Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Joyce Vance:

So whether we’re reading more serious books about democracy in our book clubs or talking about it in family gatherings, I think Thanksgiving is going to be lit for a bunch of families this year. That’s something that we can all do.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Joyce Vance. As many of our listeners will know, her resume is long. She’s a former US attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, a law professor at the University of Alabama, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center, author of the popular Substack Newsletter, Civil Discourse. She’s the co-host of the podcast #SistersInLaw and also of course, my co-host on the CAFE Insider Podcast where we unpack legal issues making the headlines. Now, Joyce is also a published author. She’s out with her first book, Giving Up is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy. Earlier this week at an event organized by the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, Joyce and I sat down to talk about the book, the state of our democracy, and what all of us can do to bolster the rule of law.

Then I’ll answer your questions about George Santos’ pardon and the US military attacking ships in the Caribbean. That’s coming up. Stay tuned. Without further ado, Joyce Vance is my friend, my former colleague, my current colleague, my podcast co-host. We were sworn in on the same day, confirmed by the United States Senate when… How quaint is that, to be confirmed by the United States Senate? Back in 2009 in August. And it’s been a great delight and pleasure and honor and treat and all sorts of other synonyms you can come up with for me to spend time with her and learn from her. And I hope to further that conversation, discussion today. She has written a great book, an important book, Giving Up is Unforgivable. We’ll talk about the title and what she means by a manual for keeping our democracy.

Joyce Vance, podcast host, former US attorney, razor of chickens, knitter of scarves, explainer of laws, soon to be the next New York Times bestselling author. Joyce Vance. Hi Joyce.

Joyce Vance:

Hi. That’s I think the nicest thing, grouping of things you’ve ever said about me.

Preet Bharara:

I only got a few of the things.

Joyce Vance:

Well, I appreciated it.

Preet Bharara:

So we’re going to going to talk about your book in a second. We’ve been friends a long time, we’ve been colleagues a long time. So I thought I would start with a non-softball question so people would understand that. I’ll ask tough questions even of a friend.

Joyce Vance:

You’ve never asked me a softball question.

Preet Bharara:

And since I’m not getting paid for this, I might as well ask you. It’s tough a question to spot. So the question is, so as I mentioned in the intro, we were literally in the group of first US attorneys in the country under Barack Obama and novice, new US attorneys. And my question to you is if you could estimate how much of an obstacle it was for you, how much of a challenge it was for you when you began as US attorney in Alabama to have virtually zero experience in insurance law. I mean, how did you know-

Joyce Vance:

It was a challenge.

Preet Bharara:

How did you know how to indict in the grand jury? How did you know…

Joyce Vance:

I mean, it meant that I actually was very familiar with going in and indicting cases in the grand jury, but I knew nothing about insurance. What’s a girl to do?

Preet Bharara:

This is such an inside baseball crowd that in no other place would that joke have been understood. Let’s get to your book.

Joyce Vance:

But let me just say though before we leave that, not only were we Senate-confirmed, Jeff Sessions called me the minute we were confirmed to personally let me know. It was important to him to make sure that I knew that he had given me his support, which is to speak of what a different era we live in now.

Preet Bharara:

Who is that you speak of? Look, that’s another piece of evidence that no matter how loyal you are to the current President of the United States and then President of the United States, if you cross him on one thing, in fact, Jeff Sessions is probably lucky given what we’re dealing with and facing and have been talking about that he got off just being jobless. Anyway, Giving Up is Unforgivable. I gave you some grief this morning on the podcast saying, how’d you come up with a title? What was in your mind? Giving up is not easy, giving up is less favored. How did you come up with the second part of the title? Why is it unforgivable and what does giving up mean?

Joyce Vance:

And I told you this morning, I kept wanting to say we can’t give up. Giving up would be bad, giving up would be wrong, but it was clear that it was more than that, right? It was unforgivable. And Joe Biden at one point actually said those words after the election and he made the point that losing elections is not the end of the world. That he too had lost elections and that giving up is unforgivable. I thought that was the perfect capture for where we were in a moment where we were all exhausted.

Preet Bharara:

We’re in a congregation of people who have obviously not given up because they’re here. I guess my first question is, giving up on what? What is the thing that we’re talking about that’s implicit in not giving up?

Joyce Vance:

So for me, that’s not giving up on democracy, on our form of government. What I sensed after the election was people who thought that democracy had failed because Democrats lost an incredibly important election that I think deep down none of us believed we would lose, right? We were worried, but it seemed that given the choices, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It really felt like a no-brainer. Even living in Alabama, I will tell you that it felt like a no-brainer. So it’s democracy, but it’s also the rule of law, which I view in many ways as sort of the architecture that democratic institutions live on top of this notion that no man is above the law, that we’re a government of laws not of men.

And I heard so many people saying, “Well, it’s failed, it’s broken. Donald Trump broke it.” I wrote the book because I don’t believe that’s true.

Preet Bharara:

It seems to me that also a first step that proceeds giving up is turning away. So the thing that we talk about, so we do this podcast together and then we each have another podcast. Mine is called Stay Tuned, which is kind of apropos of this sentiment, which is the tagline I use at the end of the podcast now is that there’s never been a more important time to stay tuned. The first thing it strikes me in my experience talking to people, talking to audiences like this one, talking to you is that people don’t just sort of hang up their hat at the first whiff of some bad thing happening. They turn away because the news is too much to bear.

They don’t want to hear about the bad stuff becomes fast and furious. It floods the zone, whether that’s by design or by happenstance. And the first step on the road to surrender or giving up is not wanting to hear the bad stuff. What’s your advice and prescription to allay that problem in the first place?

Joyce Vance:

This is a difficult problem that many of us have struggled with and I think even more so is how do you react to friends who tell you, “It’s just too much. I just have to unplug from the news. I can’t pay attention any longer.” I find myself responding and look, I try to be patient because we’re all human beings struggling under an incredible burden right now. But I think it’s incumbent upon us to patiently explain that the more overwhelmed you feel, the more important it is to at least carve out something that you can pay attention to. If you’re in public health, pay attention to public health. If you’re a lawyer, pay attention to whatever court cases interest you. Some days so much happens in court that I simply can’t keep up with everything all at once.

But my good friend Ruth Ben-Giott, who’s here in New York, who writes about strongmen and dictators, says that this flooding of the zone, that this is a deliberate tactic that authoritarians try to use to persuade people to turn away from paying attention. And of course it’s far easier to become a dictator if nobody’s watching what you’re doing. And so I think armed with that knowledge, that sense that this is something deliberate that’s being done to us, I think that empowers us to stay tuned, which is why I love the new tagline. This notion that it’s never been more important.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, further to what you’re saying, it seems to me that your exhaustion is their victory before your surrender is their victory because your exhaustion leads to surrender. So do you recommend having hobbies?

Joyce Vance:

Well, let me tell you about chicken.

Preet Bharara:

Because you do a lot of stuff. You do a lot of stuff.

Joyce Vance:

In the great experience that one derives being a parent of four children, maybe five if you count my husband and I do. It is so important to keep balance and I think instinctively that’s something that we’re all struggling for right now. What it comes down to for me is this, if they make you miserable, if you are so focused on what Donald Trump is doing to our country that you have no more joy in your life, then I think in a sense they do begin to win. And so for me at least, I found it more important to deliberately make time to be with friends, to do the things I love, including hang out with my chickens in the morning. They have big personalities. And I’m reminded of something that Tim Snyder said. So I teach a class on democratic institutions at the University of Alabama.

We had the opportunity to sit in on a talk that Tim Snyder, he wrote on tyranny who I think everybody knows, to sit in on a talk that he gave. And at the end somebody asked him, “What’s the most important thing we can be doing right now to push back?” And he said, “Hug the people around you.” And it was very surprising. He’s such a cerebral, scholarly kind of guy. And hearing him say that I thought was transformative, this notion that it’s our humanity that matters the most. And that in a moment like this, we should make time for our hobbies or to have dinner with friends or to make sourdough bread, whatever it is that keeps you on an even keel, that’s worth doing because it will prevent you from burning out and forcing yourself to tune out just to stay on a keel.

Preet Bharara:

I often say for me and you in a similar way, we can’t tune out. It’s how I make my living and all the various jobs that I have.

Joyce Vance:

Have you had that experience of going on vacation and unplugging for a couple of days?

Preet Bharara:

I try.

Joyce Vance:

It’s hard.

Preet Bharara:

But then people email and text me all the bad stuff that’s happened like you. And then sometimes I’ve written pieces while on vacation. I went with my family to India and I tried to tune out and that’s when this whole conflagration arose about immigration and H-1B visas. I literally couldn’t help myself and had to pay attention even though I was nine and a half hours ahead of the time zone. So what should people listen to? How should they figure out other than listening to our podcasts, available also on YouTube-

Joyce Vance:

It’s my favorite.

Preet Bharara:

But how should people, to the extent somebody has a diet of news and obviously everyone is here because they care about the country, they care about being educated, they don’t want to turn away, and they certainly don’t want to give up. But do you have any thoughts? And you have some passing references to this in the book. When you’re listening to the news, when you’re watching the news, how do you interpret it? What filter should you use? What lens, prism do you use? Should you, dare I say it, at the expense of heart failure and other maladies, listen to what the folks who you don’t agree with are hearing and understand what their lens and prism are also? And if so, how much?

Joyce Vance:

So y’all don’t take this wrong, but I’m a big believer in sleeping with the enemy, which is to say that I watch Fox News and I watch some of the further right news channels and I listen to people who I know I don’t agree with even when I know it’s going to make my blood boil. For one thing, I want to make sure that I’m correct when I disagree with them. I want to make sure that there’s not some kernel of truth in what they’re saying that I need to ponder. I think that’s just fair. But more importantly, I like to understand the arguments that are being made, the arguments that have persuaded so many Americans that what’s not true is true. I don’t think we can have conversations with people unless we understand what they’re hearing.

In Finland, and I write about this in the book, they have this remarkable disinformation program that begins with school kids, elementary school kids. And they are taught not sort of as a separate topic, but in the context of every classroom subject with their teachers how to evaluate information that they’re taking in. They’re taught to look at who the author is, what possible bias they might have, what points are they making, and to think critically about information before they accept it. And one thing that has stuck with me as a teacher who said, “I want them to understand that just because something makes them feel good or it’s pretty or it’s an attractive idea, that doesn’t necessarily make it true and they have to be critical of it.”

And I reflect on the fact that we do not do anything to arm our children, our young people in this country against disinformation and misinformation. We have not caught up with the internet and the reality of modern life. That’s a whole of community exercise that we need to take on.

Preet Bharara:

What time of day do you suggest for people that they should watch Fox News?

Joyce Vance:

This is a difficult question.

Preet Bharara:

Is it before or after happy hour?

Joyce Vance:

I think it’s after happy hour. And so the prime time shows are your best bet.

Preet Bharara:

What if your happy hour is 8:00 A.M. then you can watch the-

Joyce Vance:

Are you talking about yourself?

Preet Bharara:

No, I’m not, not today. Not today.

Joyce Vance:

I had a law school roommate who used to say, “It’s always after 5:00 P.M. someplace.”

Preet Bharara:

Are there- So I have sort of a rule of thumb on whether I listen to someone, pay attention to them, digest them, whether they’re on our side, whatever that means or someone else’s side. And that is if I can always, every single time predict exactly what they’re going to say, what side of the issue they’re going to be on, then I tune them out. Do you agree with that? And there are other examples of that.

Joyce Vance:

Five years ago I would’ve agreed with that about a thousand percent because frankly we can all be knee-jerk in our own minds. We don’t need somebody else to do that for us. The problem that we now face though is increasingly those lines are drawn in a very different way. There is a wrong and there is a right very often in the law, and we do this in the podcast a lot, right? There are good arguments on both sides of an issue. And in fact that’s why cases go to judges because people aren’t able to resolve them on their own. And so we have judges who make decisions in those close call sorts of cases. I think in some sense we now live in a world where there’s no longer that sort of both sides of them.

But that’s the rare situation. I don’t want to make that sound like that’s the entire world. That is some of the world. I think about that a lot. I don’t like that thought. I find it to be very disturbing. For instance, that I can listen to the President of the United States and know that he’s lying and that there aren’t two sides to it. Leaving that aside, my favorite people to listen to are people that I don’t agree with and I think that’s why I enjoy reading opinion pieces that other legal scholars have written. It’s something that I think you do really well, you are very unpredictable. I can’t always tell where you’re going to be on an issue.

Preet Bharara:

Now I feel a lot of pressure to ask a totally unpredictable question. Look, I’ll tell you, folks, I quoted him at the beginning, David French, who used to write for the National Review online. Andy McCarthy, who was my chief, my supervisor at the US Attorney’s office, writes for the NRO. And so just as an example of a genre of writing, some people will call them never Trumpers, but I think of them as people who I ideologically don’t agree with on a lot of stuff. Tax policy, education policy, a whole bunch of things. But on core things, I think the things that you care about here in this book and that you talk about every week, week in and week out, on the podcast and on television, what does the Constitution mean?

Not with respect to a particular school of thought or doctrine, but overall do we care about a nation of separated powers or not? Do we care about our overweening and overarching executive or not? I find it interesting to hear from people who I don’t agree with in lots and lots of political issues and hear how they talk about critiques of the MAGA universe because those critiques are different from the ones that I and my friends engage in and that you and I engage in.

Joyce Vance:

That I think is an interesting point, right? This notion that we live in a moment where reasonable people will support country over party, including people who were hard right, ideological Republicans for much of their adult life, but who are willing to come back to the center in some sense to talk about the importance of democracy first. Something that really puzzles me is how so many folks who, when I was in law school, were strong states rights sort of conservatives. This notion that the federal government shouldn’t intervene in affairs that the Constitution left to the states and how quickly that seems to have faded away. You don’t really hear that from some of these old line senators anymore.

And so I appreciate voices, especially lawyers who are willing to continue to raise those arguments for all of us to consider. And of course that’s the value in listening to people that you don’t agree with on everything. They remind you of principle, they remind you of what matters, they encourage you to believe that we don’t have to see eye to eye on every substantive issue in order to believe that this country should remain a democracy. So look, I very much look forward to getting back to squabbling over politics with my law school roommate, a tea party conservative in Mississippi. For now, we’re on the same side of the equation, I fear.

Preet Bharara:

How do you feel about what seems to be becoming truer and truer as the sides align against each other and don’t find common ground? And this is an aftermath of people in our profession, the legal profession because that’s all about process, right? The Constitution does not guarantee any outcomes at all. It guarantees a process. In fact, process is the most important word in the Constitution. The Constitution doesn’t have the word democracy in it, I don’t believe. But process often modified by the word due, due process. Substantive or procedural is the essence of what America is all about. And to the extent you have thought about this and are giving a prescription about the unforgivability of giving up, how much is that of the problem arises from the fact that people have given up on process?

They want what they want, they want the outcome, they want their political opponent to be locked up. By the way, this whole business of locking up your opponent, I believe began in modern times with the chants of lock her up of Hillary Clinton back in 2015 and 2016 and now they’re actually getting locked up. There is a view on the other side also. I don’t mean to both sides it, but a lot of people think, “I want the thing that I want and whatever process gets me that thing is fine by me.” How much of that is the problem?

Joyce Vance:

I mean, I think you’ve just identified the defining principle of MAGA. “I feel like life has dealt me some unfair blows. I want what I want. Here’s how I get it. Constitution be damned.” What did you say this morning? The fricking Constitution.

Preet Bharara:

I didn’t mean to say fricking constitution.

Joyce Vance:

But I mean you were-

Preet Bharara:

Our great charter.

Joyce Vance:

You were saying it in the sense sense of that’s how folks just inexplicably view the Constitution and the rule of law as something that gets in their way, not as something that guarantees their way of life. And that’s what we’ve lost so much of in this country, this understanding that due process, which yes, it protects people who don’t have legal immigration status in this country, but without due process, none of us are protected either, right? And I think that’s very much the key point that has slipped away. We are no longer a country where there’s civics education that takes place at a sophisticated level. In many of our schools, you don’t see that happening anymore. But you know what always reassures me is so I’ll get law students from LA, lower Alabama.

And I just have to tell you, if you ever think that you’re losing hope in the future of our country, then you need to sit in a room full of University of Alabama law students because these are some of the smartest, brightest, most committed kids, regardless of their politics. They believe in principle and they believe in giving back to their community. And every year in my democratic institutions’ seminar, I’ll have a student who will say something to the effect of, “I took fourth grade civics and I was hooked.” And this notion that grade school teachers who I think are America’s unsung heroes, my mom was a preschool teacher. That they’re able to engage people at an early age and help them understand how important democracy and voting is.

We need more of that, but we can’t let it be the provenance of schools alone. I think that this sort of ongoing exercise in civics education and the value of democracy has to be something that we talk about with our kids, with our families, when we’re sitting in our house, when we’re out on walks. It needs to be something that instead of being thought about in the breach is integrated into how we live. Because we are in a moment where people took democracy for granted for so long that when someone came along who wanted to erode it around the edges, there wasn’t a strong push, right? So many people had been able to take for granted the process that the constitution guarantees them, that it did not occur to them what they might possibly be giving up.

So many Americans now understand that. Seven or 8 million people who went out and protested last weekend, and I think it came as a shock to a lot of political analysts and political consultants who always tell their candidates, “It’s the economy. Run on the economy, not on democracy.” And all of a sudden we have Americans holding signs that say due process, walking down streets, numbering in the millions of people. That’s a moment in this country and it’s a shift that we need to nurture and encourage and further. So whether we’re reading more serious books about democracy in our book clubs or talking about it in family gatherings, I think Thanksgiving is going to be lit for a bunch of families this year. That’s something that we can all do.

Preet Bharara:

Do you watch Fox News together with your family?

Joyce Vance:

My husband watches no news, but he is the king of YouTube. I hope he’s listening.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Joyce Vance after this. It’s great for us to talk and educate, but power is power and people who are in positions of power actually wield power. You have a lot of power. We the people, I believe it. But today the people who are in positions of power are able to shut down the government or un-shut down the government. They’re able to affect medical treatment, all sorts of things that are true. And democratic political operatives will say just as you alluded to, I’m talking about the economy, it’s economy, stupid, issues of democracy, and we talk about fascism, and the rule of law. That’s hard to understand.

It’s abstract, it’s not concrete. Do you agree that politicians should do their job and talk about so-called kitchen table issues and people like us who are lawyers by practice should be the only ones spreading the alarm on this? Or do you think that they’re both intertwined in a way that you can’t separate them?

Joyce Vance:

I am so weary of the suggestion that Americans aren’t smart enough to understand the value of democracy. If you live in a moment like this one and politicians are afraid to talk about the value of democracy, then my head just is going to explode. I think it’s possible that Americans are willing to talk about both things at once, that we can see the value of democracy and the economy, and maybe we can even see the connection between them if our politicians are willing to trust us as much as they ask us to trust them. This isn’t a hard question and I’ll tell you from personal experience. When Doug Jones, my former boss, ran and won the Senate race in Alabama, he won that race for a couple of reasons. One was that his opponent was a no-good pedophile.

Preet Bharara:

That always helps.

Joyce Vance:

But maybe not as much as you might think in Alabama. Doug did something and look, I’m a fan. Doug did something that I have so much respect for. In one of the first interviews he did on national television, he was asked about abortion. An absolutely toxic issue in Alabama. And he said, “I believe in a woman’s right to choose.” I was driving, I sort of slammed my head down on in my front of my car and I was like, “Doug, of course that’s what you think. Don’t come out and say it.” And we talked about it afterwards and I was like, “Could you not have used politician buzzwords and said that, but said it more softly.” And he said, “No I couldn’t. That’s what I believe in. I believe that a woman has a right to choose including a late-term abortion. I’m not going to walk away from that. I’m going to die on that hill.”

And so this centrist, moderate Democrat was willing to run on principle, was willing to talk in Alabama about democracy and why it mattered so much, and he won that race. An impossible race based on the polling numbers early on. And he won that race because people understood that he was authentic and that he would be honest with them and that they might not agree with everything that he thought or believed, but that he would always listen to them and try to act in their best interests. I’m going to regret saying all of this because Doug is going to absolutely hear this and make me eat it for having said nice things about him. But isn’t this what we want? Don’t we want politicians who care about the issues that matter to us? And doesn’t democracy matter to all of us right now?

Preet Bharara:

Look, Doug Jones no longer has his power, his seat, I should say. He has his integrity and I think that we need more people who care about their integrity than they care about their seat and power. I mean it’s really astonishing how much people want to hold on to power, including in our former stomping grounds. If you actually started, I was thinking about this the other day, I think we joked about it, although it’s not funny. If you created a law firm of the forced out or fired assistant US attorneys and US attorneys, but you would have maybe the most formidable law firm in the country.

Joyce Vance:

It’d be extraordinary.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to start calling them up. I’m going to start organizing. So before we get to solutions and what everyone can do, I want to identify, sort of prioritize the problems. Non-exhaustive list. What should we be most worried about? Is it the calling out of the National Guard over the objection of governors in various states? Is it the campaign of political retribution? Is it the gutting of the CDC? Is it bombing ships where you do what you may not know whether or not there’s drug activity going on? Is it the disappearing of people by officials in ICE who are wearing masks? I can go on and on and on. Ranked choice voting, how do you put those?

Joyce Vance:

So it’s the common thread that runs among all of them. It’s the central tenant of Trumpism in his second administration, which is accumulating all the power that the people have delegated the government in the hands of the president and upsetting the balance of power that the founding fathers set. This very basic notion that we all get three branches of government so no one gets too powerful, no one can override the rule of the people. And here we have a president egged on by the unitary executive theorists who believe in a powerful presidency. Donald Trump believes in an all-powerful presidency. A president who can, for instance, on the basis of no evidence, designate strike targets, lethal strike targets in foreign waters.

A president who believes that he has the power to federalize national guard troops and take them into cities, which just coincidentally happened to be led by Democrats. Most recently talking about Portland being in flames over the weekend, which I am assured by friends in Portland is not the case. And I think we’ve seen plenty of pictures that suggest to us that there are far more blow up unicorns in Portland than there are flames, right? I mean this notion that a president can shamelessly lie in an executive order and justify putting troops on the streets in an American city for God knows what purpose, although some people like J.B. Pritzker have speculated it might have something to do with upcoming elections.

This notion that he will lie in order to obtain more power and that he will now ask the Supreme Court to sign off on that exercise of power. This is the challenge that we face in this moment. How do you keep that from happening with what our friend Dahlia Lithwick likes to call a supine Congress, right? Congress is like my German Shepherd when she rolls over and just shows you her belly and that’s all the oomph that she has.

Preet Bharara:

Your German Shepherd is cute.

Joyce Vance:

She is. She’s so much more adorable than they are. I mean look, I venerate the work that lower court judges are doing in this era of trying to uphold their oaths. I have maybe a few more questions about the Supreme Court. I would like to believe that having given Trump just absolute immunity from criminal conduct, that perhaps they will set some civil limits and find that presidents don’t have the authority to do whatever they want to do on any given day, but we have to be candid about that and say that the verdict is still out on that and we will know when we know.

Preet Bharara:

So let’s talk about the solution here and I want to give you some general pushback on one of the articulations you have in here.

Joyce Vance:

Good.

Preet Bharara:

So I was with you and then you talked about hopelessness and you write, “Hopelessness is where autocrats try to push you so that you’ll stop opposing them.” The answer and I’m looking, “What’s the answer?” Very excited.

Joyce Vance:

You don’t like my answer?

Preet Bharara:

Well, I’m going to tell you what I think. Your answer, “Be like Dr. King, be like John Lewis.” I’m like, “I can’t even be like the guy I was yesterday.” That’s a tall order. What did you mean by that?

Joyce Vance:

So there are so many examples from our history, and I talk about a lot of them in the book and John Lewis, if he was with us today, he would push back when you said that you couldn’t be like him because John Lewis understood that we were human and that we were frail and that we could only do what we could do on any given day. But that if each of us summoned whatever gumption we had to push back when it was our moment to push back, that all of us doing that in unison could make progress. And look, I will just say I didn’t know John Lewis very well. He and my father-in-law knew each other in the civil rights area and cooked up a little bit of good trouble together. That’s what I always look to, to think about this moment.

Because if you were a Black person in the deep South in the fifties and the sixties, the possibility that you would be able to vote, that seemed pretty remote. This was an era when Black people who were trying to register to vote were told that they had to pass a literacy test to show that they were smart enough to vote. “Here’s this big jar of jelly beans. Tell me how many jelly beans are in the jar. And if you don’t get it right, you can’t register.” That is a true story that John Lewis used to tell about Dallas County, Alabama, which is where Selma is. I think John Lewis’s lesson and the lesson of other folks who have lived through times where they were not given the opportunity to be full participants in this country’s political system even though they were citizens.

The lesson is do what you can in the moment and do it by the way in community. Don’t think that you have to do it alone. Don’t think that you personally are responsible for fighting the entire battle. Find people that you love and who make you happy and who will let you help them help democracy survive. And trust that if we all work together and look, you might want to be a poll watcher, you might want to be an election worker, you might want to be a teacher, you might want to be involved in civics work in your community. In many ways the most important thing is you check, you pick what you are passionate about, and you just get started without worrying that you’re not enough because that’s what I hear you saying.

“I can’t do it. I’m not sure that I can do it.” I mean you know that everyday-

Preet Bharara:

I didn’t really mean it.

Joyce Vance:

… doing it. I know you did it. I sense for a lot of people there’s that real worry that they shouldn’t do anything because whatever they do won’t be significant enough. I want to reassure people it will be. Whatever you’re doing, it’s the right thing.

Preet Bharara:

We the people, it reminds me of my favorite quote that I haven’t heard in a while on the ability of people to do things. I think it’s attributed to Archimedes who once said, “Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I shall move the earth itself.” And so I think we should aspire to those things.

Joyce Vance:

We have a long lever, we the people.

Preet Bharara:

It’s not a place to stand at the moment. So you have a whole list of things that we can do and we should do because you say we are the cavalry. By we I mean you, even you guys up there and the guidelines include a series of proposals. The first one be smart. I like that one.

Joyce Vance:

You are.

Preet Bharara:

Thank you. Tell us about the guidelines.

Joyce Vance:

So I start from the promise that we should not sit around and wait for somebody else to come and fix democracy for us, right? No one is going to swoop in and do that. It really is our shared responsibility. And if we’re going to do that, we need to prepare for it as though we were going to run a marathon. Because between now and November of 2026 and probably November of 2028, we are all running a marathon together and we need to train to do that. So I think we have to do a number of things that I lay out in the book. Being smart is one of them. Understanding what we can accomplish together I think is critical. Working in community is incredibly important. Learning how to filter out misinformation and disinformation because if you are the person who has never fallen for misinformation, then God bless you.

I try so hard not to, but occasionally I will see something online and I will believe it, only to realize a couple of hours or days later that it’s not true. And so I’m trying to constantly evolve how good of a job I’m able to do to understand what the truth is. But perhaps my favorite thing on the list and something that I think really matters is to recognize that not everyone will want to fight for democracy in the same way. Some people will do it through the arts. I have some knitting friends who love to knit these fabulous pieces with political slogans on them and that can really galvanize a whole community of people who may not be reached by Preet and me talking about the law on Tuesday mornings.

Although I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t be reached by that. But I think the important point is to expand our definition of who stands with us in community, in favor of democracy, and to support people wherever they live on that spectrum so that there is room for all of us.

Preet Bharara:

I do want to spend a couple of minutes since we do this every week on Tuesday mornings, and this is a very educated group, and it’s relevant to all the things you talk about in your book. Some current events, shall we?

Joyce Vance:

Let’s do-

Preet Bharara:

I mentioned one in the opening and maybe we’ll get some questions on this and we’re anticipating it, but we did read with great enthusiasm and interest, two motions filed by the lawyers for Jim Comey, who was also our former colleague, used to be my boss at one point, filed by his principal lawyer, Pat Fitzgerald, another former colleague of ours. What’d you make of the vindictive and selective prosecution argument?

Joyce Vance:

I can remember another moment in American legal history where Pat Fitzgerald, Jim Comey’s lawyer, former US attorney in Chicago, reminded the country that the rule of law still worked. And that was this moment at the end of the Bush administration when a series of US attorneys had been fired for what you were involved in exposing as political reasons. And there were some serious questions about the integrity of the Justice Department. And then Pat Fitzgerald indicts the governor in Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, and stands up on national television and just in this wonderfully earnest mat… And I didn’t know Pat from a hole in the wall at this point.

And explains on national television, the search warrant, the indictment, and does something that we at the Justice Department really don’t do nearly often enough because we can’t talk about the substance of our cases beyond the four walls of the document, right? What’s in the indictment, what’s in the affidavit with the warrant. He talked about the process and explained what they had done and why they had done it. It was unbelievably reassuring, at least to me in my office. I watched it with my best friend who was also a prosecutor in my office at that time. We were both assistant United States attorneys and we felt so much pride that there was someone who was willing to explain to people what the Justice Department was doing and why it mattered while respecting the defendant’s rights and being clear in saying that he was innocent until he was proven guilty.

And so now we have these two motions that Fitzgerald and Jim Comey’s other lawyers have filed in the Comey prosecution and they make, I think, what will frankly be a turning point in the way that we perceive this Trump administration arguing in plain-spoken language against the use of the powers of the presidency to indict, to charge in a criminal case, an enemy, someone who, but for the whims of the President. The desire of a president to get revenge would not be charged in a case where there may not even be criminal conduct quite frankly. And if there is, it’s just so marginal that no right-thinking federal prosecutor would ever think to bring the case. In fact, we know that federal prosecutors left their jobs rather than bring this case.

So we don’t need to speculate. There’s actually proof that no right-thinking prosecutor and to come full circle, this is why you need the experience of being an insurance lawyer to be a US attorney.

Preet Bharara:

I bet you know a lot about insurance law too, Joyce. You being my-

Joyce Vance:

Not a thing.

Preet Bharara:

Do you want to say anything about the John Bolton prosecution before we go to the audience question?

Joyce Vance:

I’m curious, have y’all been following the Bolton case like we’ve been? I hear people saying two different things. I hear many people saying, “The Bolton indictment looks much more like a typical prosecution we would see out of the Justice Department.” 20 pages of factual basis underlying the 18 counts that he is charged with. And then I hear people saying, “We can’t trust this justice department. This is a justice department that has gone into court and told judges things that are not true. This is an ideological justice department.” I will tell you that that second view of the case fills me with so much sadness perhaps because even though that’s not where I ultimately land on this one, I don’t think that we can immediately discredit that.

I do think we have to be critical and wait to see what the evidence is. But I’m used to living in a world where if career federal prosecutors, and these are the people who indicted John Bolton, are willing to lay out 20 pages worth of what their evidence is to support the charges they are bringing. They are doing that because they have that evidence and they believe that they can put it forward. And so we will see John Bolton’s lawyers file motions again for selective and vindictive prosecution. But for the president’s animus, he wouldn’t be charged. And we do live in a strange world where the Secretary of War can get on Signal and disclose important information while American military pilots are still in the air.

In essence, endangering their lives by putting that in a public means of communication and what is the attorney general of the United States say? “Nothing to look at here, not going to even open an investigation.” So we have these two parallel legal systems going on right now. That is something that’ll have to be addressed. It may not mean that John Bolton gets his case dismissed. It will be an issue in this case throughout.

Preet Bharara:

Before I let you go, Joyce, I want to congratulate you again on the book. It’s incredibly important. Your voice is incredibly important, not just by the way on television, the podcasts, but also your newsletter is a must read for so many people who care about the country who have not given up. I always say my whole shtick about not giving up is to the extent you were fighting against the things that Donald Trump represents and the MAGA universe and some of these items that you mentioned at the end of the conversation. There was nobody, nobody, nobody in modern American life and politics who was more down in the dumps and a loser in political speak than Donald Trump. And he didn’t give up and his people didn’t give up.

And if he didn’t give up, his people didn’t give up, then I don’t know what the hell people are doing thinking about giving up who are on the right side of history and the right side of the rule of law. So that’s what keeps me going. I’m not giving up as long as that side hasn’t given up. I’ll also say that I admire you for so many things, Joyce. Your intellect, your compassion, your open-mindedness. But as a selfish matter, what I appreciate most is our friendship. I’ll always value that. We talk on the side about legal issues that we have too. So when I have an issue or a problem or something thorny that I want to deal with that is not for public consumption, Joyce is my phone call. Joyce Vance, this is no doubt going-

Joyce Vance:

He’s going to make me cry now.

Preet Bharara:

No doubt going to be on the bestseller list very soon. Thank you all for coming. My conversation with Joyce Vance continues for members of the CAFE Insider Community. In the bonus for Insiders, Joyce answers questions from the live audience.

Joyce Vance:

This is a great question. I wish I knew the answer to it. I obviously don’t, but I’m not above speculating.

Preet Bharara:

Please.

Joyce Vance:

Right?

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Stay tuned. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about George Santos’ pardon and the US military attacking ships in the Caribbean. Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from Laura who writes, “Last week, President Trump commuted George Santos’s sentence. What’s your take on that?” Laura and the rest of the world. I bet you can guess my take on that. So just a reminder, we all can recall George Santos for his colorful lies about his career and personal life. He basically lied about everything. His imaginary volleyball championships or his fabricated Wall Street resume. On some level, if the late-night comedy shows were any indication, many of us found his outlandish lies kind of darkly entertaining, kind of like reading The Onion come to life.

But George Santos actually pled guilty to serious crimes and they were not entertaining, not one bit. They were real crimes with real victims. When he was indicted in 2023, prosecutors accused him of a series of fraud schemes, from collecting unemployment benefits he didn’t qualify for, to soliciting political donations, and then using the money for personal expenses, even charging $11,000 to one donor’s credit card without their permission. And so as part of the plea deal, remember he pled guilty, he wasn’t convicted at trial. That meant he voluntarily admitted and conceded his guilt. In connection with that, Santos agreed to pay about $375,000 in restitution to his victims, including the state’s unemployment insurance fund and the donor whose credit card he stole.

So then last week, President Trump issued a commutation that wiped out the restitution order. Didn’t just get him out of prison, it wiped out his obligations to his victims so he doesn’t have to pay back the people he defrauded, not the unemployment fund and not the donor. So the question is why? Why would the president use his pardon power to spare George Santos from paying back his victims? What was so compelling about this case, to my mind, absolutely nothing. But the backstory seems to be that a few days ago, a Long Island newspaper published a letter from Santos addressed directly to Trump. In it he wrote, “Mr. President, I have nowhere else to turn. You have always been a man of second chances, a leader who believes in redemption and renewal. I’m asking you now from the depths of my heart to extend that same belief to me.”

My response to that is, “Give me a break.” Trump’s response to that was, “Hey, let me commute your sentence.” And he justified the move, as he does all moves, including in the opposite direction when he charges people for disloyalty. He said, with respect to George Santos, “At least Santos had the courage, conviction, and intelligence to always vote Republican.” And so while George Santos still has victims waiting to be made whole, what seems to matter most to President Trump isn’t accountability. It’s loyalty. By the way, it’s worth noting that many of Santos’s victims themselves were Republican donors. You have to wonder how many of them voted for Trump and how many of them regret that now. This question comes from a post on X from #forwisehope. Love the handle.

“What is your take on the repatriation of the two survivors of the recent attack on the submarine in the Caribbean?” Thank you for your question, @forwisehope. With a handle like that, I would think that you would know all the answers to all the questions, but in any event. So under normal circumstances, the US handles maritime drug smuggling through the Coast Guard, right? For as long as people can remember, when a suspicious vessel is identified, it’s intercepted, the Coast Guard boards it, and makes arrests if they find evidence of illegal activity. And usually that’s piles and piles of drugs hidden aboard the ship. The Trump administration has taken a far more aggressive approach, that’s putting it mildly.

It has sought to classify suspected drug traffickers at sea as enemy combatants. Claiming the legal authority to target them with military strikes just as if they were enemy soldiers in wartime. The issue that people are raising though is on what basis, on what level of evidence, on what quantum of proof? The strike you’re referring to took place about a week ago, the US fired on a submarine-like vessel traveling through the Caribbean. After the attack, President Trump wasted no time in going to social media. He wrote, “US intelligence confirmed this vessel was loaded up with mostly fentanyl and other illegal narcotics. At least 25,000 Americans would die if I allowed the submarine to come ashore.” Well, fentanyl is dangerous, but that stat is not correct. That we can talk about another time.

So this isn’t the first time the administration has attacked a foreign vessel suspected of smuggling drugs, but it’s the first time that there have been any survivors. So a little bit to people’s surprise, what did Trump choose to do with those survivors? He announced on social media again that the two survivors “are being returned to their countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution.” Which struck some people as weird because on the one hand, moments before their ship was blown up, they were fodder for summary execution based on the level of evidence that the government had. And once surviving, they’re not getting due process in the US. They’re not being prosecuted in the US. They’re not facing justice and scrutiny in the US where their harm was intended to take place.

But back to their countries of origin where I’m not aware that there’s an ironclad understanding or agreement that they will be in fact detained and prosecuted. I could be wrong about that. Starstruck some people as odd, and it all speaks to a legal and political dilemma for all the people involved. Should they have been held as wartime detainees at Guantanamo Bay or prosecuted in US civilian courts? Or as the decision was, sent back to their home countries with the hope that those governments would prosecute them? And in fairness, the options carried some risks. Holding the survivors as wartime detainees at Guantanamo could have invited a court challenge over whether a war on drug traffickers actually exists, and that could lead to legal problems as well, which presumably the administration did not want to take the risk about.

Prosecuting the survivors in civilian court also posed problems, I guess. When Trump said that US intelligence confirmed there were drugs on board, did he mean confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt? And if so, where’s the evidence? A jury would need to see all the evidence for a criminal conviction. And so what’s odd is, and I think understandably confusing to people and perhaps bordering unbaffling, is how you can have sufficient evidence to literally kill people summarily from the air and if someone survives, there’s not enough evidence to try them in court. That’s a notable disconnect, and I think people are right to raise that question. The question being, if the president was confident enough in their guilt to order a lethal strike, how could you not be confident enough to bring a criminal case?

As I said, so far, neither Ecuador nor Colombia has agreed to prosecute those men. Ecuador is still confirming one survivor’s nationality and Colombian officials have not commented publicly. What we do know is that Colombia’s President, Gustavo Petro, has been openly critical of US strikes like this one. After a separate attack in September that killed several Colombians, Petro accused US officials of murder and of violating Colombia’s sovereignty. Not sure how cooperative he will be. On Monday, President Petro posted a video on social media that seemed aimed directly at the Trump administration’s strike first, asked questions later approach. The video showed the Colombian navy seizing nearly a half ton of cocaine at sea with Petro’s caption reading simply “Zero deaths in this operation.”

This question comes from a post on X from Twitter user HeyRachaCha who asks, “What’s the best inflatable animal costume you’ve seen at a recent protest?” Hey, HeyRachaCha, that’s a great question. As many of you probably know, the trend of wearing inflatable animal costumes took off in Portland, Oregon after tension between ICE agents and protesters began to escalate. According to one protest organization, the goal is to, and I’m definitely quoting here, “Deflate the tension and inflate the good vibes.” Since then, the inflatable animal trend has spread across the country, and it was out in full force at last weekend’s No Kings protests. One protester in an inflatable pig costume told the Miami Herald, “They want us to be violent, but you can’t get any less violent than this.”

Personally, I will say on the record, I’m a huge fan of the inflatable frogs and unicorns, especially when they’re dancing together in a conga line. But my favorite might be a mix of costume and clever wordplay. I saw a photo of a protester dressed as a giant hot dog holding a sign that read, this is true, “We relish democracy.” Organizers said about 2,600 No Kings events were held across nearly every state, and some estimates put total attendance around 7 million people, which is a record-breaking turnout. It’s nice to see so many Americans who truly relish democracy. Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Joyce Vance. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Blue Sky, or you can call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The supervising producer is Jake Kaplan. The lead editorial producer is Jennifer Indig. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. The video producer is Nat Weiner. The audio producer is Matthew Billy. And the marketing manager is Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.