Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - The Dark Side of College Admissions: Uncovering the $25 Million Scam | The TRUTH Podcast #19

00:00:02.000 Meritocracy is at the heart of what it means to be American.

00:00:26.000 You've heard me say it many times.

00:00:28.000 We need to put the merit back into America.

00:00:31.000 That's why I'm a chief proponent of eliminating affirmative action in America. 0.98

00:00:36.000 That's something that a U.S. president can do.

00:00:38.000 I think that when it comes to college admissions, that's something that the Supreme Court is likely to do later this year.

00:00:44.000 And I think that's going to be a good thing for the country.

00:00:46.000 Where 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.

00:01:04.000 And so that's something that's near and dear to my heart.

00:01:07.000 I intend to end race-based affirmative action, and that's part of a pro-merit campaign in America. 0.95

00:01:14.000 But race-based affirmative action isn't the only impediment to merit in America either.

00:01:21.000 We have corruption in every one of our institutions, starting with the federal government, by the way.

00:01:26.000 Civil service protections that say you can't be fired even if you're doing a bad job.

00:01:30.000 You know what?

00:01:31.000 If you can't fire somebody, that means they don't work for you.

00:01:34.000 It actually means you work for them.

00:01:35.000 It's anti-meritocratic where the people who we elect to run the government don't run the government.

00:01:39.000 anti-meritocratic strains pervade American life.

00:01:42.000 But 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.

00:01:58.000 I'm joined today by Andrew Lelling, who was the main person, the U.S. attorney out of Boston, who led actually the national case.

00:02:07.000 We'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.

00:02:19.000 And yes, there is corruption in the race-based admissions policies.

00:02:23.000 I've talked about that earlier.

00:02:24.000 Maybe even endlessly in other settings.

00:02:27.000 But 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.

00:02:44.000 And we'll also take some counter arguments to whether or not this should be prosecuted legally versus pursued in other ways.

00:02:50.000 But 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.

00:02:56.000 I'm excited to dig into the discussion and joined here in Columbus by Andrew Lely.

00:03:00.000 Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

00:03:02.000 Thanks for having me.

00:03:02.000 Yeah, so I'm excited to dig into a topic.

00:03:05.000 I know you've talked A lot about.

00:03:18.000 Oh, yeah.

00:03:23.000 You know, just talk a little bit about what the factual backdrop was here for these cases.

00:03:28.000 And then on a first personal level, why it is you took an interest in it, when really any prosecutor across the country could have.

00:03:35.000 You're the person who took the football and ran with this.

00:03:38.000 Why did you do it?

00:03:39.000 Why did you prioritize this relative to the range of other things you could have been pursuing?

00:03:43.000 Why was this important?

00:03:44.000 And I think that relates to the facts.

00:03:46.000 So I'd ask you to lay out both.

00:03:47.000 Yeah, no, that's a good question.

00:03:49.000 Basically, what happened here is...

00:03:52.000 This 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.

00:04:21.000 You should take them.

00:04:23.000 So what Rick would do is he would bribe those coaches to use those slots on high school students that he identified.

00:04:30.000 What Rick would do is he would go to parents and he would advertise himself as a college counselor.

00:04:36.000 Who could get their kid into a given university?

00:04:39.000 Guaranteed.

00:04:40.000 And parents would sign up.

00:04:41.000 But he would charge inordinate amounts of money for this.

00:04:45.000 And so, for example, he would say- So he would market it as a guarantee.

00:04:48.000 He would market it as a guarantee.

00:04:50.000 And 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.

00:05:00.000 A million dollars isn't going to do it anymore.

00:05:02.000 It has to be about $10 million.

00:05:04.000 I'll only charge you about 250 grand.

00:05:07.000 That's all it takes.

00:05:08.000 You give it to me.

00:05:09.000 I'll make sure your son or daughter gets in.

00:05:11.000 And what he's doing, like any good fraudster, is finding a sector of the economy where the customer base is emotionally driven.

00:05:22.000 And he's tapping into that ongoing fear across America that parents have that their kids won't get into a name brand university.

00:05:32.000 So he was wildly successful.

00:05:34.000 He probably brought in about $25 million over the course of the 10 years or so that he pursued this scam.

00:05:44.000 One, he would guarantee admission to a university.

00:05:48.000 What 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.

00:06:00.000 What 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.

00:06:22.000 Hedge fund titans, CEOs, two famous actresses, A prominent vineyard owner in Napa.

00:06:32.000 I mean, you had just this mix of uber wealthy people who had signed up for this from many different walks of life.

00:06:41.000 And so, oh, one of my favorites actually, the managing partner of a global law firm.

00:06:47.000 Someone in a profession.

00:06:50.000 Where professional ethics are meat and potatoes for your day-to-day job.

00:06:54.000 I 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?

00:07:04.000 Bill McGlashan?

00:07:05.000 Yes.

00:07:06.000 It was the TPG RISE fund, right?

00:07:08.000 Doug Hodge from PIMCO. Yeah, but these are guys who preach about the importance of exercising virtue through capital markets.

00:07:16.000 Yes.

00:07:16.000 Behaving the other way.

00:07:17.000 Yes.

00:07:17.000 These are practitioners of, you know, woke capitalism who in their private lives are pursuing this kind of petty corruption.

00:07:25.000 Practitioners of corruption, really.

00:07:27.000 So I am – the reason you're here is I'm so interested in what you did.

00:07:32.000 And 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.

00:07:50.000 You're seeing this tremendous disconnect between the perception of the American public and what actually happens in the college admissions system.

00:07:58.000 Middle America thinks that it is roughly a meritocratic process to get into college.

00:08:04.000 That's the myth you're sold.

00:08:05.000 That's the myth you're sold.

00:08:07.000 But 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.

00:08:18.000 And so, this case really grabbed the country's attention.

00:08:23.000 For two reasons.

00:08:25.000 One, approximately two million students a year are applying to American universities.

00:08:29.000 So maybe that's 10 million people who have a vested personal interest in their success.

00:08:34.000 Yep.

00:08:35.000 And two, it was so jarring.

00:08:38.000 When 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.

00:08:50.000 So on this podcast, one of the things we believe in is embodying the values of free speech and open debate here.

00:08:57.000 And I know you're an attorney, you're a prosecutor, so you can handle it.

00:09:00.000 So I'm actually mostly admiring of...

00:09:04.000 What 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.

00:09:21.000 So the first of them was – okay, I hear you on the scam artist of this guy who's putting this together.

00:09:29.000 Actually, 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?

00:09:36.000 Rick Singer.

00:09:38.000 So usually the way you would think about a scam artist is he's selling something that is false and you dupe the consumer into it.

00:09:47.000 Here, he wasn't really duping the consumer.

00:09:50.000 He was selling them something that was true.

00:09:53.000 And so if it's a scam, who was actually the victim of the scam?

00:09:59.000 It's a great question.

00:10:00.000 That was a controversial point.

00:10:02.000 The consumer is not being duped.

00:10:04.000 The universities are being duped.

00:10:06.000 Because what would happen here is Rick Singer would work with the student to fabricate an athletic resume.

00:10:15.000 He gives the athletic resume to the coach at the university.

00:10:19.000 The coach knows it's fake.

00:10:21.000 The coach takes that fake athletic resume, goes to the admissions committee and says, this kid is a phenom water polo player.

00:10:31.000 We need to take this.

00:10:32.000 Because he got a bribe on the side though.

00:10:34.000 Right.

00:10:34.000 And did that coach get paid personally in his pocket?

00:10:37.000 It varied.

00:10:38.000 Most of them, yes.

00:10:40.000 One of the coaches, the Stanford sailing coach, whose name I forget, didn't take a dime for himself.

00:10:45.000 He actually took the money that was given to him by Rick Singer and put it into the sailing program.

00:10:50.000 The Stanford program.

00:10:51.000 Right.

00:10:51.000 Also a controversial point in the case because it's still a crime.

00:10:54.000 So, he was prosecuted, but obviously more sympathetic.

00:10:58.000 But why, let's just, just because that's more interesting, and let's go there.

00:11:03.000 Why is that or should that be a crime relative to what you just said at the very beginning, which is – everyone knows this.

00:11:10.000 I mean Stanford or Harvard or anywhere else, you write the $10 million check or maybe after post-inflation, maybe it's 20 now.

00:11:15.000 But you write the check and you get your kid in.

00:11:16.000 It goes to the university's coffer, the university benefits.

00:11:19.000 Kid got in.

00:11:20.000 I don't love it.

00:11:20.000 I think we should end legacy admissions.

00:11:22.000 I think we should end affirmative action. 0.98

00:11:24.000 I want to be consistent on that.

00:11:25.000 But I'm just making an argument here if – Why is that okay if the university is the beneficiary here in the Stanford case?

00:11:34.000 The university, an arm of the university, was a beneficiary.

00:11:37.000 Why is that a crime?

00:11:39.000 Because you're defrauding the school.

00:11:42.000 So look at it this way.

00:11:44.000 The admission slot is property of the school.

00:11:47.000 Okay.

00:11:48.000 The school gets to decide what to do with that property.

00:11:51.000 You've now deceived the school into dispersing that property to someone who they otherwise would not- And who deceived this school?

00:11:57.000 This coach, really?

00:11:58.000 The Rick Singer conspiring with the coach- To deceive school into believing that student X is an athlete when student X is not an athlete.

00:12:10.000 Inducing the school to take that student when they would have taken somebody else.

00:12:14.000 There is a social cost in that it's a zero-sum game, as you know.

00:12:21.000 College admissions is a zero-sum game.

00:12:23.000 Something we talk about a lot in race-based affirmative action programs.

00:12:29.000 There's a kid who didn't get that spot.

00:12:31.000 Yeah, there's a social cost broadly, right?

00:12:32.000 So there's no identifiable victim.

00:12:34.000 But I think the nature of the way a case like this is charged would be under laws that presume an identifiable victim, right?

00:12:39.000 And that's the university in this theory.

00:12:41.000 I'm just having a little fun with you wearing my old legal hat a little bit.

00:12:43.000 But what you're pointing out, these were controversial aspects of this case.

00:12:46.000 Oh, of course they were.

00:12:47.000 Yeah, it's interesting.

00:12:48.000 And there was a lot of pressure.

00:12:50.000 And as you pointed out, there's still litigation going on on some of these points.

00:12:54.000 So 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.

00:13:00.000 This is such an interesting case, but people went by so fast that the details may have been missed.

00:13:08.000 Suppose 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.

00:13:17.000 You could say that was the university itself, right?

00:13:20.000 The coach is a representative of the university.

00:13:22.000 So 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.

00:13:31.000 In the other case, I write a – I don't know how much was it?

00:13:33.000 $100,000 check or whatever.

00:13:35.000 $250,000.

00:13:36.000 $250,000.

00:13:36.000 What's the standard rate?

00:13:37.000 $250,000 check to the university's athletic program and the coach is advertising it to me as such and I get the kid in.

00:13:44.000 What's the difference?

00:13:46.000 The difference is one involves fraud and one does not.

00:13:48.000 And I got asked about this a lot.

00:13:50.000 I got asked about this right out of the box.

00:13:51.000 None of these are new questions for you.

00:13:52.000 But it's a point worth making because a lot of people were curious about this distinction.

00:13:57.000 If you go to a university and you say, I will give you $10 million and you take my kid, there's nothing illegal about that.

00:14:04.000 What you would hope is that the universities would be transparent about this.

00:14:07.000 And I'll even say, it doesn't strike me as necessarily problematic for a university to say, we will take that deal.

00:14:15.000 That $10 million, that's additional financial aid.

00:14:18.000 That's a new neuroscience lab.

00:14:20.000 That's a lot of ways we can make student life better, right?

00:14:23.000 Or sailing team better.

00:14:24.000 Or sailing team better though, right?

00:14:25.000 We'll take your 10 million bucks and we'll take your kid who maybe we otherwise wouldn't take.

00:14:28.000 There's no fraud.

00:14:31.000 In the varsity blues context, there's fraud.

00:14:35.000 You are deceiving the school by telling the school this is an athlete and the student is not an athlete.

00:14:42.000 There is a fraudulent misrepresentation.

00:14:44.000 So 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.

00:14:51.000 That's a bribe issue.

00:14:54.000 But in the case where the hard case, right, which you hopefully brought up, Yep.

00:14:59.000 In the hard example, where is the fraud?

00:15:04.000 The fraud is that the only – what happens in that case is parent pays $250,000 to Singer.

00:15:13.000 Singer takes his cut, gives a bribe to the coach, says to the coach, here's the bribe.

00:15:19.000 I need you to take this student.

00:15:22.000 Who's not really a sailor, but you're going to pretend that this student is a sailor.

00:15:25.000 It's the pretension that he's a sailor.

00:15:28.000 And so, coach goes to admissions committee and says, this kid's a great sailor, we need him.

00:15:34.000 That's a lie.

00:15:35.000 Admissions committee, thus deceived, agrees to use this law.

00:15:39.000 So, then there's a question of choice of defendant.

00:15:41.000 We'll get through these early legal questions just because I think they're fun and interesting.

00:15:45.000 I 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?

00:15:57.000 Coach was.

00:15:58.000 We prosecuted the coach.

00:15:58.000 Okay, you did too.

00:15:59.000 So, we prosecuted three levels of defendants in that case.

00:16:01.000 Look at it that way.

00:16:03.000 Rick Singer and his organization The coaches who conspired with him and the parents who were the consumers of the fraud.

00:16:10.000 And then why were the – I mean, let's just talk about the parents there.

00:16:13.000 I know a lot of these parents are – they're not particularly sympathetic defendants.

00:16:18.000 In my case, I have no cultural sympathy for them.

00:16:22.000 But in the use of the legal system, right?

00:16:24.000 We're talking about people potentially facing jail time for these crimes.

00:16:27.000 Yes.

00:16:28.000 I wear a different hat.

00:16:29.000 It doesn't ask a question of whether I like them or their behaviors or not.

00:16:31.000 not.

00:16:32.000 The 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.

00:16:38.000 Suppose 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.

00:16:52.000 If 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?

00:17:06.000 But suppose you're one of those parents and you say, okay, I could pay $10 million and get my kid into college.

00:17:11.000 Instead, this guy says, I can pay $250,000 and get my kid into college.

00:17:17.000 Why, if the fraud was downstream of them, why does the customer of that service themselves bear criminal liability?

00:17:26.000 They do not unless they were aware or should have been aware of the fraud.

00:17:31.000 Okay.

00:17:32.000 Let's talk about the should have been aware case.

00:17:34.000 You have to be intentionally conspiring.

00:17:37.000 It has to be willful conduct.

00:17:40.000 If you don't know anything about it, you're not going to be guilty of fraud.

00:17:43.000 Did you find parents who were clients of Rick who did not know about this?

00:17:47.000 I'll say this.

00:17:48.000 There were potential defendants against whom we did not proceed because we were concerned whether we could prove that they had the sufficient intent.

00:17:57.000 There were those defendants.

00:17:58.000 So, in fact, there's one I can think of, a potential target we had.

00:18:01.000 Where for that person, English was very much a second language.

00:18:05.000 Unclear whether they really understood what Rick Singer was saying to them.

00:18:09.000 We did not proceed.

00:18:11.000 You have to be able to prove at trial that the parent knows that it's going to be a fraud.

00:18:17.000 And there is a doctrine in the criminal law of deliberate and willful blindness or deliberate indifference.

00:18:22.000 Deliberate ignorance, not deliberate indifference.

00:18:25.000 And there's a jury instruction for that. 0.91

00:18:26.000 And so, you can see scenarios where someone makes sure they are not aware, right?

00:18:33.000 And so, we confined ourselves to instances where we could prove that the parents knew that this was not on the up and up.

00:18:43.000 And primarily, the way you would do that is Rick...

00:18:45.000 Speaking in explicit terms with the parent about fabricating the resume.

00:18:49.000 That's usually how this went.

00:18:51.000 And 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.

00:19:00.000 You know, it's interesting.

00:19:01.000 I mean, let's get into the philosophy of this a little bit.

00:19:05.000 I think the problem that you exposed is a big problem.

00:19:11.000 I 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.

00:19:23.000 Our university and education system is very high on that list.

00:19:26.000 One of the rationales for doing this case.

00:19:28.000 Right.

00:19:29.000 Thank you.

00:19:30.000 Which is actually what brings me to a philosophical question that I, you know, struggle with, actually.

00:19:37.000 And this is, look, U.S. President actually runs the executive branch of the government, the Department of Justice, which you're a part of.

00:19:47.000 You stepped down, by the way, as prosecutor when?

00:19:49.000 Yeah, about two years ago.

00:19:50.000 At the end of the Trump administration.

00:19:51.000 At the end of the Trump administration.

00:19:52.000 I went to private practice.

00:19:53.000 So, 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.

00:20:21.000 The rot needed to be exposed.

00:20:22.000 For the longest time, it wasn't.

00:20:24.000 Everyone sits by and looks the other direction as this corrupt, anti-meritocratic system plays itself out.

00:20:31.000 The attack on merit is an attack on the American soul.

00:20:34.000 And so someone needs to do something about it.

00:20:38.000 At 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.

00:21:08.000 That 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.

00:21:20.000 You're putting your finger on an inherent unfairness in the criminal justice system that we actually readily accept.

00:21:27.000 I'll tell you what I mean.

00:21:28.000 There are two different paradigms here that you're really talking about.

00:21:31.000 In the law enforcement paradigm, one of the reasons why we prosecute people is that other people don't do the same thing.

00:21:37.000 So getting stopped for speeding is unfair when the 500 other people who drove by that cop didn't get stopped.

00:21:42.000 Deterrence.

00:21:43.000 This is like that.

00:21:44.000 Yeah.

00:21:44.000 So, there is a general, what we call general deterrence value to prosecuting Rick and prosecuting these parents and prosecuting coaches for doing this.

00:21:54.000 So, maybe it doesn't happen the next time.

00:21:56.000 Ideally, you wouldn't have to do that.

00:21:58.000 Ideally, you would use a different paradigm.

00:22:01.000 There'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.

00:22:19.000 Traditionally, that does not work.

00:22:21.000 Traditionally, what has happened is in America, we've done this slightly backwards, and Varsity Blues is a good example.

00:22:28.000 You do the case, it uncovers the problem, you prosecute a bunch of people, and then legislatures pass laws or schools improve their internal procedures.

00:22:38.000 It tends to go that way more.

00:22:41.000 Yeah, I mean, let's talk about the two theories of criminal justice, right?

00:22:45.000 Proper retribution and reform versus deterrence.

00:22:49.000 On the deterrence count, two sub-questions there, right?

00:22:54.000 One is I think everyone is in favor of – or whatever.

00:22:58.000 We'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.

00:23:14.000 I 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.

00:23:25.000 But 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.

00:23:33.000 And so I think question number one… Portionality is a break on deterrence value.

00:23:37.000 Right, right.

00:23:38.000 And 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.

00:23:54.000 And 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.

00:24:03.000 Whereas 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?

00:24:13.000 Because 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.

00:24:25.000 So universities are reforming their behavior for the better.

00:24:27.000 It's better policing.

00:24:29.000 Yeah.

00:24:29.000 Well, it's better policing but by the university.

00:24:32.000 That's what I mean.

00:24:34.000 Figuratively.

00:24:35.000 Yeah, 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.

00:24:40.000 Here you're saying the police system that's policing people who's running red lights, it's like the traffic light, really, or whatever.

00:24:47.000 You're saying that the person runs a red light, punish them so you fix the traffic light, which is a little bit different.

00:24:51.000 So I guess I wanted you to respond to both of those, both the proportionality and the indirectness.

00:24:55.000 The second point first...

00:24:59.000 What you're doing is exposing a flaw in a system, and so fixing it requires a few things.

00:25:04.000 There's the university side of the equation.

00:25:07.000 So in light of varsity blues, most universities scrambled to improve their internal compliance procedures so that they would avoid this kind of problem, right?

00:25:16.000 No longer take the coach's word for it that this kid is a great water polo player, but do a little more due diligence.

00:25:24.000 That's good.

00:25:25.000 On 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.

00:25:39.000 So, hopefully it has healthy effects on both sides of the equation.

00:25:43.000 I agree what makes it a little anomalous.

00:25:46.000 What you're not doing is deterring predators like Rick Singer, right?

00:25:51.000 So, Rick Singer may or may not be a deterrable person.

00:25:57.000 Like the resolute fraudsters, right?

00:26:00.000 In any context, when it comes to securities fraud or the kinds of investment fraud, this kind of fraud.

00:26:06.000 It is questionable whether they can be deterred, but the surrounding systems can be improved so that less of this happens in the future, right?

00:26:16.000 The 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.

00:26:26.000 That's the best you can do, right?

00:26:29.000 It's not nothing, but it won't guarantee this doesn't happen in the future.

00:26:32.000 To 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.

00:26:40.000 Because you get paid to wrestle with these amazing issues of legal and moral responsibility that other people just don't get to deal with.

00:26:47.000 And we had that here.

00:26:49.000 So, I remember saying to people, You remember the marathon bombing?

00:26:54.000 And 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.

00:27:06.000 I 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.

00:27:16.000 Do these parents really need to go to jail?

00:27:18.000 That was the question.

00:27:19.000 It's a good – especially against the backdrop of we're bringing the case against this guy Rick.

00:27:26.000 We're bringing the case against the coaches.

00:27:29.000 Against that backdrop on the margin, are we doing the right thing or not by criminally charging the parents who were willfully blind to it?

00:27:37.000 And obviously, we concluded yes.

00:27:39.000 And there's a few things that we thought about.

00:27:41.000 The parents are knowing participants in a federal fraud.

00:27:46.000 Or knowing or willfully blind for many of them.

00:27:49.000 Sure.

00:27:50.000 And 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?

00:27:58.000 They're on the phone.

00:27:59.000 We had wiretaps.

00:28:00.000 They'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.

00:28:06.000 The explicit discussion of the fraud.

00:28:08.000 They're in on the lie.

00:28:09.000 Very much in on the lie.

00:28:10.000 And so, what do you do with these people?

00:28:13.000 I'm more interested in the hard case because the easy case, you know.

00:28:15.000 Good point.

00:28:16.000 But in the hard case, let's say the willful blindness case.

00:28:19.000 Well, the Stanford sailing coach got no jail time.

00:28:21.000 Okay.

00:28:22.000 Right?

00:28:22.000 The hard case, right?

00:28:23.000 Didn't take the money.

00:28:24.000 It went to the sailing.

00:28:24.000 Got no jail time.

00:28:25.000 Was that a sentencing matter or is that how you wanted it charged?

00:28:28.000 Or was it settled?

00:28:29.000 Or pled?

00:28:30.000 He pled guilty.

00:28:32.000 He was charged with roughly the same thing everyone else was charged with.

00:28:36.000 But we had no issue with him not getting jail time.

00:28:41.000 He pled guilty.

00:28:42.000 He pled guilty.

00:28:42.000 And you guys negotiated no jail time.

00:28:44.000 Exactly.

00:28:45.000 What was his penalty, if anything?

00:28:47.000 That's a good question.

00:28:48.000 I don't remember exactly.

00:28:49.000 Well, he was fired.

00:28:50.000 I mean, if you're a white-collar offender, there are serious collateral effects to this kind of thing.

00:28:56.000 Right.

00:28:56.000 Even if there's no prison time.

00:28:57.000 Right.

00:28:57.000 So he was fired.

00:28:58.000 I forget if there was a fine.

00:29:00.000 He was on probation for some period.

00:29:01.000 Can I just ask you a question about him?

00:29:02.000 Do you think his intentions were – Maybe – Did you ever talk to him?

00:29:08.000 No.

00:29:08.000 Okay.

00:29:08.000 I did not personally.

00:29:10.000 So it may be harder for you to answer this.

00:29:12.000 Like, do you think that he as a human being thought he was doing the right thing for Stanford?

00:29:16.000 No, I don't.

00:29:17.000 You don't?

00:29:18.000 I think based on the evidence and the – well, let me put it this way.

00:29:20.000 Keep in mind, these two things can coexist.

00:29:22.000 One of the interesting things about criminal law.

00:29:24.000 He can, on the one hand, know he's committing a crime, but on the other hand, think that it's good for the school.

00:29:29.000 Of course, of course.

00:29:29.000 And I think there was some of that here.

00:29:31.000 But 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?

00:29:38.000 Rowing – say whatever it was.

00:29:39.000 Yeah, the sailing team.

00:29:40.000 The sailing team.

00:29:41.000 Sailing team, fine.

00:29:44.000 I mean, it's hard to imagine what else his motive was.

00:29:48.000 Well, my guess is that – My guess is that – Like you haven't used it as self-interested or some wrong motive.

00:29:53.000 People are messy.

00:29:54.000 My guess is that he had a few things going on.

00:29:58.000 One, he genuinely wanted to help the sailing program.

00:30:00.000 Two, a successful – Which would make for a weird criminal theory against him.

00:30:05.000 Sure, but a successful sailing program also helps him as its coach.

00:30:08.000 And three, I'm guessing – I don't know – that he changed horses midstream perhaps.

00:30:15.000 Meaning, 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.

00:30:29.000 On 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.

00:30:43.000 That might have changed The case?

00:30:45.000 Still be bribery.

00:30:46.000 If you bribe me by saying, you do something for me in an exchange, I'll give money to a third party.

00:30:52.000 Not a third party, but it's like, let's draw the parallels to the provost.

00:30:57.000 That's making my point.

00:30:58.000 It could be a third party.

00:30:59.000 Yeah.

00:30:59.000 It could be anybody.

00:31:00.000 But let's say you're talking to the provost though.

00:31:03.000 The provost is representative A of the university as the provost and representative B is a sailing coach.

00:31:10.000 Let's suppose I'm the parent in this – for this play fiction here.

00:31:14.000 As 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.

00:31:27.000 No fraud there.

00:31:28.000 Totally fine.

00:31:29.000 Right.

00:31:29.000 Maybe distasteful, but totally fine.

00:31:32.000 Second case, we have Representative B of Stanford University, sailing coach.

00:31:36.000 And you say, for the purpose of getting my kid into Stanford, I will put $250,000 in Stanford's sailing account.

00:31:44.000 It is, I have to admit, hard for me to see why that would be – Well, that could be totally fine.

00:31:49.000 But again, you've gained the fraud element.

00:31:50.000 Yeah.

00:31:51.000 Yeah.

00:31:51.000 Right?

00:31:52.000 What's happening there is Rick Singer saying, coach – I'm going to give you 50 grand.

00:31:58.000 The 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.

00:32:08.000 This kid's not a sailor, but you're going to tell the university he is a sailor so that the school takes him.

00:32:15.000 That's what's happening.

00:32:16.000 Can 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.

00:32:25.000 I went to Yale.

00:32:26.000 My parents didn't have money, first-generation American, and also I'm not in one of the protected racial categories.

00:32:31.000 So I understand what the – You had to do it the hard way.

00:32:34.000 Yeah.

00:32:34.000 I mean, I understand what that looks like and great.

00:32:35.000 I'm proud of that and got more out of the experience because of it and whatever.

00:32:39.000 But I also understand how the game is played from – been through a double dip in this Ivy game.

00:32:46.000 Here's the thing.

00:32:48.000 There 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.

00:33:01.000 Is 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.

00:33:09.000 And 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.

00:33:20.000 But 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.

00:33:34.000 And we don't have to agree on this.

00:33:35.000 It's fine.

00:33:35.000 But I just – it's something I struggle with a little bit.

00:33:37.000 To your point, the – The technically legal situation where a person says, I give school $10 million, you take my kid.

00:33:45.000 My view has always been that while that is not illegal, schools should be required to report it.

00:33:52.000 There should be transparency.

00:33:54.000 But they're not today.

00:33:55.000 No, they're not.

00:33:55.000 It's actually very closed door.

00:33:57.000 No, no, very much so.

00:33:58.000 I could as a student figure out who these kids were over a couple of years of being in classes with them.

00:34:02.000 If you had to report it, one, some quantum of parents would be deterred from doing it.

00:34:08.000 And two, the universities would be a little deterred from doing it, right?

00:34:12.000 Because if you do it too much, it looks a little piggish. 0.92

00:34:14.000 And this came up in some of the trials in the Varsity Blues cases.

00:34:18.000 So, while not technically illegal, it does strike me as there's a benefit to, you know, the antiseptic of sunlight, right?

00:34:25.000 You want to do it university, Harvard, whatever, fine.

00:34:28.000 But annually, you need to report to the Department of Education or wherever.

00:34:34.000 All the deals that you have struck.

00:34:37.000 All the donations you have accepted in the same calendar year that a student related to the donor has been admitted to the university.

00:34:45.000 I like that.

00:34:46.000 I like that.

00:34:47.000 That's not something a prosecutor is able to deliver.

00:34:50.000 Either a policymaker or even a university board can make it a norm.

00:34:53.000 It's very much policy.

00:34:53.000 It doesn't even have to be a government body.

00:34:55.000 No, it could be a best practice.

00:34:57.000 A best practice, exactly.

00:34:58.000 And something that stands for, I mean, Harvard's motto is Veritas Truth.

00:35:02.000 Well, why would truth hide from sunlight, right?

00:35:04.000 So, it's a cultural question.

00:35:07.000 Interesting conversation, man.

00:35:08.000 I appreciate it.

00:35:09.000 Of course, this is not the only case you've prosecuted, to say the least.

00:35:14.000 Actually, do you have a little bit of a transition to some of the other kinds of cases you've dealt with?

00:35:19.000 Just a little bit on the managerial bureaucracy side of this.

00:35:24.000 Who knew that you were going to bring that case before you brought it?

00:35:28.000 The Varsity Blues case.

00:35:29.000 The way that works.

00:35:30.000 Up the chain, I'm talking.

00:35:31.000 The way that works in a bureaucratic sense is when you have a case, quote, of national importance, unquote, you send a report.

00:35:41.000 It's a form.

00:35:42.000 To the Deputy Attorney General.

00:35:44.000 Just to the Deputy Attorney General.

00:35:45.000 Just to the Deputy Attorney General informing that person of the case.

00:35:49.000 Now, of course, it's an interesting game within the bureaucracy of when do you do that?

00:35:54.000 What's national importance?

00:35:55.000 Yeah.

00:35:55.000 And that was that hypothetically, you might wait as long as you possibly can before you tell DC that you have this case brewing.

00:36:03.000 But we told DC at some point in advance, but deep, deep, deep into our investigation.

00:36:08.000 And in fact, almost to the point.

00:36:10.000 Eighth inning, ninth inning.

00:36:12.000 And you deemed it to be of national importance.

00:36:13.000 Oh, we knew this would be huge.

00:36:15.000 Okay.

00:36:16.000 So if there's a case of national importance, you have to let the deputy AG know.

00:36:20.000 Yes.

00:36:20.000 Is it permission?

00:36:22.000 No.

00:36:23.000 No, it is not.

00:36:24.000 What you are doing is, you're just giving them a heads up.

00:36:29.000 You may then get a phone call, and I got several.

00:36:32.000 But it's just a heads up.

00:36:33.000 You do not need permission.

00:36:35.000 Now, they, you know, obviously can, the AG, I suppose, can say, stand down on this case.

00:36:41.000 Oh, sure.

00:36:42.000 Absolutely.

00:36:44.000 That has happened within the department.

00:36:46.000 It's fairly infrequent.

00:36:47.000 Have you ever had that experience?

00:36:51.000 No, I have not.

00:36:52.000 But what it's really for is not for Washington to say no, but for Washington to prepare for the questions they're going to get.

00:37:01.000 But they could say no, right?

00:37:03.000 They could say no, or more likely, they could sort of impose their input.

00:37:10.000 Right?

00:37:11.000 So, you know, I've had conversations with attorney generals about my cases over the years.

00:37:16.000 A deputy AG or AG? No, with the attorney general.

00:37:19.000 And 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.

00:37:36.000 Right?

00:37:36.000 So, if I'm talking to the Attorney General about a case, the Attorney General says, oh, wow, no, I can't see doing that.

00:37:42.000 Why would we do that?

00:37:43.000 Then, boom, I can't do that.

00:37:44.000 I 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.

00:37:53.000 And so, it's always a little fraught having those conversations because you know how you want to do the case.

00:37:59.000 Right?

00:38:00.000 But now you're on the phone with somebody who has the power by just saying X or Y to drastically alter how you pursue that case.

00:38:07.000 So it's – Presumably on this case of national importance, the deputy AG would consult the AG to make sure they're all lined up.

00:38:13.000 Yeah.

00:38:14.000 And varsity blues – I would bet this is one of the cases that made it to the AG. Absolutely.

00:38:20.000 Yeah.

00:38:20.000 We knew this was going to be a very big case.

00:38:24.000 Do you think it would have made it to President Trump?

00:38:27.000 That's a really good question.

00:38:28.000 I don't know the answer to that.

00:38:29.000 I would be not surprised if it did, actually.

00:38:31.000 It is like right at the heart of middle America.

00:38:35.000 I mean, I used to say to people, if you want to know if a case is big news, forget the New York Times or forget CNN, right?

00:38:42.000 Look for the cover of People Magazine.

00:38:44.000 If you're on the cover of People, not me, if the case is on the cover of People Magazine, You have hit a cultural nerve.

00:38:52.000 You are reaching millions of Americans standing in their supermarket checkout lines if you're on the cover of People Magazine.

00:38:59.000 And I think this case was on the cover of People Magazine three or four times.

00:39:03.000 It's for that reason that I'm not surprised if this would have gone to the White House.

00:39:07.000 I'm going to be president.

00:39:11.000 I don't know about it.

00:39:12.000 Yeah, there's nothing esoteric about this.

00:39:14.000 I don't know about that.

00:39:15.000 This is a rite of passage for millions of American kids every year.

00:39:19.000 And would you consider it a legitimate use of executive authority?

00:39:25.000 Let's play that out.

00:39:26.000 It 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.

00:39:50.000 Yeah, I think that...

00:39:51.000 I mean, that's the way the system works, right?

00:39:52.000 That's the way the executive branch works.

00:39:54.000 If the question is, would that be an abuse of prosecutorial discretion?

00:39:57.000 No.

00:39:57.000 I don't think so.

00:39:58.000 No.

00:39:59.000 Or an abuse of executive authority.

00:40:00.000 I don't think so.

00:40:01.000 I mean, you're reporting to the executive branch for a reason.

00:40:03.000 Well, it's not an abuse of executive authority.

00:40:06.000 I 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?

00:40:14.000 Yeah.

00:40:15.000 It would not be improper...

00:40:17.000 DOJ and the White House, they're very controlled in the communications between the two, or at least they're supposed to be.

00:40:23.000 And it would not be improper for the White House to today.

00:40:24.000 Between even the AG and the U.S. President.

00:40:26.000 Between even the AG and the U.S. President.

00:40:27.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:40:27.000 So I'll give you a perfect example.

00:40:29.000 Back in the Bush administration, we were involved in litigation over affirmative action back in those days.

00:40:34.000 The Grutter Supreme Court decision came out in the early 2000s.

00:40:37.000 So the Michigan case, right?

00:40:39.000 Michigan case, tremendous debate within the Justice Department.

00:40:42.000 I was in the Civil Rights Division at that time.

00:40:44.000 What do we do?

00:40:44.000 What do we say?

00:40:45.000 What position do we take, right?

00:40:47.000 The White House counsel at that time, Al Gonzalez, a good guy, Had a lot of input on that subject.

00:40:52.000 Now, that's the White House talking to DOJ, but this is an issue that goes right to the heart in America.

00:40:59.000 People have opinions on this.

00:41:00.000 Voters have opinions on this.

00:41:01.000 It affects Americans in many walks of life.

00:41:04.000 What the department is going to argue in court about affirmative action, yeah, the executive has a view on that.

00:41:11.000 And the executive is entitled to express it to the AG and the Solicitor General in that instance.

00:41:16.000 So yeah, that happens from time to time.

00:41:19.000 And I think that there's...

00:41:20.000 When you think about the propriety of...

00:41:24.000 Chief Executive Presidential influence on this.

00:41:27.000 I 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.

00:41:48.000 The second would be extremely problematic.

00:41:50.000 Yeah.

00:41:51.000 Hopefully, we never live in that country.

00:41:55.000 The former is fine.

00:41:56.000 The latter is fine.

00:41:57.000 It's not legally prohibited.

00:42:00.000 It is not.

00:42:02.000 Even the nature of that, that's a norm, right?

00:42:05.000 It is a norm.

00:42:06.000 It's a norm.

00:42:07.000 It is not legally prohibited.

00:42:08.000 It is not a constitutional problem.

00:42:10.000 I mean, the AG is a member of the cabinet, works at the pleasure of the president.

00:42:14.000 The 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?

00:42:34.000 So, if the White House calls and says, hey, this looks like a huge problem, can you look into that?

00:42:38.000 It shouldn't be a reflexive no.

00:42:41.000 You should take that for what it is.

00:42:42.000 Treat it as any one of a number of inputs that come into the department when it decides who to go after.

00:42:48.000 Treat it that way.

00:42:49.000 Not as more, but not as less.

00:42:51.000 That's one of the hard things about being the attorney general.

00:42:53.000 And I think you think about – there's a beauty to that too.

00:42:56.000 I mean the criminal justice system is still backstopped, at least on the prosecutorial side, by some backstop of democratic accountability to the people.

00:43:04.000 So it's not necessarily a corruption of the system.

00:43:06.000 No, it's not a corruption.

00:43:07.000 It's part of what actually builds trust in it.

00:43:08.000 But there's a sense in which none of us want that justice system to be politicized in the literal sense either.

00:43:13.000 You can see the risks.

00:43:14.000 We recently saw the risks.

00:43:15.000 Yeah, of course.

00:43:15.000 Look at the school boards.

00:43:16.000 Mm-hmm.

00:43:17.000 Right?

00:43:17.000 So, Merrick Garland is attorney general and Merrick, super smart guy and a guy who wants to do right.

00:43:24.000 He's put in as attorney general.

00:43:26.000 His first substantial issuance to the field is this memorandum about school board meetings, about parents at school board meetings.

00:43:35.000 It turns out we find out afterward that there was a letter to the White House.

00:43:39.000 The White House, I think, undoubtedly had contact with the Attorney General and he proceeded.

00:43:44.000 Reasonable people will differ whether he was proportional in his response or not, but you see the risk there.

00:43:50.000 That generated a tremendous amount of distrust.

00:43:54.000 Because 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.

00:44:03.000 Not a good look, right?

00:44:05.000 So maybe they stumbled there, maybe they didn't.

00:44:07.000 But 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.

00:44:22.000 You 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?

00:44:32.000 March 24th.

00:44:33.000 March 24th right now, we'll release this in due course.

00:44:37.000 But as of right now, I think we're good to go.

00:45:02.000 His campaign promise was to investigate and potentially in a way that leads to the indictment of Donald Trump.

00:45:09.000 We don't know whether he's going to follow through with that.

00:45:11.000 It is the subject of wild speculation and interest now as we have this conversation.

00:45:17.000 I've been very public, though it would be politically convenient for me if Donald Trump were not in this race.

00:45:21.000 I don't care about that.

00:45:22.000 I think it feels fundamentally un-American and wrong for a prosecutor here to carry out what is really fundamentally, in my opinion, politically motivated.

00:45:33.000 Yeah, but here's the evidence of it.

00:45:35.000 It was a campaign promise, right?

00:45:37.000 So leave even the Democrat versus Republican stuff about this to one side.

00:45:40.000 I've talked about that elsewhere.

00:45:44.000 How are we supposed to feel about elected district attorneys or attorneys general carrying out campaign promises?

00:45:51.000 This is a great issue.

00:45:52.000 I've written on this in the past.

00:45:55.000 The short answer to your question, and then I'll back up some.

00:45:58.000 The short answer to your question is my personal view is that district attorneys should never be elected.

00:46:03.000 Prosecutors should not be elected.

00:46:04.000 You have too much power.

00:46:05.000 Good.

00:46:06.000 Prosecution is often a counter-majoritarian function, meaning there are cases that you will bring even though they are unpopular.

00:46:13.000 Yep.

00:46:14.000 And the bigger risk, there are cases you won't bring even though they would be popular.

00:46:18.000 And 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.

00:46:26.000 And one of the things you do is you interview with the Attorney General.

00:46:29.000 And 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?

00:46:40.000 And I had a view on this.

00:46:41.000 I've been a prosecutor a long time.

00:46:42.000 I begin to express a view.

00:46:44.000 He just cuts me off and starts, you know, ranting about – ranting's a little strong – speaking passionately about how prosecutors should never be elected.

00:46:53.000 They should always be appointed for precisely the reason that you describe.

00:46:58.000 I see the counterargument.

00:47:00.000 You want prosecutors to be pursuing what are the utmost law enforcement concerns of the community.

00:47:05.000 Okay, I get that.

00:47:07.000 But there are tremendous risks, like you're highlighting, in having prosecutors elected because it will affect their prosecutorial judgment.

00:47:16.000 And just can I get your opinion just as a human being and as a citizen?

00:47:19.000 I 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?

00:47:38.000 This is an issue I've thought about a lot in the wake of Varsity Blues.

00:47:42.000 My personal view, I don't know the man, is that he's either motivated by politics and or by fame, by glory.

00:47:50.000 Both 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.

00:48:05.000 Both of those things can happen.

00:48:07.000 One of the things you look at is if no one had ever heard of Donald Trump, Would that office still be vigorously pursuing the case?

00:48:19.000 I mean, even if they hadn't campaigned on pursuing it, would they be vigorously pursuing it?

00:48:23.000 But put that aside.

00:48:24.000 Even the politics, using just the fame piece of this.

00:48:26.000 Fair enough, fair enough.

00:48:27.000 Put that aside.

00:48:28.000 So in Varsity Blues, you thought about this a lot.

00:48:29.000 You know, and I would think to myself, sitting in my office, literally, am I prosecuting Felicity Huffman because we should do that?

00:48:39.000 Or am I prosecuting Felicity Huffman so that someone will say, Andy Lelling prosecuted Felicity Huffman?

00:48:45.000 And it's hard.

00:48:47.000 It's hard.

00:48:48.000 You're human.

00:48:48.000 You're a human being.

00:48:49.000 We all have egos, hubris.

00:48:51.000 It is part of the discipline of that job.

00:48:53.000 And the elected portion of it has got to make it even harder.

00:48:58.000 Oh, yeah.

00:48:58.000 Exacerbates that.

00:48:59.000 Your future depends on it.

00:49:01.000 So this may be the last question.

00:49:02.000 I mean, this hour has flown by.

00:49:06.000 We didn't even get to fentanyl, which is what we were supposed to talk about.

00:49:09.000 So if you're open to it, let's do it next time because I can tell we can go deep on this.

00:49:13.000 We'll do it next time.

00:49:14.000 But I'll close with this one for you.

00:49:19.000 So 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.

00:49:25.000 How do you feel about this?

00:49:26.000 There'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.

00:49:37.000 I'm actually quite favorably disposed to this.

00:49:40.000 But put that to one side, I'll ask a different question about it from a prosecutor perspective.

00:49:44.000 So let's say you're in a situation where the prosecutors aren't elected.

00:49:46.000 Should there also be a cooling off period before prosecutors are allowed to run for elected office afterwards too?

00:49:55.000 Because that's really at least one better deterrent on cashing in on the same factor.

00:50:01.000 That's an interesting question.

00:50:02.000 I haven't thought about that.

00:50:03.000 I am overall, I'm a fan of cooling off periods.

00:50:06.000 The law has a bunch of them built in.

00:50:08.000 This one isn't, though.

00:50:10.000 This one is not.

00:50:10.000 In fact, many people jump straight from prosecutor to elected office almost in a way.

00:50:14.000 Republicans do it, Democrats do it.

00:50:16.000 I was considering running for governor of Massachusetts, coming off the platform of being the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts.

00:50:23.000 Since you opened up so first personally there, you said you looked yourself in the mirror, right?

00:50:27.000 Thank you for being vulnerable.

00:50:28.000 I appreciate that.

00:50:30.000 Just 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.

00:50:41.000 Yeah.

00:50:42.000 There is an argument that if you could do that, that also would influence your decisions as a prosecutor.

00:50:48.000 So the law strikes these balances.

00:50:49.000 And you didn't though.

00:50:50.000 Why didn't you run for governor?

00:50:51.000 Oh my gosh.

00:50:52.000 You'd have been compelling.

00:50:53.000 You had the fame.

00:50:55.000 You had the momentum.

00:50:56.000 Well, there's a 10% Republican registration base.

00:51:03.000 Yeah, of course.

00:51:04.000 Now Massachusetts is a complicated equation.

00:51:05.000 Occasionally you do get some Republicans.

00:51:07.000 It's very complicated.

00:51:08.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:51:08.000 Well, anyway, thanks for having me.

00:51:09.000 Thanks for joining me on the podcast.

00:51:10.000 Sure, of course.

00:51:11.000 We'll pick up where we left off and start on fentanyl next time around.

00:51:14.000 Yeah, happy to do it.

00:51:15.000 It's a great conversation.

00:51:16.000 I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - April 27, 2023

The Dark Side of College Admissions: Uncovering the $25 Million Scam | The TRUTH Podcast #19

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript