes in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for our next episode on the opioid crisis and fentanyl crisis, coming soon! Stay safe out there, folks! -Eugene Pizzi Tweet Me! and Timestamps: in the future episode of the podcast: . . . Text Me!! , & . and in the podcast ( ) Thanks, Andrew Lely to the podcast, Tim, Andrew, - @ or for the podcast? Please rate us your thoughts on the fentanyl? , and your support is so we can help us spread the word out there about this podcast, and send us out to the world about the fentanyl epidemic? - Timestep ? tweet us out there! , or send us what you think about it! & your thoughts about the drug crisis? and what you like it's a little bit more? & so on this podcast is appreciated. - TIMESTAG: - Thank you, Timestag: , right? or not too much? #fentanyl? @p=a& : <3 #Fentanyl Crisis? (linktr. and so on + Also, thank you, Andrew
Transcript
Transcripts from "Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. You can also explore and interact with the transcripts here.
00:00:02.000Meritocracy is at the heart of what it means to be American.
00:00:28.000We need to put the merit back into America.
00:00:31.000That's why I'm a chief proponent of eliminating affirmative action in America.
00:00:36.000That's something that a U.S. president can do.
00:00:38.000I think that when it comes to college admissions, that's something that the Supreme Court is likely to do later this year.
00:00:44.000And I think that's going to be a good thing for the country.
00:00:46.000Where people know when they look to their left and look to their right in a college classroom, for that matter, in the workplace, that they know the person who got that seat got it because they were the best person for that job, the best person for that spot without, say, race-based preferences entering into that game.
00:01:04.000And so that's something that's near and dear to my heart.
00:01:07.000I intend to end race-based affirmative action, and that's part of a pro-merit campaign in America.
00:01:14.000But race-based affirmative action isn't the only impediment to merit in America either.
00:01:21.000We have corruption in every one of our institutions, starting with the federal government, by the way.
00:01:26.000Civil service protections that say you can't be fired even if you're doing a bad job.
00:01:35.000It's anti-meritocratic where the people who we elect to run the government don't run the government.
00:01:39.000anti-meritocratic strains pervade American life.
00:01:42.000But there's one area where we've seen the rise of an anti-meritocratic cancer, too, and rise of a certain form of corruption that nobody else had really taken on in quite the way that my guest today had in his tenure as a prosecutor.
00:01:58.000I'm joined today by Andrew Lelling, who was the main person, the U.S. attorney out of Boston, who led actually the national case.
00:02:07.000We'll talk about why it is that he had jurisdiction to do it nationally, but led the national purge of a corrupt system of determining who actually gets into college and who doesn't.
00:02:19.000And yes, there is corruption in the race-based admissions policies.
00:02:24.000Maybe even endlessly in other settings.
00:02:27.000But today we're actually going to focus not on the race-based affirmative action cancer, but on the insider rigging of a system that determines who actually gets to make it into America's most elite ranks, starting with our universities and what we can do to actually stop it.
00:02:44.000And we'll also take some counter arguments to whether or not this should be prosecuted legally versus pursued in other ways.
00:02:50.000But that's going to be the first of several topics we cover from there to actually the fentanyl crisis, something else he knows well as a prosecutor.
00:02:56.000I'm excited to dig into the discussion and joined here in Columbus by Andrew Lely.
00:03:52.000This guy named Rick Singer who used to himself be an assistant basketball coach on the college level decided to set up a scam where he would on the one hand bribe college coaches To take students that he identified to them, meaning each college coach in first-tier or second-tier sports has a number of slots they can play with where they can go to the admissions committee and they can say, hey, this guy or gal is a great prospect.
00:04:50.000And what he would do is he would say to wealthy parents, look, if you wanted to guarantee your child's admission the old-fashioned way, you'd have to give that elite college $10 million.
00:05:00.000A million dollars isn't going to do it anymore.
00:05:34.000He probably brought in about $25 million over the course of the 10 years or so that he pursued this scam.
00:05:44.000One, he would guarantee admission to a university.
00:05:48.000What he would also do in a side scam is he would help your child cheat on the SAT. He would sell these services to parents who were unscrupulous enough to buy them.
00:06:00.000What was fascinating about the case and what drove public attention to the case is that when we put the case together, Over time, what we realized is that the parents who had bought these services for him were, as I said at the press conference, a veritable catalog of wealth and privilege in the United States.
00:06:22.000Hedge fund titans, CEOs, two famous actresses, A prominent vineyard owner in Napa.
00:06:32.000I mean, you had just this mix of uber wealthy people who had signed up for this from many different walks of life.
00:06:41.000And so, oh, one of my favorites actually, the managing partner of a global law firm.
00:06:50.000Where professional ethics are meat and potatoes for your day-to-day job.
00:06:54.000I believe actually, if I'm remembering correctly, now that you bring that fact up, I think one of the leading ESG fund managers, which was about sustainable investing was ensnared in this, right?
00:07:27.000So I am – the reason you're here is I'm so interested in what you did.
00:07:32.000And I think it's actually really important to have highlighted – This strain of anti-meritocratic cancer, which actually in some ways provides legitimacy to other cases for affirmative action or otherwise to say, well, if the system's already corrupt, then let's at least even it out.
00:07:50.000You're seeing this tremendous disconnect between the perception of the American public and what actually happens in the college admissions system.
00:07:58.000Middle America thinks that it is roughly a meritocratic process to get into college.
00:08:07.000But you have race-based affirmative action, you have legacy admissions, you have other aspects of the process, and you have just petty corruption, like what Rick Singer was peddling here.
00:08:18.000And so, this case really grabbed the country's attention.
00:08:38.000When people see famous actors in the cover of People magazine who bought their kids way into college and the breadth and scope of the scam, it really undermined their confidence in a system that was already teetering on the brink.
00:08:50.000So on this podcast, one of the things we believe in is embodying the values of free speech and open debate here.
00:08:57.000And I know you're an attorney, you're a prosecutor, so you can handle it.
00:09:04.000What you did in exposing this problem, but I want to just put some pressure on some different aspects of this and then come back at me with respect to counterarguments to the points that I want to make because I think it will be useful for people to – on the other side of it, I think you'll actually persuade people more effectively if you understand some of the objections here.
00:09:21.000So the first of them was – okay, I hear you on the scam artist of this guy who's putting this together.
00:09:29.000Actually, I'm going to get to this separate question in a second about why the parents, but even in the scam artist for a second, what's his name again?
00:12:50.000And as you pointed out, there's still litigation going on on some of these points.
00:12:54.000So on this, let's just – because a couple of these rabbit holes I just want to go down because I think it will help people understand.
00:13:00.000This is such an interesting case, but people went by so fast that the details may have been missed.
00:13:08.000Suppose you're Rick Singer and as the fraudster guy, you know, so – Suppose you're him and that was the only case in the Stanford case.
00:13:17.000You could say that was the university itself, right?
00:13:20.000The coach is a representative of the university.
00:13:22.000So in one case, I talked to the president of the university and I write him a $10 million check to the university and my kid gets in and that's normal course.
00:13:31.000In the other case, I write a – I don't know how much was it?
00:14:31.000In the varsity blues context, there's fraud.
00:14:35.000You are deceiving the school by telling the school this is an athlete and the student is not an athlete.
00:14:42.000There is a fraudulent misrepresentation.
00:14:44.000So in that Stanford example of it, for example, or in that example where the coach didn't even take this – because if the coach takes the side money, okay, there.
00:15:35.000Admissions committee, thus deceived, agrees to use this law.
00:15:39.000So, then there's a question of choice of defendant.
00:15:41.000We'll get through these early legal questions just because I think they're fun and interesting.
00:15:45.000I mean, in that case, let's just since we took the trouble of walking through that example, why is Singer the defendant and not the coach who's actually the agent of the university?
00:16:32.000The question is whether or not it was unlawful and intended to be the kind of behavior that the laws were intended to put people in the prison in the back of.
00:16:38.000Suppose they didn't know about the fraudulent nature because the essence of the fraud is a coach lying to the university in conspiracy with this middleman, Rick.
00:16:52.000If a parent is just getting a deal to say, I pay $250,000 and my kid gets into college and that's a lot cheaper than paying $10 million, which is the natural other alternative, then Like if you put yourself in the shoes of that parent, I don't like this game one bit, okay?
00:17:06.000But suppose you're one of those parents and you say, okay, I could pay $10 million and get my kid into college.
00:17:11.000Instead, this guy says, I can pay $250,000 and get my kid into college.
00:17:17.000Why, if the fraud was downstream of them, why does the customer of that service themselves bear criminal liability?
00:17:26.000They do not unless they were aware or should have been aware of the fraud.
00:17:48.000There were potential defendants against whom we did not proceed because we were concerned whether we could prove that they had the sufficient intent.
00:18:51.000And there were some unfortunate instances where the son or daughter was involved in the conversation and in on fabricating the resume, which was too bad to see.
00:19:01.000I mean, let's get into the philosophy of this a little bit.
00:19:05.000I think the problem that you exposed is a big problem.
00:19:11.000I think that seeing a problem, even if you don't solve it, alone is a service because that helps build trust in institutions that have lost the trust of the public.
00:19:23.000Our university and education system is very high on that list.
00:19:26.000One of the rationales for doing this case.
00:19:53.000So, until you understand this, and I think you have to have a theory as a chief executive here, I struggle with using the Judicial – using the justice system to put select individuals here in prison as a way of exposing what was a deep rot.
00:20:24.000Everyone sits by and looks the other direction as this corrupt, anti-meritocratic system plays itself out.
00:20:31.000The attack on merit is an attack on the American soul.
00:20:34.000And so someone needs to do something about it.
00:20:38.000At the same time, there's a part of me that feels like those parents who, from their experience of it, just think of like an ordinary American, and this goes to the willfulness, where you're really willfully blind if everyone knows that you can write a $10 million check to a university and get in, that somebody else comes along and says they can do a $250,000 check and without doing due diligence on it, sort of says, okay, $250,000, fine, I'm just playing the same game and getting a cheaper rate.
00:21:08.000That there's something about that, not for that Rick guy, and maybe not even for the coaches who knew what they were doing, but for that parent to be behind bars as a way of solving that problem.
00:21:20.000You're putting your finger on an inherent unfairness in the criminal justice system that we actually readily accept.
00:21:44.000So, there is a general, what we call general deterrence value to prosecuting Rick and prosecuting these parents and prosecuting coaches for doing this.
00:21:54.000So, maybe it doesn't happen the next time.
00:21:56.000Ideally, you wouldn't have to do that.
00:21:58.000Ideally, you would use a different paradigm.
00:22:01.000There'd be a regulatory approach, a more legal or legislative approach, something that makes universities I'm better at this, which they are now after Varsity Blues, or somehow otherwise programmatically weeds out of the system this kind of corruption without having to make an example of people.
00:22:21.000Traditionally, what has happened is in America, we've done this slightly backwards, and Varsity Blues is a good example.
00:22:28.000You do the case, it uncovers the problem, you prosecute a bunch of people, and then legislatures pass laws or schools improve their internal procedures.
00:22:41.000Yeah, I mean, let's talk about the two theories of criminal justice, right?
00:22:45.000Proper retribution and reform versus deterrence.
00:22:49.000On the deterrence count, two sub-questions there, right?
00:22:54.000One is I think everyone is in favor of – or whatever.
00:22:58.000We've accepted as a system that we're okay with a cop pulling the one person who runs the red light over even if every person doesn't get pulled over and that that person bears a punishment that deters everybody else from doing – because there's the possibility the same thing could happen to you.
00:23:14.000I think that in principle, you could achieve deterrence by then putting a person who runs a red light in for prison for 10 years makes it definitely less likely that somebody is going to cross a red light.
00:23:25.000But it's constrained by the justice of that situation too, that there would be something fundamentally unjust about putting someone in prison for those 10 years.
00:23:33.000And so I think question number one… Portionality is a break on deterrence value.
00:23:38.000And that relates to my second question, and I'll put both of you together, but one is whether or not the idea of putting that parent in prison… Was the equivalent of the 10 years for the – I'm exaggerating it, but for the red light.
00:23:54.000And then combine that with the fact that even when you're doing it for the person who crosses the red light, you're still deterring the other person who crosses the red light.
00:24:03.000Whereas the social good that came out of this that you pointed to, universities have begun to reform their behaviors – Is a little bit different, right?
00:24:13.000Because the theory of this case is that the university was the victim, and yet the party whose behavior you're reforming is really the party who in the legal theory was the victim.
00:24:25.000So universities are reforming their behavior for the better.
00:24:35.000Yeah, which is different than the deterrence of saying somebody who runs a red light, you don't want other people running a red light, you punish them.
00:24:40.000Here you're saying the police system that's policing people who's running red lights, it's like the traffic light, really, or whatever.
00:24:47.000You're saying that the person runs a red light, punish them so you fix the traffic light, which is a little bit different.
00:24:51.000So I guess I wanted you to respond to both of those, both the proportionality and the indirectness.
00:24:59.000What you're doing is exposing a flaw in a system, and so fixing it requires a few things.
00:25:04.000There's the university side of the equation.
00:25:07.000So in light of varsity blues, most universities scrambled to improve their internal compliance procedures so that they would avoid this kind of problem, right?
00:25:16.000No longer take the coach's word for it that this kid is a great water polo player, but do a little more due diligence.
00:25:25.000On the other side of the equation, maybe we have deterred the consumer population, the parents, a little bit more than they otherwise would be From getting into this sort of behavior.
00:25:39.000So, hopefully it has healthy effects on both sides of the equation.
00:25:43.000I agree what makes it a little anomalous.
00:25:46.000What you're not doing is deterring predators like Rick Singer, right?
00:25:51.000So, Rick Singer may or may not be a deterrable person.
00:26:00.000In any context, when it comes to securities fraud or the kinds of investment fraud, this kind of fraud.
00:26:06.000It is questionable whether they can be deterred, but the surrounding systems can be improved so that less of this happens in the future, right?
00:26:16.000The universities are more on guard, parents are more afraid to do this kind of thing, and so the ground isn't quite as fertile for this kind of fraud.
00:26:29.000It's not nothing, but it won't guarantee this doesn't happen in the future.
00:26:32.000To your proportionality point, I'll tell you, there were some days when I was a federal prosecutor where I would have done the job for free.
00:26:40.000Because you get paid to wrestle with these amazing issues of legal and moral responsibility that other people just don't get to deal with.
00:26:49.000So, I remember saying to people, You remember the marathon bombing?
00:26:54.000And one of the things I had to do toward the end of my tenure was decide whether to recommend to the Attorney General whether we should continue to seek the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving bomber in the marathon bombing.
00:27:06.000I remember saying to people that was an easier decision at the end of the day than figuring out what to recommend for some of these Varsity Blues defendants for reasons that you point out.
00:27:16.000Do these parents really need to go to jail?
00:27:19.000It's a good – especially against the backdrop of we're bringing the case against this guy Rick.
00:27:26.000We're bringing the case against the coaches.
00:27:29.000Against that backdrop on the margin, are we doing the right thing or not by criminally charging the parents who were willfully blind to it?
00:27:50.000And there was the occasional hard instance where you were thinking about willful blindness, but the majority of them, we had direct evidence that they knew, right?
00:28:00.000They're on the phone, the Rick Singer, sort of figuring out what's the best way to position the kid as an athlete when the kid's not an athlete.
00:29:29.000And I think there was some of that here.
00:29:31.000But here's – it's just an interesting question, which is like, if it's not that he's doing good for Stanford's sailing team or rowing team or what was it?
00:29:54.000My guess is that he had a few things going on.
00:29:58.000One, he genuinely wanted to help the sailing program.
00:30:00.000Two, a successful – Which would make for a weird criminal theory against him.
00:30:05.000Sure, but a successful sailing program also helps him as its coach.
00:30:08.000And three, I'm guessing – I don't know – that he changed horses midstream perhaps.
00:30:15.000Meaning, after having gotten into the situation with Singer, perhaps having originally thought maybe he would take some portion of this money, at the end decided not to take the money, either because he thought it was wrong to take it or because he was afraid to take it.
00:30:29.000On the technicality, let's say the money had been paid directly to the account of the Stanford Sailing Team rather than via the coach's account and then him trying to fix it backwards.
00:31:00.000But let's say you're talking to the provost though.
00:31:03.000The provost is representative A of the university as the provost and representative B is a sailing coach.
00:31:10.000Let's suppose I'm the parent in this – for this play fiction here.
00:31:14.000As parent or Rick or as a representative of the parent or whatever, says, Provost, in return for putting this money in the bank account of Stanford University, I get my kid into college.
00:31:52.000What's happening there is Rick Singer saying, coach – I'm going to give you 50 grand.
00:31:58.000The parent paid me 250, but I'm going to keep 200 of it and I'm going to give you, coach, 50. In exchange, what you're going to do for me is deceive the university into taking this kid.
00:32:08.000This kid's not a sailor, but you're going to tell the university he is a sailor so that the school takes him.
00:32:16.000Can I go to the other case actually, which is back to the giving money through the front door is It does seem – I mean, I've been – so I went to Harvard.
00:32:48.000There is a deception and a fraud at the heart of the other one too where the university – I'm using not a criminal fraud here, but a lowercase f fraud.
00:33:01.000Is the idea that that person who got in was still on a holistic review every bit as meritorious as somebody else except for the money.
00:33:09.000And I just – we can leave this soon, but it just seems like on the hard case, it does seem to me a little bit – and I'm glad that guy didn't do prison time because that would just feel fundamentally unjust to me if he did.
00:33:20.000But it feels to me that either a parent in that case or that guy, especially if the money found its way to the university's coffers, especially if it went there directly – That that be something that we ought to be putting people in prison over.
00:37:11.000So, you know, I've had conversations with attorney generals about my cases over the years.
00:37:16.000A deputy AG or AG? No, with the attorney general.
00:37:19.000And as I think something you'll probably sympathize with, having been an employee and having been a leader, is when you are speaking to the attorney general, what you're dreading is the attorney general making some offhand remark, which really in substance is an order.
00:37:44.000I mean, it's just an offhand remark in the conversation, but then afterward, I can't go off and do the opposite of whatever it is the AG observed during that phone call.
00:37:53.000And so, it's always a little fraught having those conversations because you know how you want to do the case.
00:39:26.000It comes up the chain to the presidency and I say something like, we're not going to interfere with that, but take anybody who the public could perceive legitimately as an Either innocent bystander or even victim and make sure we go hard at everybody who's an obvious perpetrator, but take the parents off.
00:40:01.000I mean, you're reporting to the executive branch for a reason.
00:40:03.000Well, it's not an abuse of executive authority.
00:40:06.000I mean, what you run into there is a slightly different question, which is just how much or how little should the White House be saying to the Attorney General about who to prosecute or not?
00:41:20.000When you think about the propriety of...
00:41:24.000Chief Executive Presidential influence on this.
00:41:27.000I think that there's a difference between saying less or to understand a case whose genesis came through the normal channels of generating an investigation and then to exercise discretion in constraining that scope versus a top-down affirmative mandate to say that this is the target we need to actually pursue.
00:41:48.000The second would be extremely problematic.
00:42:10.000I mean, the AG is a member of the cabinet, works at the pleasure of the president.
00:42:14.000The president wants to say, you really should be looking into X. There's no constitutional impediment to doing that, and the AEG, one of the difficulties of being the Attorney General, is you have to have both the fortitude to resist when resistance is needed, but also have the judgment to discern one from the other, right?
00:42:34.000So, if the White House calls and says, hey, this looks like a huge problem, can you look into that?
00:42:51.000That's one of the hard things about being the attorney general.
00:42:53.000And I think you think about – there's a beauty to that too.
00:42:56.000I mean the criminal justice system is still backstopped, at least on the prosecutorial side, by some backstop of democratic accountability to the people.
00:43:04.000So it's not necessarily a corruption of the system.
00:43:26.000His first substantial issuance to the field is this memorandum about school board meetings, about parents at school board meetings.
00:43:35.000It turns out we find out afterward that there was a letter to the White House.
00:43:39.000The White House, I think, undoubtedly had contact with the Attorney General and he proceeded.
00:43:44.000Reasonable people will differ whether he was proportional in his response or not, but you see the risk there.
00:43:50.000That generated a tremendous amount of distrust.
00:43:54.000Because now the view of a significant segment of the public is that Merrick Garland and the FBI is coming after parents at school board meetings because someone petitioned the White House.
00:44:05.000So maybe they stumbled there, maybe they didn't.
00:44:07.000But it highlights the risk that you are identifying when you have the White House talking to DOJ. It would be, I think it would be malpractice in this conversation not to touch on, you know, the issue hanging over the cloud of the country.
00:44:22.000You could say right now, as we're having this conversation, we're recording this on, you know, whatever date today is, Friday in late March of the day, 23rd, 24th?
00:45:22.000I think it feels fundamentally un-American and wrong for a prosecutor here to carry out what is really fundamentally, in my opinion, politically motivated.
00:46:14.000And the bigger risk, there are cases you won't bring even though they would be popular.
00:46:18.000And so, I don't think I'm really giving anything away here, but I remember vividly interviewing to be the United States Attorney in Boston.
00:46:26.000And one of the things you do is you interview with the Attorney General.
00:46:29.000And I go to DC and I sit down with Jeff Sessions and he hands me a Diet Coke and he says, Andy, do you think prosecutors should be elected or appointed?
00:46:44.000He just cuts me off and starts, you know, ranting about – ranting's a little strong – speaking passionately about how prosecutors should never be elected.
00:46:53.000They should always be appointed for precisely the reason that you describe.
00:47:07.000But there are tremendous risks, like you're highlighting, in having prosecutors elected because it will affect their prosecutorial judgment.
00:47:16.000And just can I get your opinion just as a human being and as a citizen?
00:47:19.000I mean, as we sit here today, pending knowledge of whether or not Trump will be indicted by Alvin Bragg, On the facts as we have them, do you believe that is a politically motivated and unjust prosecution or do you think that he is approaching this with the clear-eyed vision of somebody who is actually effectuating justice?
00:47:38.000This is an issue I've thought about a lot in the wake of Varsity Blues.
00:47:42.000My personal view, I don't know the man, is that he's either motivated by politics and or by fame, by glory.
00:47:50.000Both can affect prosecutorial decision-making, meaning either it is a partisan political episode for him, or it could be merely that he wants to be in featured articles in the New York Times and he wants to be made famous off this case.
00:49:19.000So you talked about being elected and being put in that position, but that's actually on the retrospective because you were at least elected before you got into that position.
00:49:26.000There's a lot of discussion in my circles, policy circles, et cetera, about whether, for example, elected officials should have a cooling off period from lobbying the government.
00:49:37.000I'm actually quite favorably disposed to this.
00:49:40.000But put that to one side, I'll ask a different question about it from a prosecutor perspective.
00:49:44.000So let's say you're in a situation where the prosecutors aren't elected.
00:49:46.000Should there also be a cooling off period before prosecutors are allowed to run for elected office afterwards too?
00:49:55.000Because that's really at least one better deterrent on cashing in on the same factor.
00:50:30.000Just seeing that isn't – it feels to me like the system working like it is where you can't go off of that and just run for governor of Massachusetts on the back of prosecuting Felicity Huffman.