[00:00:00.28] PREET: Joyce Vance, welcome to the show.

[00:00:04.06] JOYCE: Thanks for having me, Preet.

[00:00:05.15] PREET: So, let me just say off the bat, for folks who are listening, it is 6:01 PM, on Tuesday, August 21st and I have just come through, i know you also have, witnessing the craziest 90 minutes that I can remember, ever, in terms of legal developments, that affect the president of the United States. Would you agree with that?

[00:00:28.28] JOYCE: Or maybe just Tuesday in the Trump administration.

[00:00:32.05] PREET: (Laughing) No, do you agree that today, this Tuesday, was a different kind of Tuesday, and a more significant Tuesday than most?

[00:00:38.12] JOYCE: This is different, and I think everybody is experiencing a range of emotions, from surprise all the way on through to the very sobering thought that we’re hearing legal developments about this presidency that no one really wants to hear about any presidency.

[00:00:54.20] PREET: I would agree with that. So just to recap quickly, that the two things that were happening, literally like on split screen on cable news, back and forth, two things, and I kept wondering which thing would happen first, and which thing would be you know, more significant to the future. You had the jury deliberating in the Paul Manafort trial in the eastern district of Virginia, on 18 counts of various federal crimes, and the jury was, you know, looked like it was coming to a little bit of a stalemate, or a standstill on some counts, and at the same time, word came out that Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer and quote end quote, “fixer,” was pleading guilty in court. And all those things that were unfolding throughout the day, which one did you think was gonna become the more important story, and which one do you think is the more consequential story?

[00:01:46.29] JOYCE: I think it has to be the news of the Cohen plea. Even though we, I think we’ve all been looking forward to this, right?  It seemed just so likely that Cohen would be charged, it seemed likely that he would have no option other than to plead, and he’s been so radio silent for about the last 10 days that it looked like that was in the works. But then you see the actual charges and realize that he’s being charged with campaign finance violations that directly involve the president, that has to be the one that has more legs.

[00:02:17.12] PREET: It was an odd thing for me to watch, because the Cohen…let’s start with the Cohen case before we talk about Manafort. The Cohen case, is odd for me in a sense because it’s being handled by the office that I used to lead for a number of years, and I know all the people on it, I saw the press conference a few minutes ago that was given by the Deputy to the US Attorney, the acting you know US Attorney for the  purposes of the Cohen case because the US Attorney has recused himself, Rob Khuzami, on the courthouse steps with all sorts of folks standing to the side of him, most of whom I hired, if not all of them, and or promoted. So it was this feeling that the case was in good hands, with folks that I know very very well and work with very closely, but let’s just review what the charges are, and again, apologies to everyone in the audience, if we are processing this literally at the same time as we’re reading the documents…

[00:03:10.05] JOYCE: We’re like talking and processing all at once, right?

[00:03:12.25] PREET: SO just a couple minutes ago, my folks brought in to the studio a copy of the, what’s called a criminal information to which Michael Cohen plead guilty, and the plea agreement, and they’re basically three sets of charges, right, Joyce?

[00:03:26.18] JOYCE: Yeah, I think that that’s right. We’ve got some tax charges, there’s one count that’s sort of a bank fraud count an institution fraud count, and then there are these campaign finance charges.

[00:03:38.26] PREET: So, let’s just start with how odd it is that Michael Cohen was not charged in an indictment, or a criminal complaint, that he could see, he could get discovery, he could have some proceedings in court, he could fight them, he could go to trial. How unusual—and I’ll tell you how unusual it is in mine, also—how unusual is it in your experience, that a defendant of this type pleads guilty to a charge right off the bat?

[00:04:06.13] JOYCE: So to be fair, we don’t know if he got some form of discovery behind the scenes before this happened…

[00:04:12.04] PREET: That’s true, it’s rare but it happens.

[00:04:13.17] JOYCE: …but if he didn’t get indictment behind the scenes, I’d say that it’s relatively rare for this to happen without him seeing the discovery and putting the government’s feet to the fire. But, Preet, before we go any further I just have to say you’ve got to be remarkably proud of the office that you led, because I heard that press conference and process too and I heard Khuzami say, “We will not fear prosecuting additional campaign finance cases, and the rule of law is here.” And it was really a stirring moment, I hope his comments will be captured and played over and over for people, because I thought that was remarkable.

[00:04:50.14] (Recording of Khuzami plays) The rule of law applies, and that for law enforcement, all of whom are gathered here, it is our commitment that we will pursue and vindicate those who choose to break the law, and vindicate the majority of people who live law abiding lives, who follow honest and fair dealing, and live lives of lawful behavior.

[00:05:17.19] PREET: I saw that too and it was, and I should just say, I’ve known Rob Khuzami for a long time, we were colleagues when he was the head of enforcement at the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission when I was US Attorney. We did lots and lots of cases together, and we made announcements on criminal cases that we brought and civil enforcement actions that he brought. And so, he deserves a lot of credit for being independent, and for pursuing this case as he said in his comments, just like any other case. I mean it’s a special case, he noted, in a lot of ways, and I’ve said the elephant in the room, if you can use that term, is DOnald Trump. But you know, justice is done, when all cases large and small are treated the same way and everyone is treated equally before the bar of justice. And that’s essentially what he said.

[00:06:02.25] JOYCE: Absolutely.

[00:06:04.04] PREET: So, a lot of the speculation about Michael Cohen has been this issue is, is he going to cooperate? Is he going to flip as people say? And so all day the speculation was, leading up to this taping, which is very fortuitous, will he have a cooperation agreement with the government? Which would, generally speaking, require him to be available to testify, provide information, that the government deems to be of value. And then on the side of the prosecution, they’re obligated to make a motion essentially, for leniency on the part of that person, to make sure that all of his cooperation becomes known to the judge, so he can get a lighter sentence at the end of the day. What we see in front of us, and what you and I are both reading in real time, is not a cooperation agreement, is it?

[00:06:50.20] JOYCE: No it’s not a cooperation agreement at all. It looks very close to a straight plea. The parties don’t even agree on the sentence. They have different interpretations of what the appropriate sentence is…

[00:07:02.17] PREET: And does that surprise you?

[00:07:03.17] JOYCE:…That’s not a hallmark of cooperation. Yeah I think that’s really surprising. It’s your district, right?

[00:07:07.29] PREET: It is!

[00:07:09.02] JOYCE: Is that a typical practice for Southern District of New York with a cooperation agreement? And that’s not to say that they’re not cooperating, I expect that there’s an exchange going back and forth and they’re sort of doing the dance. But I was really surprised that they had not agreed on sentencing.

[00:07:25.01] PREET: But putting that aside, the issue of whether or not there is an agreement as to whether the government is going to make a motion to the court, or make available to the court, information that would result in a lower sentence, generally speaking you would expect a, someone charged with a crime or about to be charged with a crime, to want that guarantee from the prosecutor. So, the question sort of is, did they not find Michael Cohen to be credible? Was his information not gonna give substantial assistance to the prosecutors in bringing a case against someone else? I mean, what we’re about to talk about in a second, which is the most momentous thing that happened today, was Michael Cohen saying in open court, essentially, that he committed the campaign finance violation in coordination with and in, and at the direction of, a federal candidate for office, which from the surrounding documents he means President Trump. [00:08:19.06] He literally got up in court, under oath, during his guilty plea allocution, in front of Judge Pauley, in the Southern District of New York, and said, “I did this crime, in coordination with, and at the direction of, the president.” Or, you know, the person before he became the president. How stunning is that to you, and are you surprised given that statement in court, that there’s not a cooperation agreement?

[00:08:45.06] JOYCE: So on the one hand, I thought it was absolutely stunning, I was listening to it in real time and what was running in the back of my head was the knowledge that Cohen has an extraordinarily capable defense lawyer, who would have been certain to rehearse with him the importance of being absolutely truthful in court to avoid subjecting himself to additional perjury charges. So what we heard from Cohen today I think has the strong ring of truth to it. And given that, and that Cohen can apparently offer at least some of that to prosecutors, that leads me to believe that although we didn’t see a cooperation agreement today in this plea agreement, there’s not one in the offing. But you make this really interesting point of why Cohen would have gone ahead and pleaded guilty without that assurance that he would get some sort of favorable treatment from prosecutors, you know he gets a little bit of a bump down in sentencing just by virtue of pleading guilty. [00:09:44.02] But he could have gotten that at any time, so I feel like there’s a little bit more here that we don’t know yet that’s going on.

[00:09:50.15] PREET: Do you think that if the president was not the president, and given the benefit of this prevailing legal rule, or conclusion by the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be indicted, but he was just a regular guy who was subjected to the same rule of law, principles that you and I are, that he might have been charged with a campaign finance violation based on what you see here?

[00:10:13.09] JOYCE: You know, I think that there’s this hesitation, this isn’t information, it hasn’t been to the grand jury, I don’t know if these campaign finance counts have been something that SDNY has been working with all along, the sort of thing that they believe that they have strong evidence to prove, or if the lynchpin for them is having some sort of let’s just call it a confession from Cohen, of course we both know that a confession alone would not be enough to sustain a conviction of guilt, so they must have additional evidence. That makes it hard to walk away from the conclusion that if he were just a private citizen, Trump, he would not have found himself in that courtroom in Manhattan today.

[00:10:53.20] PREET: Do you think that  reason why prosecutors might find that Cohen’s information about the president does not constitute substantial assistance, they have a legal bar to charging the president, and so the information is not worthwhile? Right? Do you know what I’m saying?

[00:11:11.12] JOYCE: Hmm, yeah I do know what you’re saying and I think that’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought about that before, I think you’re…it’s sort of like a law school exercise, right? The president cannot be indicted based on DOJ policy, so anything Cohen says about the president cannot be assistance. I sort of doubt though that Mueller’s folks would work that way. For one thing they’re writing this report that will go up to Capitol Hill, maybe that would ring the bell for being assistance in another matter, and certainly Cohen has assistance that he can offer beside the president, so I suspect that the hold up here is, you know there’s some negative possibilities here, right? They’ve just found that Cohen isn’t truthful, maybe he’s not willing to provide full information on all crimes that he knows have been committed, either by himself or by others, which he will have to do in order to successfully conclude a cooperation agreement.

[00:12:08.17] PREET: Can we pause here for a second? Because maybe people don’t understand this, you know, so you have a person, who has information about a bad guy. You know a mob figure, or a bank robber, or an insider trader or something, and they say, and they come into your office when you were the US Attorney in the Northern District of Alabama, or into my office, and they say, “Alright, you want this information against a bad guy, I have it. And I can give it to you on a silver platter,” but then you also know that he has information about you know someone else, and that he can implicate someone else, and he refuses to do so. What’s the reason for not taking the cooperation from a guy who wants to selectively cooperate?

[00:12:48.00] JOYCE: YOu know, some prosecutors in some cases will find a way to do that. Maybe they’ll carve out cooperation on family members, for instance, is one exception. But, the value of a cooperator who’s not being fully truthful, is in many ways diminished. This reminds me so much as a young prosecutor I used to prosecute Dixie Mafia cases, and the Dixie Mafia operated on a surprisingly large nationwide scale, but every time you brought in a Dixie Mafia cooperator, it was this really almost exhausting process of getting them to disclose all of the crimes that they were aware of, because there were so many, and so many people that they didn’t want to cooperate, regarding either because they were afraid of them, or because they were family members. That I think is a little bit about what’s going on here with Cohen.

[00:13:41.17] PREET: So this is the excitement of breaking news while we’re in the middle of recording this. So I’ve just been….

[00:13:46.03] JOYCE: I can’t take anymore today.

[00:13:47.20] PREET: Well I’m gonna read something to you. This is the statement of Lenny Davis, who was one of the lawyers for Michael Cohen. I’m just gonna read it to you, and listeners know that Joyce Vance has not heard this before, and I want to get your take on it, because it’s literally what we’ve been talking about for the last few minutes. So Lenny Davis says this, “Michael Cohen took this step today so that his family can move on to the next chapter. This is Michael fulfilling his promise made on July 2nd to put his family and country first, and tell the truth about Donald Trump.” Fair enough. Then he goes on to say, quote, “Today he stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal purpose of influencing an election. If those payments…”

[00:14:28.11] JOYCE: Wow.

[00:14:28.29] PREET: Yeah. “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?” Question mark, close quotes, that’s from Lenny Davis, just now. I feel like we should be on live television. What’s your reaction to the Lenny Davis provocative statement?

[00:14:46.14] JOYCE: I think it would be difficult to draw any other conclusion, right? What he says is just what it is based on what happened in court. The question I guess, the more subtle question is why does he need to say that? Is that part of the dance that they’re doing with prosecutors? As though to emphasize what Cohen has to offer, even if there’s something else that he wants to hold back. but of course I’m speculating wildly.

[00:15:10.03] PREET: Yeah. It just seems very odd, right? That he has this information about somebody who’s the sitting president. He’s making a very shocking allegation, forthrightly, after saying he would take a bullet for the president. And he pleads straight up. Anyway, maybe this is just sort of not as interesting, as this is lawyer talk, but the fundamental issue…

[00:15:33.02] JOYCE: But before we move off of it though, let me just say, maybe the problem here is, what evidence Cohen has to back this up. For instance, if he’s got emails that make this clear, then it should be a done deal. So perhaps this isn’t the strong evidence that the government wants.

[00:15:49.24] PREET: Yeah look it maybe it’s a way for Cohen to get back at the president, because it’s not necessary to his making it a factual basis for his guilty plea to say exactly what he said. In other words, people plea guilty all the time for crimes that they have committed with other people. And they’re often pretty minimalist in what they say about other folks, and what the role of other folks was, right?

[00:16:13.00] JOYCE: I think that’s right, and as a prosecutor I’m testing everything that comes out of Cohen’s mouth. I’m taking nothing at face value, you don’t believe a cooperating witness because you want to, you have to literally go through and truth test every single statement that they make.

[00:16:29.25] PREET: And Cohen has a reason now, because he’s been abandoned, he’s been called a liar and a terrible person by Rudy Giuliani, so maybe he wants to stick it to the president a little bit? Is that another reason why you might look a little bit with a grain of salt on his statement?

[00:16:42.19] JOYCE: Yeah absolutely, I’d be really careful. Cohen is not a choir boy.

[00:16:46.24] PREET: (Laughs) Right, I mean that’s the funny thing about people who become cooperating witnesses, or almost become cooperating witnesses, one day they’re terrible, and they should go to prison, and the other day, you know people tend to sympathize with them because they will help perhaps prosecute somebody that you don’t like. In this case…

[00:17:03.25] JOYCE: Right you always say, “IT’s a thug, but it’s our thug.”

[00:17:07.11] PREET: (Laughs) Right, right. So Joyce, it’s stunning information, the statement that again, we’ve discussed why there are reasons you might take it with a grain of salt, but it remains a very provocative, incriminating statement echoed by the lawyer. What do you think happens next here?

[00:17:26.09] JOYCE: So i think what happens next is not on public view. The next stage in the Cohen part of this case is for Cohen and his lawyers to meet with prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, and we’ll find out ultimately, is it simply this indictment of Cohen or today information with nothing else, or is there more that comes out of Cohen and perhaps his cooperation down the road?

[00:17:52.04] PREET: But do you think it’s also possible that this is it, you know he said his piece, he got in the dig at Trump, the lawyer got to make his statement, he pled guilty, a sentencing date will be set, and probably has been set I should say, I didn’t see if that happened in the proceedings today, and then he goes on his merry way and they argue about sentencing and then that’s it, that’s the last we hear from Cohen. Do you think that’s also a possibility?

[00:18:14.12] JOYCE: I guess that’s possible but have you ever seen a case like this with such volatile actors and with so much, sort of…

[00:18:21.05] PREET: No, no.

[00:18:21.20] JOYCE:…just say smoke going on? And then it just ends?

[00:18:24.03] PREET: No one’s ever seen a case like this, ever.

[00:18:26.13] JOYCE: Well that’s true too. But I mean just the quantum of publicly available information about potential criminal acts, I think it’s unlikely that it stops here.

[00:18:36.27] PREET: But, just a last point that I’ll get the lawyer’s because I’m stuck on this. Have you often seen a case where someone you know negotiated a deal, entered into a plea agreement, pled straight up, and then sometimes, and then sometime later, entered into a cooperation agreement where they got leniency?

[00:18:52.08] JOYCE: Yes, frequently and particularly in cases that involved crime organizations.

[00:18:58.03] PREET: So you take what you can get from the guy now, you leave open the possibility for cooperation later, so there might be a second act here.

[00:19:04.10] JOYCE: Absolutely.

[00:19:05.23] PREET: Okay. So Joyce, I’m doing something again that I’ve never done before, which is I keep getting interrupted with texts and emails that I want to get your reaction to, this is Bret Stephens, conservative columnist with the New York Times, who tweeted out a few minutes ago, quote, “I’ve been skeptical about the wisdom and merit of impeachment, Cohen’s guilty plea changes that. The president is clearly guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors. He should resign his office or be impeached and removed from office,” closed quote. Do you think we’re gonna be hearing more of that kind of talk in light of the Cohen plea?

[00:19:41.02] JOYCE: I think we will, I think we’ll hear it from more conservative columnists, but the real issue is whether it will stiffen the spines of the people in the house, and ultimately in the Senate, and move them towards impeachment. You know the president is gonna continue to look at his popularity polls and base his decisions on that. And perhaps that’s true of the folks who would have to begin impeachment proceedings as well.

[00:20:09.09] PREET: Here, you know one more thing, Rudy Giuliani finally has put out a statement, saying, quote, on the Cohen plea, quote, “There is no allegation of any wrongdoing against the president and the government’s charges against Mr. Cohen. It is clear that as the prosecutor noted, Mr. Cohen’s actions reflect a pattern of lies and dishonesty over a significant period of time.” Closed quote. Do you have a reaction to that statement, which is actually more articulate than a lot of things he’s said recently?

[00:20:36.13] JOYCE: I’d love to have some of whatever it is that he’s smoking. You know, this statement…

[00:20:42.02] PREET: Could you respond to him by saying truth isn’t truth?

[00:20:45.19] JOYCE: I may have already said that once today, you know I think Rudy’s problem is actually that he’s gonna find out that the truth is very much the truth, and that it comes home to roost at some point. What happened in this courthouse today to say that it doesn’t involve the president, you know sure it doesn’t involve collusion with Russia, but to say it doesn’t involve, it doesn’t implicate the president for involvement in the campaign finance violations? It’s just wrong.

[00:21:14.22] PREET: Do you think the likelihood of impeachment has gone up today?

[00:21:19.11] JOYCE: If this was a typical….

[00:21:19.21] PREET: I’m not asking you if it’s likely, but has it gone up?

[00:21:22.05] JOYCE: I hear ya. I mean if this was a typical presidency, and if politicians were behaving in a way that they normally behave, you would expect that we would have inched closer towards impeachment today. But my crystal ball on this presidency has been bad, it doesn’t operate like a typical presidency. Trump’s voters don’t operate in many ways like voters for other politicians do. I would have to think that this does inch us closer to impeachment, but we’ll see.

[00:21:53.22] PREET: You heard it here, from Joyce Vance on impeachment. Paul Manafort was on trial, on 18 counts for federal crimes, in the Eastern District of Virginia, but I think it was all five tax avoidance…

[00:22:05.23] JOYCE: That’s right.

[00:22:06.17] PREET:…he was convicted of.

[00:22:07.02] JOYCE: Two bank fraud, and then one FBAR count.

[00:22:09.23] PREET: Yeah, and the FBAR count means he didn’t make the disclosure that he had an interest in a foreign bank account.

[00:22:15.20] JOYCE: So it’s an interesting split verdict, I’m not sure what it signals about the jury, I did hear from someone who was in the courtroom that there was one juror who was off to the side, the other jurors were sitting together, that sometimes signals that you have one hold out, um but we don’t know, and I’m not sure that we will find out, whether it was just one holdout on these other counts, or whether there was a larger number of jurors who simply didn’t believe that the government met its burden of proof on 10 of the counts in this indictment. The important thing though, is that in sentencing, the government will be able to use all of the conduct that Manafort is charged with as relevant conduct. It will all count against him at sentencing, and he will be looking before he even heads into next month’s second trial in the District of Columbia, at the risk of a lot of time in federal prison.

[00:23:11.18] PREET: A couple things, just sort of so people understand about the law, that I’ve been getting asked a lot today. On the remaining 10 counts, that caused the mistrial, the government can still go to trial on those counts later, correct?

[00:23:22.25] JOYCE: That’s right. The government can choose to go ahead and re try because those weren’t acquittals, those were charges that the jury couldn’t resolve, and because they’re in the Eastern District of Virginia with the rocket docket, I would expect that that would be a relatively quick decision and that they would be out to trial pretty fast.

[00:23:40.25] PREET: Someone just handed me a note suggesting that the court said that the court said they need to decide by August 29th, I think that’s consistent with the rocket docket. Would you—you’re the US Attorney and I was asked this question earlier on television actually, as it was happening. This is your case, you got the conviction on eight, you got the mistrial on 10, what’s your decision on going forward with the remaining 10?

[00:24:03.21] JOYCE: So my off the cuff reaction is that I would not retry those counts. I got enough convictions here on serious charges, I’d move into sentencing and go on in the District of Columbia as much to economize on government resources as anything else.

[00:24:21.05] PREET: Yeah, my answer is similar. What I said was, “I’d like to see what happens in the District of COlumbia and just make sure that the level of accountability you have on the eight counts is similar to the level of accountability you would have otherwise had, on all 18 counts. Now here’s the thing that happens on TV all the time, that drives me crazy and used to drive me, especially crazy when I had the job, everyone on TV has been yelling about how Paul Manafort is looking at 300 years in jail, and the rest of his life, or 400 years. Explain to folks why that is kind of misleading.

[00:24:54.16] JOYCE: So, federal sentencing is really a complex critter. There are the federal statutes and they almost always contain a final sentence that says something like, “And the sentence for violating this section of the criminal code will be not more than 30 years.” And so people look at that and they say, “Oh 30 years,” and if you’ve got ten 30 year counts they somehow think it’s 300 years. But here’s how it works in reality, sentencing is conducted under regulations called the sentencing guidelines. And they use a two prong sort of a calculation based in one part on the defendant’s prior criminal history, on the other hand on his conduct and the offense, or offenses for which he’s being charged, and they come up with a range of sentencing. And that range is typically far lower than the statutory maximum, and also it doesn’t stack. [00:25:49.26] So in other words if you’ve got 10 counts, it’s not each count plus the other, usually the longest sentence becomes the defendant’s sentence. Did I explain that right?

[00:25:59.14] PREET: I think you explained it very well. I mean in other words, what people think when they see a count of conspiracy, and then a count of bank robbery, for example, you know conspiracy to commit bank robbery and then a separate count of bank robbery, people think well ,the statutory maximum for one is X years, and then you add it to the statutory maximum for the second, which is X years and which is why when you have many counts, it looks like you’re looking at hundreds of years in prison, when in actuality, if you’ve get convicted of both the conspiracy to commit the bank fraud, and then also the actual bank fraud, your sentence is not gonna be any greater. Generally speaking.

[00:26:33.21] JOYCE: Exactly. That’s almost always so, unless in rare cases where the judge might do something different, but…

[00:26:39.12] PREET: There’s sort of a natural redundancy sometimes in these counts.

[00:26:42.17] JOYCE: Yeah.

[00:26:42.29] PREET: Do you wish people would make that clear on television?

[00:26:45.18] JOYCE: It really annoys me, and the other thing that sometimes bothers me is white collar sentences can be very low under the guidelines as a prosecutor, I sometimes found it very disturbing to get a low sentence, for instance for a former CEO or CFO, who had been involved in manipulation of the books at his company, as opposed to someone who was selling, you know I won’t say small amounts of drugs, but for instance not an enormously large amount of cocaine or methamphetamine.

[00:27:17.24] PREET: Can you explain to folks why on earth Paul Manafort is facing a second trial on, you know different but related charges, in the District of Columbia? ‘Cause that’s probably confusing to some folks.

[00:27:29.03] JOYCE: So this is entirely of Manafort’s own doing. When the government, when special counsel’s office was ready to supercede, or to amend the indictment against him with additional charges, they realized that they didn’t have venue in the District of Columbia. Under the federal laws you can only bring charges in districts where the defendant committed the crimes, and so although the original crimes there was both jurisdiction and venue in DC, for this latter group that they wanted to amend, the proper venue was in the Eastern District of Virginia, and very sensibly special council appears to have gone to Manafort and said, “Look if you’ll wave venue, we’ll just go ahead and supercede and bring all of these charges in the District of Columbia one trial.” But Manafort’s lawyers, for whatever reason, decided the better strategy for them was to have two separate trials. I wonder if they’re rethinking that today.

[00:28:24.17] PREET: So what’s that mean, the logic of that, you know in the Eastern District of Virginia they might have a better jury pool?

[00:28:29.09] JOYCE: You know we saw this little maneuver where they tried to get out of Alexandria, and down to I think it was Roanoke, which is a much more conservative part of Virginia in the Western District of Virginia. That of course failed, I don’t know if that was the strategy from the get go, but one additional risk that they face here is that Manafort has been convicted in the Eastern District of Virginia, when he goes into the District of Columbia, he will have some criminal history. It won’t be someone who’s never been convicted of a crime. I don’t know if or how much that will influence his sentence in the District of Columbia but they’ve certainly run a risk there.

[00:29:07.14] PREET: So Paul Manafort, going to jail, yes?

[00:29:10.14] JOYCE: Yes, absolutely.

[00:29:11.24] PREET: And how long do you think…

[00:29:12.09] JOYCE: Unless he decides he has a change of heart and wants to cooperate. But even then I think he has to serve some time.

[00:29:18.16] PREET: But at this point, the only thing that saves him from going to prison for some period of time, you think, is cooperation, against someone significant.

[00:29:26.09] JOYCE: He could still cooperate, we don’t know if the government is interested in that cooperation or what kind of deal the government would offer. IF it were my district he would still have to serve a good bit of time.

[00:29:41.01] PREET: Final question, you know that is something looming and swirling around in people’s minds, and the closer we get to people who are close to the president, and people perhaps still in the position to harm the president through a legal process, is the question of pardons. How worried should people be that President Trump is just gonna off and pardon Manafort, or someone else?

[00:30:02.27] JOYCE: This president’s favorite part of being in office are the parts where he has absolute power. He seems to love using the pardon process in a relatively indiscriminate fashion. You know you and I were both part of an administration where the pardon power was used to do justice, and to right some old wrongs. And it was very carefully calculated to do justice while preserving safety and communities. It was an orderly process, there were rules. There were a lot of people who were concerned about uniformity. None of that applies here, and so if this president feels threatened, and there’s no way he doesn’t feel threatened tonight, you got to think that it’s even odds. That he might try to deliver pardons and see if he can save himself, and the only thing that will save us if he chooses to do that will be for Congress to see that that’s, you know everyone talks about the red line that can’t be crossed. [00:30:58.10] Pardoning someone who can testify against you, whether it’s Manafort or Cohen, that has to be the red line. If it’s not we’re in terrible trouble.

[00:31:06.17] PREET: Final thing that I want you to share with my audience, is you and I share a memory from the time that we were US Attorneys together, and I also should tell folks, you know, we have been friends from the beginning, when we both got nominated and confirmed on the same day, and I got to know you very well over the next number of years. And there was an occasion when there was a US Attorneys conference in Washington DC, and all the US Attorneys, you know the 90 some odd of us, all had a photo opportunity at the White House. And we’re all sort of standing, you know the short people in the front, the taller people in the back, and the President of the United States at the time, Barack Obama comes in to give us a little pep talk. Tell folks what he said to us?

[00:31:47.24] JOYCE: You know so many people wrote the words down because they were striking at the time, he told us, “I appointed you but you don’t serve me, you serve the American people. And I expect you to act with independence, and integrity.”

[00:32:04.12] PREET: Yeah I remember that very well. And I think those words were not lost on the folks sitting in the room, ’cause as you said I hired you, as you said, but you have a more important job than serving me. It’d be good if people remember that today.

[00:32:19.18] JOYCE: It was a Do The Right Thing moment, I think that that’s something that applies to everyone today too.

[00:32:24.26] PREET: Joyce thank you for being on the show at such a critical moment, and dealing with my sort of breaking news interruptions. People I think will really appreciate your insight.

[00:32:36.12] JOYCE: Thanks for having me.