Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Kristy Parker: Thanks for having me.
Parker: Well, I certainly think it is not unprecedented for members of the United States Senate who are from the same party as the president to exercise their independent advice and consent roles. So from that point of view, this is just run-of-the-mill Senate doing its constitutional job, which no one should really be that surprised by. However, this is a highly political time that we live in with a president who demands loyalty from the rest of the party. So in that sense, it can be seen as somewhat remarkable for this moment.
Parker: Well, again, I think my rejoinder to that would be simply is that it really shouldn’t be remarkable. What we should be focused on is that we have three branches of government. They each have a job to do. The president is the head of one of those branches of government. He is not the king. So when we see things like we’ve seen for the last two months—courts saying, X thing is unlawful. You cannot do this thing—or now seeing a member of the Senate who has a constitutional duty to provide advice and consent doing that, that really shouldn’t be remarkable. That should be something that we’re all happy to see, that every member of our government should celebrate—because that is the system that our founders put in place so that we would have a democratic republic and not a monarchy.
Parker: Sure. So there are 93 or maybe 94 U.S. attorney’s offices in the country that are arms of the Department of Justice, but they are very individually important everywhere. They are federal law enforcements in their individual jurisdictions, and they are primarily responsible for executing the laws and enforcing the criminal laws in their jurisdictions. While all of them are important, some of them have more prominence than others. And certainly, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia is a very important one because it is the one that is in the seat of our government. Lots of cases are going to come through that office: national security related cases, cases relating to operations of the federal government, complex criminal cases that you wouldn’t necessarily see on a day-to-day basis in some of the other offices. So it has always performed an outsized role in the constellation of U.S. attorney’s offices and is considered one of the most prominent presidentially appointed positions outside of Main Justice.
Parker: Well, it’s really important for a U.S. attorney to observe the rules of the Department of Justice—and the Department of Justice has some pretty clear rules about making public comments on potential investigations or, certainly, active investigations. And those are all under the umbrella of the Constitution itself and of the importance of protecting due process and the integrity of cases. So it’s very important for people who occupy those positions to be very careful in the way in which they conduct themselves so that they don’t prejudice cases that might be very legitimate cases, and also so that they don’t abuse the very significant law enforcement powers of the Justice Department.
Sargent: I want to bear down a particular thing that Martin did toward Covington & Burling. The news emerged again that this law firm had given legal advice to Jack Smith, and Martin tweeted something like “Save your receipts,” which is really a menacing thing to do. And I want to try to get at why that, as public conduct in a prosecutor, is not acceptable. Can you talk a little bit about that?
So those sorts of things can be very chilling not just to the people who are the subjects of whatever it is the person says but also to other people—and cause them to make decisions like, Well, I’m not going to represent any of these folks who the administration has targeted for firing, or, I’m not going to hire any of the people who were part of the January 6 prosecutions because I might make myself a target of this sort of thing. So that’s what’s really problematic about that behavior and why, in the many years leading up to this moment, it has really been very much verboten within the Department of Justice to do those sorts of things.
Parker: It’s an assault on the rule of law. And it’s really an assault on a fundamental feature of self-government. The country is supposed to be governed by the people through our elected representatives. And the Bill of Rights protects all of our rights to criticize the government, to petition the government for redress of grievances. And it also creates rights for people to have counsel in those situations when we the people may be adversarial to the government. So when you attack lawyers, law firms for people who they represent because the president may disfavor those people, that really is fundamentally an attack on self-government.
Kristy, it seems to me if Trump does lose here, it’s not a small thing. I get your point about how if the system were functioning normally, it would be a typical thing for a Republican senator to oppose a nominee like this—but we’re not in normal times. What we need to see is Republican senators going out on a limb occasionally and not doing what the president wants and putting the brakes on the president when he’s flagrantly trying to wreck the rule of law. So if Tillis can do this and not self-immolate on the spot, maybe that sends a message to other Republicans that they can do this as well from time to time. What do you think?
They are exercising their role and doing what they think is best: to put the right people in those positions, and really—I imagine it will be hard for the president to see it this way—are probably trying to do him a favor by aiming him in the direction of appointing people who are not going to undo the mandate of their jobs by creating all sorts of side scandalous behavior and various things. We’ve already seen that with the secretary of defense. It’s not promotive of the government efficiency that they like to talk about when people who are put in these positions can’t focus on doing the job and instead are constantly wrapped up in ways in which they may have violated rules or committed misconduct. So again, the Senate plays a huge role in that. And yes, it’s something we should all welcome and hope to see and provide encouragement to them when they step up and act like Article 1 truly is equal to the other two branches of government.
Parker: Well, I’ll go back again to basic principles. Every person who takes a position with the federal government—whether they are politically appointed or whether they were a career civil servant like I was—take[s] the same oath. And that oath is not to the individual who is the president of the U.S. It is an oath to the U.S., to uphold the laws and the Constitution of the U.S. So the job is not about serving a particular individual and advancing that person’s political interests. The job is about faithfully executing the laws on behalf of the American people. So no. Anyone who says things like, I’m the president’s lawyer, when they are actually a U.S. attorney or a political appointee in the Justice Department—that is a fundamental misunderstanding of the proper nature of the job.
Parker: And so important for the rest of us to keep the focus on where it belongs and who we are as a nation and what it means to have a democratic republic. In many ways, Mr. Trump’s time on the national stage has been a long, very vituperative argument with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton—all of the people who came together and pledged their lives and their sacred honor to create a system that would give us something that was specifically not a king and about loyalty to an individual; it was about we the people of the U.S. So the more people can remember that and remember that the president is our employee who was elected to do a job in a particular branch of government, the better off we’re all going to be. And when U.S. senators step up and do their part in that, the better off we’re all going to be.
Parker: Well, I’m a lifelong civics addict, career civil servant. I believe in the American project, the thing that I just outlined. I believe in we the people. I believe in the Constitution. I believe in the three branches of government. And anytime I see people—even in the face of someone who is quite bullying and who has shown himself to be serious about a lot of the very threatening things that he has said—every day continuing to stand up and when I see people in the other branches of government saying, I am going to do my job and, in this particular case, my job requires me to tell the executive branch that they are wrong and that they can’t do a thing, then that is a reason for all of us to have hope. And it just has to continue.
Sargent: I think it’s really important that right now there’s really a robust movement out there in the streets letting judges, letting senators, letting other independent actors in the system know that the people have their backs.
Sargent: Exactly. We’re not going to let this lunatic blow it all up. Kristy Parker, thank you so much for coming on. Great to talk to you.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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