And now I'm really excited to introduce you to our
two speakers this evening.
Barbara Quaid is a professor at the University of Michigan
Law School, where she teaches criminal law, criminal
procedure, national security, and data privacy.
She's also a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC,
and she's the co-host of Sisters in Law podcast and
author of the national bestseller, Attack from Within.
From 2010 to 2017, she served as U.S.
attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan,
and she was the first woman to hold that position.
Deborah Juarez is currently appointed to the Seattle
City Council, representing District 5, my district.
Any other D5ers in the room?
North Seattle?
Come on.
Nope. All right.
Well, it's a special place.
She previously served as Seattle City Council President, and
she was the first Indigenous woman to hold that role.
Her remarkable career has spanned
public defense, tribal affairs, economic development, and
public service, including work with Evergreen Legal Services,
King County Superior Court, the Governor's
Office of Indian Affairs, and Seattle City Council.
Would you please join me in welcoming Deborah
and Barbara to the stage?
All right.
So I'm going to sit here.
Thanks so much.
Well, this is very exciting.
The last time I was here, I was in the audience
when Barbara was here promoting her other book,
The Attack from Within.
And so let me just start with, first of all,
welcome Barbara McQuaid back to Seattle.
Welcome to Seattle and FIFA and a special shout
out to our sister, former Mayor Jenny Durkan,
that brought us together.
And so what I want to start with is I know that you want
to share some things with the good folks of Seattle.
Well, thank you.
I just want to say how honored I am to be
back here at Seattle Town Hall.
I was here a couple years ago and absolutely loved coming.
What an incredible community.
What an informed group of people.
Deborah, thank you very much for moderating tonight.
And I just wanted to show a little bit of my Seattle pride.
A little...
A storm.
I know it's a rough year for the storm, but I also know
that no other Seattle team is a four-time champion,
so go storm.
And I also have to thank Deborah for the gift she gave me just
before we came out on stage, which is this beautiful
necklace, and maybe you can tell us about it.
Well, in our tradition, as you know, never mind the land
acknowledgement, she is wearing Dentalium, which is very
special in the Pacific Northwest and other tribes.
And she also has the turquoise
beads. This originally came from my other dear
sister Senator Claudia Kauffman, who's Nez Perce.
Claudia gave it to me and as we do,
we gift when we have visitors and I wanted her to have
something. So that is what I brought to her
tonight and I let Senator Kauffman know that I would be
gifting and re-gifting our gift because that's what
we do.
I know white folk call it re-gifting, we
don't call it that.
It's called honoring.
So we want you to have something that was close to
us that we wore that has memories.
And also she's got her Seattle Storm shirt on, so how can
you go wrong?
Thank you.
So before we begin, I got to do a
quick little shout out is Thaddeus Gregory is here.
He's a former student of Professor McQuaid.
There he is.
He's a legislative aide and before I left
the office he says let Professor McQuaid know
that she was my teacher and I never missed a class.
It's a little late now to be sucking up to the professor.
You already graduated from law school, so, but I want
to say a big shout out to him, and his dad is Judge Gregory,
Willie Gregory, so with that, we are going to dive in a little
bit, but before we dive in, Barbara, I want to, if
there's anything that you want to kind of prep us
with before we go into questions, Barbara had
questions, which is really wonderful that she sent
to me, and then I had some questions, and then I
combined them, so we kind of have a little bit of
a flow here, we may go a little back and forth,
but I'm really following the book, and I don't
know, I'm going to call on some folks.
I read all 327 pages.
Who else read the book?
Anyone else?
Be honest.
Oh, you just got it.
Well, I got it the minute I got the call, so I
was on it.
So with that, Barbara, can you share with
the audience just kind of like, you're here, you got the book,
and then we can just dive right into some of the questions
that we have teed up.
Yeah, one thing I'll say is I've been traveling
around the country.
The book came out June 2nd, and so I've had a
chance to talk about it with a lot of different groups.
And the thing that I find so heartening
is how many people are really interested in the message
and people who are really interested in
fixing our democracy.
I think sometimes it's easy to assume that nobody cares
and they're all busy watching, I don't know,
Dancing with the Stars, Celebrity Season 47,
or whatever it is.
But there are many people, like all of you,
who care deeply about our country.
It took 250 years to build and about four years to destroy,
or less, two years to destroy.
And so many people, I think, want to be part of the fix.
We want to see our country last another 250 years
for our children and our grandchildren.
Thank you.
so before I start asking a few questions um there
is something that I do want to share is I want to
tell you Barb you're a really good storyteller and I really
like the rhythm of your book and how you set it up and it's
you know I'm a lawyer as well almost 40 years
now and I literally went into PTS trigger mode with
highlighter and cabbing and writing stuff in the margins.
But my point is, it's really hard for some of us as lawyers
to translate legal issues into the public to understand
their democracy and the concepts that you bring up in your
book. And you, particularly in your
introduction, as you should, when you talk about and you
give us an overview of the power and corruption and cruelty
and chaos that we're seeing and And what is the way forward?
It doesn't just prepare us for the premise,
but I really think it spoke to me anyway, in real time.
We are talking about people that are doing these
crappy things right now.
And you brought it right home to us.
And so I want to go into the very first question,
if you don't mind.
The first question is, which was one of the ones that
you and I talked about, which I'd like.
Why did you decide to call your
book or title your book The Fix?
Yeah, the book is called The Fix,
Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style
Government. Not pulling any punches there, but The Fix
is sort of, has a, you know, sort of a double meaning there.
The first is the problem that I think all of us can see,
which is we have a president who leads our
country like a mob boss, using extortion tactics,
intimidation, fear.
And so the term the fix is in with somebody who is engaging in
an organized crime enterprise.
But it also means something else,
and a good part of the book talks about the fix.
Like how do you repair this?
How do we restore our democracy after we have
seen somebody destroy it the way this president has?
And so much of it is proscriptive
in terms of ideas.
Some are institutional ideas that
require legal changes, but others are things that
we can do individually right now.
And so The Fix has sort of that two meanings.
And I hope people will see it as a
hopeful book.
Certainly, I diagnose what I see as
the problems.
But as a prosecutor who saw some of
these kinds of cases in my work, I also saw how we can counter
these kinds of problems.
And so So I am hopeful that by sharing
ideas, it will help inspire other ideas and also inspire
action so that we can fix what's broken about our democracy.
So when we talk about mob-style tactics and what we're seeing
in real time, not just the president though, what
are the other bad actors?
I mean, you talk about this in the book more in depth, and
I know you all are going to to buy the book.
But when we talk about the mob style tactics
of not just the president, his executive orders, and
the vicious and cruel things that he's done,
what about the people that surround him?
What about those folks, the mob style folks?
Yes, so interesting.
You ask about them, how much time do you have?
Oh, man.
They're all over here all night.
I'll mention just a a couple of them.
One of the things that I talk
about in the book is a concept that is known as
engineered incompetence.
People who study authoritarian regimes throughout history
have come up with this term.
We see it in Putin's Russia, where he surrounds
himself with yes-men, which is perhaps why he
entered Ukraine thinking a war would last a week and
here we are four years later because when you surround
yourself with yes-men they just tell you what you
want to hear and in Trump's second term in contrast
to his first term when he did surround himself with
experienced capable people who'd been leaders in
government before he this time it seems to me has
has surrounded himself with people who will be loyal to him.
Not loyal to the country, not loyal to the Constitution,
but loyal to him.
So, you know, people like Kash Patel.
That's K-A, dollar sign, H, by the way, how we spell Kash.
Kash Patel.
In no other administration would this man be
selected to lead the FBI.
Oh, we're going to get to all those knuckleheads in a minute.
They're down on my list as we go.
You know, Pete Hegseth, another one.
Bondi, let's go on and on and on.
It just seems to me that they were selected
based on their willingness to be subservient to the president
as opposed to their willingness to serve the people.
I remember when Jenny Durkin and I
were U.S.
attorneys in the Obama administration.
We went down to Washington for our orientation
where we got a lot of training, and one day they took us
on a bus to the White House to meet with the president.
And it was wonderful.
We got to meet in the East Room where they meet all
the sports teams.
And he came in, and the one thing he said to us
that has always stuck with me is, he said,
remember, even though I appointed you,
you do not serve me.
You serve the people and the Constitution.
And I think that's what's missing in this administration.
I know that I'm going to get into a little bit deeper
about the cast of characters and the normalization
of this cruelty and chaos and corruption.
But so stay with me for a minute because this is important.
Getting back and staying with the mob style tactics theme,
I can't help but think, are we seeing what we saw
in New York in the 1990s with the Mollen Commission?
Do you remember when they had the Dirty 30 and Mary Jo
White was a U.S.
attorney? all those dirty cops and there's
that saying that we have you can judge a tree by its fruit
like the rotten the rotten tree and what happened
in the 90s as you know is all these cops well over
30 were into all the the bad stuff corruption
drug dealing all those things I feel like that's
kind of where we're at again.
I feel like it's like 1990 is New
York. People who were sworn to have a shield as a symbol
of protection, upholding the law, did just the
opposite. They use it as a sword against everybody and
then self-dealing and you name it.
So I guess my question was
in the lesson there, what were the guardrails?
Is it brave and courageous people?
Is it the the everyday person
that steps up?
Is it that cop that finally says,
I can cross the blue line and tell people what's
really going on?
And do we have those people in 2026?
You know, President Trump has filled his cabinet
with people who are like-minded and who are loyal to him.
And I think that has been his litmus test throughout.
I have read that to get a position
within the Trump administration, you had to give the correct
answer to whether the 2020 election was stolen.
And anybody who would not say what he wanted them to say
was not considered for one of those positions.
And what happens, and I've seen this in cases
that I've prosecuted, when you are willing to
lie about something that is so obviously false,
you have crossed a line and they own you because to admit
that what you said was a lie is to confess your own lack of
integrity and so once you've crossed that line you're kind of
you know in for a penny in for a pound and so I don't expect
people like Pete Hegseth or J.D.
Vance or Marco Rubio to say, you know what?
I was wrong.
This guy is a crook.
I think it's going to be up to all of us.
I think the media has a role to
play. I think historians have a role to play.
I think teachers have a role to play.
But I think all of us in educating our
fellow citizens so that that we can take our power
back at the ballot box.
Thank you.
So, if you don't mind naming names, I don't mind,
and I have those same names coming up.
Who do you believe?
We have these good people out here,
and you see people in the No Kings March,
and you see people stepping forward and leaving justice
and saying, I'm not going to work for this administration,
you're not going to have leverage on me,
you're not going to do this mob stuff.
I believe in the Constitution.
I'm trying to do the right thing.
And we've normalized such brutal behavior, obscene behavior.
And I think a lot of us saw it coming in 2016.
We all knew who he was in 2016.
So who do you believe right now in 2026 are these
brave and courageous people,
like you, that are writing these kind of books on
the shows and other folks?
Can you name some names to tell us who are those people,
who are those changemakers, who are still guiding us
that we can still believe in?
I'll give you two names.
How about Renee Good and Alex Pretti?
I think that...
And thousands of other people whose names are unknown to us.
You know, certainly there are people out there who are
speaking out, some members of Congress, mostly not of
the president's own party, but some of them who have
become lame ducks, who've lost their elections, are
suddenly finding their voice, some Republicans in Congress.
But I really think a very good story of success are
just the good people of Minneapolis who fought back.
And it came with a price for some people.
I mean, you know, Rene Good and Alex Pretty lost their lives.
We saw some people indicted recently.
There was a group of 15 people who were indicted.
There was that other group of people who protested in
the church who were indicted.
But there were so many people who said,
we are going to help our neighbors who can't
go outside to get food.
We are going to stand up.
We are going to peacefully protest.
And ultimately, I think they won, right?
They saw ICE leave.
They saw Gregory Bovino.
He was the very cruel Customs and Border Protection
leader who got driven out and forced into retirement.
And so I think it's a great example, and it inspires me when
we see ordinary people who can say, no, we own our streets.
And certainly you can enforce immigration law.
That's fine.
But the way you're doing it with such cruelty and dehumanizing,
I think one of the goals, you know, if you look at the social
media of the White House or their web page, it's all these
memes that depict immigrants as less than human and are
gleeful about the cruelty that's inflicted on them.
You know, showing chains.
Do you remember when those men were deported to El Salvador?
And they posted that video, like Hollywood quality,
showing these men forced to their knees
and their head shaved.
I mean, that was an effort to not only dehumanize them,
but I think to dehumanize us, to make us see our fellow
humans as less than, as other, and to cheer Trump on in
this immigration enforcement.
It's a real tactic to divide and conquer.
And I think the story of Minneapolis,
the people of Minneapolis, have shown us that
united together we can defeat that
kind of effort.
Yep, and a good friend of ours, Peggy Flanagan,
is running for the Senate.
I'm not supposed to be political, but she's a friend.
So you wear your necklace when you see her.
tell her it's from Deborah.
I mean, don't give it to her.
Just tell her you got it from her.
So you did something really interesting in your
book that I appreciated,
a real literary tool or style.
Your book is divided into three sections, and each section
begins with a victim or a villain or a saint or
a situation, and then you kind of go through the
the process and the guardrails about what happened.
And then you kind of tie it up at the end,
like this is how the system's supposed to work.
This is how the courts are supposed to work.
This is the rule of law.
These are how these, how these, if you have these
corrupt systems, this is how they developed
and this is how we fixed it.
And when that type of corruption,
chaos and cruelty was uncovered,
we responded as a nation with a rule of law.
And so what I wanted to ask you is, what happened to
us in our guardrails today?
What the hell happened?
Why did we become so normalized, even though we knew who this
man was in 16, gone, then back?
What happened to us?
Are we victims?
Are we innocent bystanders?
Are we enablers?
Tell me who we are right now from that.
What happened?
Well, I think that, I don't think Donald
Trump created our situation, but I think he exploited
it. I think that we now live in an age where we
have a real plurality in our country.
You know, when he talks about make America great
again, I think he's referring to a time in, I don't know, the
1950s when America was great for some, but not for most of us,
right I mean the America he wants to go back to
again is a time when white Christian men were on
top of the pyramid and I think we live in a
time now when there's certainly a place for white
Christian men I'm married to one I have three sons
I love white Christian men but I do but we all
We all want to have a place at the table.
And in Donald Trump's America of Greatness,
it was a time when women were second-class citizens,
when minorities were on the bottom rung of society,
when the LGBTQ community was invisible.
And I think there's a goal that they kind of liked it that way.
But here we are in 2026, and all of these
different groups want their seat at the table.
They want their voices heard, understandably.
And that makes the world kind of messy
because we have a lot of differences of opinion
about how things are supposed to go.
And so rather than listen to those voices
and try to find places where we can be united and common ground,
President Trump has worked to stoke divisions in society.
If we could ever get working-class white people
together with working class minorities,
that would be a very powerful voting block.
And so instead, he stokes division between those groups.
And when he says, you're forgotten, you're left behind,
you're worse off than you were in your parents' generation,
they were.
And the reason is not the DEI that he blames it on
or the immigrants or the LGBTQ community or minorities.
It's because of policies starting in the
Reagan administration
that benefit the wealthy and harm the working class.
The tax rate was like 79% in the 1970s.
Now we all pay the same rate, unless you're Donald Trump,
in which case you pay nothing.
The system is rigged against us.
It is skewed in favor of the wealthy.
But to protect the wealthy, let's divide people based on
race and class and religion.
And that way, if we're all fighting with each other,
then he can continue these policies
because our strongest loyalty
is to our racial and ethnic and religious identities
entities and not to our pocketbooks.
And I think that is something that Donald Trump has exploited
and it's why we find ourselves in this predicament.
So you bring up a real interesting point, and I really
mean this because I'm taking notes and of course
you know me, I already took notes beforehand.
So 250 years, our country.
Well, I was already here, so I don't know about you guys.
But I'm a member of the Blackfeet Nation.
Born and raised on the Puyallup Res.
My stepdad's Yakima.
Can I just ask you this on a real, I was going
to say personal level, like it's just you
and I sitting here.
Were we always these people, though?
Did Trump really show us who we are?
Did he make us hold up a mirror and realize,
and that's okay about, we have biases, we have
prejudices, we have flaws.
But America was supposed to be this great experiment idea
that we so transcended above that.
And then all of a sudden, this person shows up.
And maybe, maybe, he did show us who we are.
Well, sure.
I mean, if you look at our nation's history,
We had European settlers come here and murder
indigenous peoples.
We had plantation owners who enslaved others
and imported people, kidnapped people from their
homeland and enslaved them.
We had women without the right to vote until 1920.
We've seen discrimination against groups
based on disability.
The LGBTQ community has been oppressed to this day.
So we are a country that has certainly had
moments, I think, of shame.
But one of the things I always felt, especially as
a woman in my lifetime, it felt like we were making
progress, that certainly we've had problems in our country,
but that we were moving toward a more perfect union.
And I feel like in the past 10 years, we've taken not just one
step back, but 10 steps back.
I think about the advances we made as women, at least,
in the 1970s and 80s.
And it was really transformational to see
all of the women in office and other kinds of things.
But now with every group, there is this resentment that
people feel like if you are lifted up, somehow that is
pushing other people down.
But did we become complacent, though, with, you know,
okay, our people got the right to vote in 1924.
We go back and forth with dates and times and all of that.
But do we get complacent in thinking,
and we talk about the third wave of feminism,
and now we're talking about a billionaire class.
Do we get complacent with capitalism and greed and money,
and now we have a billionaire class, we
have the Epstein class?
Do we just get complacent and basically just assume
that the world would just keep spinning the way we saw it,
and we wouldn't really have to fight for anything anymore
until this person showed up?
No, and I don't think we should blame us as individuals.
I blame people who have advanced policies
that make money more important than any other value in society.
After Watergate, Congress passed a number of very good statutes.
Many of them were immediately challenged.
Many of them were upheld.
One of them that got struck down happened with the Federal
Election Campaign Act that put limits on the amount of campaign
expenditures people could make.
And they said money equals speech, and therefore the
First Amendment forbids any restrictions on expenditures.
So I can cap how much I can donate to your campaign,
but if I want to pay money for an ad that either
supports you or attacks you, the Supreme Court said in
Buckley v.
Valeo in the 1970s, that is unconstitutional.
So sky's the limit.
Then fast forward to 2010 when the Supreme Court
decides Citizens United and says those same rights
now apply to corporations and organizations.
That opens the floodgates to dark money and super PACs.
And so now all those billionaires who are
trying to protect all of that wealth inequality
inequality that they have amassed over the
years, can spend like drunken sailors to try
to keep it that way.
And so that's why we can't pass reasonable gun reform or,
you know, protect kids in our schools or do any of the kinds
of things that make common sense, things that most voters
favor because big money is driving us in a direction
to support the status quo.
That is really a good lead into my next question
and I have to congratulate myself on my questions and
how I thought it the flow would go.
This is what happens when you read the whole
book and you know you have a professor of law and you
listen to the podcast and you're basically afraid
of her.
So you know that But you have to know your stuff.
And I know Thaddeus is out there and understands that.
So the other question, which is great, what you were saying,
why did so many businesses in courts and media outlets
and companies and law firms and political leaders,
why did they all just...
I was going to drop an F-bomb.
Why did they just capitulate?
Capitulate is a good word.
I can answer that question in two words,
and those words are...
Cowardice? Fear and greed.
Oh, my God.
I had it right here.
Is that what you wrote down?
I've got it on my bingo card right there.
Fear, greed, power, cowardice.
So, you know, law firms, these big, powerful global
law firms were attacked.
Donald Trump extorted them.
He issued these executive orders falsely accusing
them of engaging in lawfare simply for hiring
some of the people who went after Donald Trump, like Robert
Mueller and Andrew Weissmann, who worked on his team, or Mark
Pomerantz, who worked for the Manhattan DA's office,
Mark Elias, who represented the Clinton campaign.
And he said, you law firms, Perkins Coie was
one who fought back.
Let's hear it for them.
It's in the book.
But the conditions were things like, you are going to lose
your security clearances, we will never hire any
of your lawyers in the federal government,
and you cannot enter a federal building, including courthouses.
If you're a lawyer, good luck practicing law if you
can't go into a courthouse.
So this is a real mob tactic.
Inflict pain on your rival or your critic and coerce
them to come to the table to negotiate their own punishment.
And that's what he did to them.
And he said, you know, give me some free pro bono hours
and we'll make it all go away.
It's like saying, nice restaurant you got here.
It'd be a shame if something should happen to it.
But if you like, I can watch it for you if you
just pay me $5,000 a week.
I'll make sure nothing happens.
You know, a little protection money.
That's exactly what this was.
And it was so disappointing to see so many of
these law firms say, okay, we will pay you this.
I think when I say fear, I think they were afraid that if they
did not go along with this, that bad things would happen
to them and their clients.
You know, their clients are in battles with the federal
government over approval of mergers, litigation,
enforcement actions, licensing.
And so they feared that President Trump would
interfere with those interests.
But I also think greed, because as we said, the four law
firms that did agree to fight this, all won, understandably,
as everyone knew they would.
I think the firms didn't want to risk losing their clients
and losing the business deals that makes some of
these law firm partners, the average salary in one of these
firms, $6 million a year.
You know, it would be a little tough to settle for, say,
I don't know, $5 million.
I don't know if I could do it.
So I think there was a little bit of greed involved.
But I think one of the things that they're
learning now is what I saw in those extortion cases,
which is people think, I'm going to pay off the
extortionist this one time, and then everything's
going to be okay.
And what they realize is the extortionist keeps
coming back for more again and again and again.
It's like giving your lunch money to the bully.
They realize you're an easy mark and they just keep coming back.
And so although those law firms paid in the form of pro bono
legal hours and they probably thought this is a good deal.
We're going to do pro bono legal services anyway.
we just have to direct them toward President
Trump's pet causes.
But of course what that did
is it took them off the playing field from challenging
Trump's cases.
They couldn't be on the other side of the V if
they were representing Trump's pet causes.
In his first administration it was
these big law firms that challenged some of his
executive orders and his travel bans so this time
they've been neutralized and they've lost clients
they've lost lawyers I know many of my law students
don't want to work for these law firms that caved in
and you know as a client
how can I expect you to stand up for me if you won't
even stand up for yourself Right.
So I think they have lost again and again as a
result of this.
It may have seemed like a short-term gain,
but I think in the end it's causing them long-term pain.
So we're going to move away from lawyers for a minute.
And I want to go to the media, the media outlets.
We were talking about CBS, 60 Minutes, ABC.
Now, we know with business there's money, there's
greed, there's mergers.
But let's just go over to this kind of access
journalism and media outlets that have capitulated.
And we can, you know, Bezos bought Washington Post.
that is the Washington Post he bought.
So let's talk about the media piece of that,
when they capitulated, so many of them quickly,
and we saw what happened with late-night talk folks.
You know, what are your thoughts about that side of
the capitulation?
Yeah, I think it's been tragic, really,
and again, I think it's fear and greed.
You know, the First Amendment is so important
because it guarantees the right to free press,
and I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said
said something to the effect of, you know,
were I to have to choose between a free government
and a free press, I would not hesitate
to choose the latter
because the exposure and the information is so
essential to a free society.
And in fact, I talk about in the book some lessons from history,
and one of them is the role of the free press so many times
in exposing injustices in our country that led to change.
the Civil Rights Movement, the Watergate scandal,
the Gilded Age, so many of the changes that came about
came about because of public awareness
brought out by the media.
So, of course, a mob-style leader fears the media
and wants to silence them and control them.
And so one of the things we saw President Trump do
is to file these frivolous lawsuits against ABC and CBS
CBS and some of these others in an effort to silence them.
You know, defamation and fraud and other kinds of things,
seeking millions of dollars.
And what was so stunning to me is how quickly they caved.
So ABC paid a settlement when George Stephanopoulos said some
things that were literally true.
Rape instead of...
About rape with E.
Jean Carroll.
and then CBS caved over a lawsuit about 60 Minutes
where they get this, edited the interview of Kamala Harris.
I don't know of a single television program
that does not edit an interview that they do with anybody.
I mean, the show is called 60 Minutes, right?
It's not 72 Minutes or 84 Minutes, it's 60 Minutes.
Of course they had to edit it.
And he claimed it was fraud for them to edit that.
And they caved.
They paid and they agreed to produce the transcript.
And they apologized.
And why do they do that?
I think it's because of fear.
They don't want them to keep coming after them.
They don't want to lose their broadcast license.
Remember Brendan Carr made some threats about that.
But I also think there's greed.
You know, we live in this world of consolidation.
And these media companies, you know, keep buying each other.
I think we're all owned by Paramount Plus
these days, by the way.
And it's billions of dollars.
And so, you know, if I pay $6 million,
does that mean I get the $100 billion merger deal?
Well, okay, right?
It's just the cost of doing business.
But I think they're selling more than the
settlement of this case.
They are selling their souls.
They're selling the First Amendment.
And I think that we as consumers have power of boycotts and
other things to tell them that we don't agree with it.
I saw something recently that ABC is asking
its viewers to share.
There's currently a battle between the president and
now The View and talking about the equal time rule and
some other kinds of things, some very heavy-handed
tactics to try to get them to control who their guests are.
And they've asked the public to share with the government
how they feel about that, which I think is
kind of interesting.
So, you know, we have the power, and we shouldn't forget that.
Well, you kind of answered a second question, but
I'm going to go back.
I had one of two, but you kind of went into the second,
but I'm going to ask you this because I might
tie it back together.
You made a really nice quote in your book from Maureen
Comey, Comey's daughter, who was fired or left or resigned
from Department of Justice.
And she made a statement, and you quoted it, and I wrote it
down because it seemed very...
It just was so timely for me, when she said, "Fear
is the tool of the tyrant."
Talk to us a little bit about what that means, particularly
in your book, The Fix, in real real time.
And you kind of touched on it already
with the cast of characters and the people that
Trump surrounded himself, Bondi, Patel, Hegseth, Rubio, Miller,
J.D. Vance, and the whole Trump family, Lee, Leavitt,
all of them.
So talk to us about that.
Fear is the tool of the tyrant.
Yeah. So Maureen Comey, of course, was a prosecutor,
daughter of Jim Comey, the former FBI director,
who led the Russia investigation during Trump's first term
and has been an outspoken critic.
He himself has, of course, been indicted twice.
First one didn't stick for false statements before Congress.
Now he's been indicted for posting a picture of seashells,
forming the words 8647.
We're not supposed to say that out loud, I guess.
Even though you can go to Amazon right now
and find T-shirts and caps and all kinds of
things that say 8647.
But this was his daughter, a very accomplished
prosecutor in the Southern District of New York,
a very fine prosecutor's office.
She led the Epstein investigation
and handled the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell
and Sean Combs,
handled them very well, and one day out of the blue got
an email from Pam Bondi saying, pursuant to Article 2,
you are hereby separated and terminated from the
Department of Justice.
Despite the fact that she has civil service
protections and other things, she has filed a lawsuit
to challenge that.
She should win, but of course the point is to punish her
and to make her lose her job.
Even if she wins, who would want to go back to that climate?
But she sent this in an email to her colleagues before she left,
And she said, you know, please continue to do your
important work here and don't be afraid because fear
is the tool of the tyrant.
And that is the big goal here, right, to these executive
orders, the punishment, the cruelty, the show
of force on the streets with immigration agents,
the calling up of the National Guard,
the National Guard on the streets of Washington, D.C.,
the masked agents.
It is, I think, an effort to instill fear
because when we're afraid, we keep our heads down.
It has a chilling effect on discourse
because people don't want to be arrested.
They don't want to be punished.
They don't want to be beaten on the streets.
They don't want to be shot like Rene Good and Alex Pretty.
And so instilling fear is a way of controlling a population.
I think we have not only an ability but a
duty to respond to that.
I was talking earlier with some of the members here
about how peaceful protest is incredibly valuable,
but you have to be very careful not to cross the line
because they will jump if you do.
You cannot in any way obstruct a federal officer
who is working in their duties.
Like you can't get in their way, you can't stop their car,
you can't do any of that, you will be arrested.
You can't throw stuff, you can't damage property,
you can't hurt people.
But you don't need to.
You just need to be out there speaking.
You may be arrested anyway, and we've seen that
in some instances.
But I think this show of force is an effort to silence people.
And when you're silenced, you can act with impunity.
And I think that's the goal, to have a chilling
effect on all of us.
I'm going to go script just a little bit because this is one
of the questions that I had, and I have a few more, but I
want to give the audience an opportunity to ask questions.
But I want to shift over to these women that have
challenged Trump, whether we're talking about Liz Cheney,
Elizabeth Warren, I'm thinking of Kara Swisher, Caitlin
Collins, Molly Jong Fast.
I mean, there's a lot of these writers, and I listen
to your podcast, by the way, a lot of these women
that challenge, and what is this thing with,
how are the women's voices different than the men's?
I hear a difference, but I want to know what your thoughts were,
because you know a lot of these people.
One of the voices that I think has been so powerful
is that of E.
Jean Carroll.
I mean, she had some guts.
It takes a lot of guts to take on somebody like this,
because not only are you putting yourself in the
public eye and risking loss, I mean, any time you bring
a lawsuit, there's always a risk that you lose,
even if you believe it's a righteous cause,
that a jury doesn't see the case your way,
or the judge dismisses the case or whatever.
So there's litigation risk, but there is also the very real,
it's not just a risk, reality, that you will get
threats, death threats.
You will get people who want to hurt you because
they see you as some enemy.
And she won defamation suits twice.
She's still trying to collect, working her case
up to the Supreme Court.
But I think that President Trump has an especially
strong disdain for everybody who opposes him,
but particularly women.
I mean, think about the way he treats some of
these women reporters.
Quiet piggy?
Remember that quiet piggy it is an effort to insult and demean
and degrade usually on the basis of looks remember
when E. Jean Carroll sued him for um a defamation
after he denied that he had sexually assaulted her you
know it's things like she's not my type she's not a 10 you know
all these kinds of things.
It's all about appearances and looks and how you fit some
traditional stereotype of what a woman is supposed to look like
as a, you know, sexual object, as opposed to seeing you as an
equal human capable of reason and thought and perspective.
I mean, he's gone after Liz Cheney.
Hillary Clinton, of course, is one of his favorite enemies.
But what do you see with regard to his attacks on women?
Well, going back to 16 and all the other issues,
but I think for me, watching the attacks and the misogyny
and the way it's been normalized when we watch the interviews,
even with Pete Hegseth and his war department,
and someone helped me, I can't remember now,
I should because I read her book.
Who is the young woman that went to Liz Cheney
who used to work in the White House who turned on Trump?
Oh, Cassidy.
Cassidy Hutchinson.
If you ever get a chance to do the audio or read her book,
and it gives...
After you read mine, of course.
After you read hers.
But after you read that and the podcast and Attack Within,
I had read Liz Cheney's book and her book back to back
like three or four years ago, and it just really jolted me,
being a mother of two daughters, very strong-willed daughters,
and now I'm a grandmother to a daughter, a grandson and a
granddaughter, is the misogyny, the throughput
line that it's still okay in 2026, in the 21st century,
to value women, but not just to value or have this
idea, but to actually say it on TV in front of God
and everybody, and there's a bunch of people out
there shaking their head like this is okay.
I mean, that's what I see, and I see it in Seattle too, so,
but not at the level, obviously, God forbid in the city,
but I'm thinking, because you're out there, you
know, you're out there, Joyce Vance is out there, and
who's the other one who did the Watergate stuff?
Jill Winebanks.
Jill Wine-Banks.
Tell me about that being, because you're kind of
a frontliner out there.
Yeah, and our other sister is Kimberly Atkins Stohr.
Yes, she's great.
So not only do we get it as women,
she gets it doubly as a woman of color
because there's also misogyny and there's misogynoir,
which is a double dose of hatred for women of color.
I get death threats.
I get hateful emails.
My email is on the law school's public-facing website,
so it's easy to find me.
But it is amazing how you just say something.
You know, Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, right?
Some objective fact.
You left-wing lunatic.
You know, blue language, blue language, blue language.
It's amazing.
and I think some of that is the normalization
of, as you say, misogyny,
xenophobia, homophobia, all of these things.
We had reached a point in society where I thought
we were making a great deal of progress on these things,
and I think we have, but as I said, it feels like
we've regressed so much.
And I think some of it is by verbalizing these
things and saying out loud, it gives license to others
to say similar things.
And there are also these influencers on social
media who, you know, I imagine they get paid,
but now there's all these women with, like,
Turning Point USA who are starting to normalize
the idea that women that women should not
have the right to vote, that there should be
one vote per household, and only the husband should
be permitted to vote.
I mean, this is lunacy.
But the more you say it out loud,
the more normal it becomes.
You know, think about your own crowd.
You know, people dress alike, people talk alike.
We're all chameleons.
We tend to conform to the people we see
and the way we talk.
And I think the more, you know, just saying these things
over and over and over again does normalize it.
And so I think we need to use our voices
to speak out against it and talk about just
how outrageous it is to think about
the idea of, like, taking away the right
for women to vote.
Well, and also the right to choose for our bodies.
I mean, that's another thing where there's been
this huge movement.
I mean, think about in the 1970s, the Republican Party
was in favor of the ERA, favored conservation, as we
called it then, cared about the environment and Earth
Day and all of these things.
And it wasn't until
they kind of got the memo that this wasn't going to be
part of the party platform that things started to change
and the talking points the idea that climate
change is a hoax I mean come on
it's just objectively wrong and yet people continue
to spout these lies because it has become normalized
in certain parts of the culture And so I think all of us have
an obligation to speak out when we hear those kinds of lies.
Well, also, before I move on to this next question,
and this is for your next book when you come out,
is we've seen, and I've seen, and I'm 65.
Well, I just told everyone my age, and I'll have to lie again.
We have seen that, when you were talking, that
anything that's feminine, that's female power,
that's centered in women in our power
to have children, to be mothers, to be grandmothers,
to carry wisdom, that that's weak and bad.
Anything that makes you a bro and greedy
and a billionaire makes you a man,
and that's power.
I have never seen this shift so markedly
than I have in the last decade, quite frankly.
and that, I'll come back to that in a moment, because I have a
question on that, but let me, let me go back to a question
I have teed up here regarding your book, and I'll have to say,
part three of her book is very lawyerly, and I got into it
deep, too deep, it was too much, yeah, I'm the highlighter
tabbing type of person, so you, your, part three
of your book is titled, how do we take it back?
And your book says that, you know, you
offer and remind us of all these tools that we have, the law, and
to name a few, the guardrails, if you will, the litigation,
revamping Department of Justice and Ethics, local
and state power, finance laws, voting, education,
you have just phenomenal, just examples that are phenomenal
just to go through and read.
So my question to you is, being where you sit as a former
U.S. attorney, a law professor, and whether you like it or
not, an influencer and a great podcaster, do you think that we
right now in 2026, do we have the political courage, do we
have the political maturity to face this moment and change it?
It's a very good question, and I don't know.
You know, there are times when I think that not enough
people are paying attention.
I think there are those who think they like what they see
from the Trump administration.
I think there are some like us who are horrified.
And I worry about that group in the middle, because I think
the super magas are never going to come along.
I think there is a strong number of people who are
horrified by what they see.
But I worry about that middle group who kind
of likes their 401K.
They don't love everything about Donald Trump.
They think he's kind of mean.
You know, they don't love the UFC fighting on the White
House lawn and all that, but they're willing to
tolerate it because they like their comfort and
their comfort creatures.
And so I think the way we have to bring them along is by
showing them what's at stake.
And, you know, I think we can point to some other cultures
to talk about what's at stake.
Until recently, Hungary was moving in this very dangerous
direction. They've had a course correction, and I think there's
some lessons there.
But in Russia, which is really where I
think we could be headed, we see a country where people have
just disengaged from politics, because they view politics
the way we might view professional wrestling,
right? It's all a little show, and you know, some people
actually go out and vote, that's adorable, but we know it's all
fixed, it's all rigged, and in the end, Putin's
going to win again.
And so maybe we're a little
bit entertained by this little political show,
but in the end, we can't change it at all.
And so all we worry about is our families
and our jobs, because that's the only thing that we can control.
That is no way to live.
That is not the kind of freedom that
we've had.
And maybe in this 250th year, when people are
spending more time thinking about the founding documents
and why we're here, it's all about liberty and the freedom
for each of us to choose how we want to live, right?
Who we want to love, where we want to live,
what we want to do for a living, how we exercise our
right to vote, what we want to say, what we want
to do, how we want to worship, or whether we want
to worship.
Those are all the liberties that we
came here for, and maybe this 250th anniversary
will remind all of us what it's all about.
It's not about getting a better return on your 401K.
It's about making sure that we and our kids
and our grandchildren get to live that
dream of America.
So let me bring you back to something that...
Let's clap.
Thank you.
So when I brought up political maturity,
and I mean this from the bottom of my heart,
from having, I have millennial daughters.
When I talk about political maturity,
and you just said something very right on point
about the middle there, is it Gen Z that's
going to save us?
Is it Gen Z?
Who was that young kid that was on CNN?
His last name is Mockler, and he told Jenny,
he told him, get your effing
finger out of my face.
I know, usually I don't get this snarky,
but I actually enjoyed that moment a lot.
Is it Gen Z that's going to step up and say,
listen, Xers, boomers, millennials,
we're tired of this crap.
We don't got nothing to lose.
We don't got a house.
We don't got a 401k.
We're going to vote.
We're young.
And what do we do as, I see myself as an elder now,
and what do we do to not, I hate using the word empower,
but is it Gen Z that's going to do it,
and how do we help them?
Yeah, you know, they like to say, okay, boomer.
I know.
I kind of like that, though.
I don't think we have the luxury of waiting for any one group
or individual to save us.
I think it's got to start with each of us.
We all have to feel some responsibility to save us.
I'd like to think of all of us as having a responsibility
to be ambassadors for democracy and thinking about what
we can do ourselves.
But I do think that there's a reason
that candidates who are promoting affordability
are doing well.
You know, whether you call yourself a socialist
or a Democrat or whatever you call yourself,
I think younger people are less concerned with the labels.
I think people over a certain age freak out
when they hear the word socialist,
and I think young people don't blink an eye.
What they care about is policies that make life affordable.
The average age for a first-time homebuyer
in the United States right now is 38 years old.
I just read that.
And I think young people are seeing,
like, I can't afford to buy a house,
and I'm paying all this rent, and I'm just running
on a treadmill.
I'm not saving the money I need to buy a house.
I'll never be able to own my own home,
which, of course, is the biggest investment
most of us ever make, and it's a great investment.
And it's also good for communities
when people own their own homes because then we're
invested in communities, we get to know our neighbors,
we look out for our neighbors, we beautify our homes.
All of those things are so incredibly important.
And so affordability, I think, is a really important issue.
I know, you know, back in Bill Clinton's day,
they said it's the economy, stupid,
but I think this wealth gap is the thing.
It isn't so much the economy in terms of the gross national
product or the stock market.
It's about my standard of living.
And I think people see these billionaires,
and now they flaunt it.
We really are living in a second Gilded Age
with the robber barons.
It used to be oil and railroads, and now it's tech and dot-com
and all these kinds of things.
No offense, Seattle.
I know you've got your tech jobs and all that.
But I think that how the other half lives.
There's a lot of people who are hurting economically
because of those policies we've had since the
Reagan administration.
And so when there are politicians who say,
let's work on making things affordable,
I think it is such a clear path to victory for a politician.
This is what Peter Magyar did in Hungary.
He campaigned very hard in the areas that were
previously won by Viktor Orban.
And he talked about affordability.
And he talked about, aren't we tired of the fear and the hate?
Don't we want to be united and feel some pride
in our country again?
Why don't we come together?
So if we could unite progressives and populists
and get over these racial divisions that the president
has stoked, I mean, I think there is a great opportunity
for visionary leadership to come in and unite us.
And so that, I think, is a hopeful
way that all of us can try to advance toward the future.
So you touched on two things, but I have two
questions for that.
Income inequality and the capitalism that I grew up with,
probably that you grew up with, isn't the capitalism we see now.
I think the capitalism we see now is just basic hoarding.
I mean, how much money do you need, Mr. Musk?
Turns out $1 trillion is how much he needs.
How much money do you need, Mr. Bezos,
if your girlfriend and wife can go to the moon?
so let me just ask I have some questions, a few
left and I want to open it up to the audience
because I'm really interested in your
thoughts on this so we all
got to listen to and I hope you watched the
listening to President Obama and Michelle Obama in
the opening of the Presidential Center
applause
I have to admit I'm just going to be
really honest with you, I always tear up
because I'm like it used to be like this
but now I was trying to be positive Debra
Okay. So what are your thoughts about the spirit or the
sentiment of the president, former President Obama, when
he was telling us, which I thought, again, I thought, oh,
he's speaking to me.
Don't long for the past.
Roll up your sleeves.
Vision, not vengeance.
What are your thoughts on that?
I think it's about action and it's about hope
and that's what we need one of the goals
of an authoritarian is to make you feel
helpless and hopeless it's why President Trump
puts his name and his picture on everything
because he wants you to think he is omnipotent
that he is everywhere and that he cannot be defeated
but as President Obama has said And by the way, I think his
greatest speech is the one he gave at Selma, Alabama.
If you haven't read it lately, it is so worth a reread.
I happen to be there, so maybe that's why I like it so much.
Okay, don't brag.
Now you're just showing off.
Yeah, I am just showing off.
But it's a speech I've read and reread.
And what he talks about is what American
exceptionalism means to him.
You know, people like to think America is exceptional because,
like, God chose us to be the shining city on the hill.
and somehow he likes us better than, you know, France
and Ghana or something.
But he said, no, what makes America exceptional
is our ability to change.
And it's always been ordinary Americans who rolled up their
sleeves and fixed things, right?
The people who worked on the Underground Railroad
and the people who marched across the Edmund Pettus
Bridge in Selma, Alabama, the women who fought
for the right to vote.
I mean, all of these injustices throughout our nation's history
were solved with ordinary people.
And so I think what he speaks to is action.
We can't just sit around waiting for someone else to do it.
And hope.
We have to believe that we can succeed.
And so I took a lot of, you know, it was nostalgic,
but I agree with him that we can't look past, you know,
history tells us that when there's been a disruptor,
we don't go back to what we were.
We have something that's new.
And I think that's exciting.
What does our future look like?
We have the ability to shape that and to build that.
And I think that we can use this dark time in
our nation's history as a lesson to come
together, united, and solve some of these problems.
We know what the path needs to look like.
We just need to get out there and do it.
So one of the things, just a little bit,
and then I'm going to move on to another topic,
but President Obama also said that what America
does best is look forward.
And do you agree with that, that what America does?
It doesn't mean we forget the past,
but one of the things that we do best is look forward.
Do you agree with that?
And what are your thoughts on that?
You kind of answered that to some degree, what
you were saying just now.
Yeah, you know, I don't know.
I think there are times when we have.
There are times when we're not so great.
But I do think that one of the things we have the ability
to do is to shape our future, which is what he talked
about in that other speech that I talked about.
And I want to just remind everybody about all the
things that we can do, right?
Not only can we vote, but we can encourage our
friends and others to vote.
Young people still vote in dismally low percentages.
So if you've got young people in your lives, encourage them
to get out there and register and vote.
We can do a lot of important things.
Protesting is incredibly valuable.
If you've participated in any of
these No Kings protests or others, they work.
They are valuable.
Minnesota shows us what it works.
But in the book, I talk about political
scientist Erica Chenoweth, who is at Harvard, and she has
studied regime change around the world and concludes that if
even only 3.5 percent of the population engages in
peaceful protest, they can effect regime change.
And part of the reason is the protesters themselves are
out there inspiring each other and empowering each other.
But there are other people, like
that group we talked about who's not paying attention,
they see you.
They see you on television.
They see you on social media and the internet.
And they realize, wow, there is a big group of people
who think something is amiss in our country.
Maybe I should wake up and pay attention.
So that's really powerful.
And then, of course, if you don't know where
to begin or plug in, there are all kinds
of great organizations around this country
where you can join and do discrete tasks.
Like the League of Women Voters, great organization
that provides information to voters
in a time when there's so much disinformation
that you can add a lot of value there.
Indivisible chapters.
These are great grassroots organizations
that are building democracy.
And we've got local political party groups
through congressional districts or county parties.
Lots of places where we can plug in and get to work
if that's something you want to do.
One thing I've done is just driving people to the polls.
That is incredibly valuable.
A senior citizen who can no longer drive but wants to
exercise their right to vote, there's nothing more rewarding
than spending Election Day driving people to the polls.
So I hope all of you will find in your own way some
way to get involved to be part of the solution.
Well, I got a couple follow-up questions, and I think we're
going to go into the audience, but these are a little
bit more personal.
So you end in your book with the powers of, again,
we shared this earlier, you just rattled off a bunch
of more tools that we have and guardrails that we have,
the powers of litigation and organizing and
education and voting, and you talk about how
hope looks forward.
So my question to you is, is courage more contagious
than fear, and why?
I think they're both contagious, courage and fear.
And so people look to each other to see how should
we react in this moment.
You know, if you've ever been in a building like
when the power goes out, the first thing people do is
they kind of look at each other.
They don't do anything until like, should we be scared?
Should we be freaked out?
Is this okay?
Is it coming back on in a minute?
Are we okay here?
And so you can lead by example and people will
follow your lead, right?
As I said, we're all chameleons.
If you show courage, others will follow.
Courage is contagious.
But so is fear.
And as we said, fear is the tool of the tyrant.
The response and the antidote to fear is courage.
And so if we can stand up in our own way, whether it's
participating in protests or or just working on one of
these pro-democracy things.
I think just even having courageous conversations
with people in our own sphere.
Research says that we are most influenced
by the people around us, our friends, our
families, our loved ones.
And so you may have the crazy uncle who's MAGA forever.
Don't worry about him.
You don't have to talk to him.
But you may also have friends or family
who are these people who are not really paying attention.
They don't think it's a big deal.
They think all these talks about authoritarianism are overblown.
They roll their eyes, you know, when you talk about some of the
problems that are happening.
We have an obligation, I think, to share with them our views
and the evidence that we have about these things,
because if they trust you and respect you,
it may plant a seed that will cause them to rethink
what's happening in our country, too.
So this is my last question and it's very personal
to me.
You and I had a little chat about it before
we came out here and I was so happy to see this at
the end of your book.
You end with an amazing quote
from one of my lifelong heroes since I was 12
years old, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm.
I'm gonna to read the quote, then
I'm going to tell you a quick little story.
Shirley Chisholm, my hero, said, you don't make
progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering
and complaining.
You make progress by implementing
ideas. And I was sharing with Barbara before we
came out here that Shirley Chisholm, I had a poster, I
have one of her original posters in 1972 when she was running
for president.
I had it framed in my office.
Still have it and some other things.
But when I was 12 years old, I
think, I was watching the Democratic Convention.
We were talking about this.
And in my little 11, 12-year-old mind
at the time, before I really understood
racism, sexism and misogyny, I remember
watching the TV and thinking, oh, this
black lady's going to be our new president.
Remember those days?
And I think when Hillary Clinton ran and
then Kamala Harris who had the opportunity
to meet a few times and actually chat with
her, and it was wonderful.
I think people forget that Shirley Chisholm
ran for president, was the first woman to
get on the nomination in the Democratic, not the
ticket, but at the convention.
And she was actually stabbed on the campaign trail.
And a lot of people don't know that about her.
One thing that we do share in common is we both have MS.
and she lived out her final days in Texas.
And like I said, she's always just been like a hero of mine,
but she's also a reminder to me of who I used to be
before I knew how ugly the world could be when I was 12.
Like, we were poor, but I didn't know I was poor
until I got to school and I went, damn, we're poor.
Now I know what this means.
So you ended on that beautiful quote,
and so I want to ask you, why did you choose that quote?
"Was that for me?"
You know, I, too, have been disappointed
that America fails to live up to its promises,
but I think that quote, and especially coming from her,
suggests that that promise is still out there,
and we can still look forward, and we can still fulfill it,
but it's up to us to do that.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
So I understand what we're going to do now,
and you're all going to laugh at me.
I am not on any social media except for Substack,
and I listen to podcasts of all kinds.
But when my staff said, they're going to give you an iPad,
I said, no, they're not.
I'm not using any technology.
I am a paper and pen gal.
So there should have been some cards filled
out for people who have questions to ask of Barbara.
So at this time, are we doing the microphone
or are we doing cards?
Oh, we're doing, okay, I can't see out there.
Oh, we're not doing cards.
We're doing microphones.
Are you the first one up, gentlemen?
Oh, this is just like.
There's a microphone right there.
Oh, I can't even see.
Okay, you guys, this is not public comment.
It's Seattle City Hall, okay?
We're not playing here.
There's no timer.
You got to behave.
You can't call us names.
Why aren't my streetlights on?
Yeah, yeah.
And why aren't you?
Yeah, why?
My favorite one is, you know, there's weeds
growing in my garden.
And what are you doing about that?
Why don't I have another bike lane?
Why don't I have a pee patch?
Why don't why aren't the kids splash pads on?
It's your fault that the electricity went out.
OK, I'll stop with that.
Let's start with you, sir.
Thank you.
Thank you for having us tonight.
Enjoyed the conversation.
My name is Dennis Larkin.
I can try to squeeze in two questions if I'm late,
because you triggered one.
But my first and primary question is,
when I look at the title of your book, The Fix,
especially this week, I almost lose any optimism
when I think about the Supreme Court.
And I would like to hear you speak to what's happening.
It looks like it's almost impossible to change.
And it's going to have multi-generational unless
there's some fix that we don't know about.
The other question, real quickly, if I might, you talked
about bringing the movement together of poor, working class,
whites, multigenerational, I mean, multiracial, etc.
And it struck me about the movement of Reverend William
Barber, who I know you've met, and the Poor People's
Campaign, which began way back in the early 90s, which I have
followed and participated in.
And I'd be interested in any comments you have about why that
just does not come together.
But first, the Supreme Court.
Thank you.
Yeah. So with regard to the Supreme Court, you know, we've
got this 6-3 supermajority.
And, you know, they have views about executive power that I
think are very unfortunate to be happening concurrently with the
administration of Donald Trump.
So today, you may be referencing this,
the Supreme Court ruled that courts do not have the ability
to overturn a president's orders when it comes to things
like removing protected status from Haitian and
Syrian refugees.
And if he wants to remove that, he can do that.
We've seen support for this unitary executive theory,
which is this idea that the president embodies
the entire executive branch, and even when Congress
puts in some guardrails, the president can
disregard them.
I think we're going to get a couple of opinions
in the next couple of weeks that really enshrine that
unitary executive theory to our detriment.
We've seen several dissenting opinions,
mostly from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson,
who keeps writing, if it...
now people, is what she seems to be saying,
if there could be a worse moment in history
to embrace this unitary executive,
this is the moment.
This is the time when we need to be enforcing guardrails.
Have you met Donald Trump?
And because she is among the three justices
and the minority, those dissents are
not majority opinions.
So I think we are stuck with some bad decisions.
You know, it's not going to be 100%.
I think they're going to strike down
Trump's birthright citizenship order.
They struck down his tariffs.
They struck down the National Guard in Chicago.
So I don't think they're completely in his pocket,
but I do think they share his worldview,
which is unfortunate.
How can we fix it?
There are some proposals that I think could be done
through a statute and not a constitutional
amendment so if we had a Democratic majority in the
House and the Senate and in the White House I think
you could achieve this and this idea is that we tweak
the Supreme Court a little bit it would take a little
time for it to bear fruit but the idea would be this
because Supreme Court justices are appointed for life,
to change it without a constitutional amendment,
you could create two classes of Supreme Court justices,
active justices and senior justices.
District courts and circuit courts already
have senior judges, and the senior justices would
be given a different role, like reviewing cert petitions
and emergency petitions on an as-needed basis.
And then the active justices would be limited to a
term of, say, 18 years and would be appointed to
those terms, maybe three of them, each president,
so that you would have these staggered terms
and no one president would get an outside percentage
of who ends up on the court.
And so over time, it would have an equalizing effect,
and the electorate would know, whoever I vote for president
is going to put three justices on the Supreme Court,
so I better vote accordingly.
And so, you know, after a certain cycle,
you would probably equalize some of that extremism.
The other suggestion that I think is good is the number
of justices is not part of the Constitution either.
That's set by statute.
And over our history, we've had anywhere from
five to ten justices.
We currently, of course, have nine.
That number nine was selected at a time when
we had nine judicial circuits around the country.
We need a tenth circuit.
We now have 13.
So maybe we could expand the court to 13 justices.
And when you have more voices at the table,
it tends to have an equalizing effect
because you can defeat the more extreme views
of any body of decision makers.
So those are some changes that I think have, you know,
some popular support,
and it could be done with an act of Congress
and a president who is amenable to it.
Thank you.
Sir, go ahead.
I didn't address your second question, but I'll just say
I agree with you that wealth inequality is a huge problem,
and perhaps we can see some leadership that addresses
And affordability matters to young voters, so I think it is
our future one way or another.
Barbara, I was just in your beautiful state of Michigan
last week for the Professional Women's Hockey League draft,
and you have a lot to be proud of in Pure Michigan.
That was a fun time.
Very good.
So my question was crystallized from my information warrior mom
who calls me every day saying, I just saw this headline, and
then tells me the headline.
How can he get away with this?
How is this okay?
And after all this time of thinking about that,
the question crystallizing in my mind is this.
If and when we go to the polls and we vote out the bums and
we make the changes, we bring in people who can restore
decency and normalcy, how can this be prevented again?
And to really put a fine point on it, here's what I mean.
We're getting victories in the courts.
He's being barred from this and barred from that.
Things are getting struck down.
You know, he was ordered by a court to turn the plane around
for the illegally deported individual who he just ignored.
The courts say you have to take your name down
off the Kennedy Center.
He ignores that.
You know, how can we enforce the wins?
that we, the, uh, uh, the Musk and his team
team, and they said, you can't go rip off all the
information, you know, they're pulling these, oh, we'll get to
in a minute.
Hang on.
Let's just finish ripping off this
info. How can we enforce these wins?
Yeah, it's a great question.
Um, one of, um, the suggestions I, uh, I
make in my book is maybe a bold change, but I think it could be
done with an act of Congress, and that is to take the U.S.
Marshal Service, which is currently part of the Executive
Branch and is part of the Department of Justice, and
move it over to the judiciary.
Because right now, if somebody in the Executive Branch says,
"I'm not going to comply with your order," there's really
no way to enforce it, right?
J.D. Vance like to say, oh, you've made your ruling, now
you enforce it.
Ha ha, justices, you can't do it.
But the marshals already, their
function is to provide courthouse security,
movement of prisoners, and fugitive apprehension.
They kind of work for the courts anyway, except
they are part of the Department of Justice and ultimately take
their orders there.
But if they they were in the
judicial branch, then if someone were to say,
I'm not going to obey this court order,
a judge could hold that person in contempt
and order the marshals to arrest them,
jail them, they already have the lockups,
keep them jailed until they comply with the order.
So that's my solution.
Lock them up.
Can I just remind people we have seven people lined up so
if we can get to your question?
Hi, Barbara.
I'm a career federal prosecutor retired from Jenny
Durkin's office in 2017.
Same year you left.
We've heard a lot about the offices, say, Maureen Comey's
in the Southern District and other East Coast offices.
I want to focus on one that you're very familiar with, your
office in Michigan and what's really been going on there.
I assume you've been in touch there.
The question is, how much of your AUSAs that were working
in the office have either been purged or have left on our
own, given what's going on in the Department of Justice?
And as my follow-up, as a law professor at Michigan, what do
you tell your senior students who ask, I really want to
be a federal prosecutor, what do you say about that now?
I want to apply to the honors program.
Yeah, thank you.
So in my former district, the Eastern District of
Michigan, I think it's been a little bit of a mixed bag.
There are a number of people who said, I'm leaving
because I don't want to work for this administration.
I don't know what it is that's going to happen, but at some
point I'm going to be asked to do something I don't want to do.
So a number of good people have left.
I'm not, oh, I am aware of a couple people who
were fired, not by that office, but by Washington,
because they had the audacity to enforce the FACE Act.
This is the statute that makes it a crime to obstruct the
entrance of abortion clinics.
They prosecuted very righteous cases, and part of this false
narrative that the Biden Justice Department was weaponized
was this report that said they were attacking people
solely on the basis of their religious beliefs, which
of course was not true.
These were cases that went to trial, and a jury
convicted people for obstructing the entrance.
So that has happened there.
Mostly, they've managed to stay under the radar.
And people still rob banks.
They're prosecuting ordinary cases.
But of course, that's probably what the prosecutors
in Minnesota thought until Metro surge came along.
So I know there's still some very good people who are there.
And I tell them to please stay, because we
need good people there to enforce the rule of law.
What I say to my current students is, this is probably
not the best time to go work at the Justice Department, but
going out and getting experience somewhere else, like a
state attorney general's office, or private practice,
or a public defender, there are plenty of good places where
you can serve, and I hope that in two years or so, it will
once again be the crown jewel of the U.S.
government. Thank you, sir.
Thank you.
Go ahead.
Hi, thank you both for your leadership and courage.
This has been amazing this evening listening to you.
So I was initially going to ask a question
about how to protect free and fair elections in the midterm
in the face of a very panicked and determined
Trump administration, but I'd like to pivot and ask
about reproductive rights.
I'm a University of Michigan medical school
graduate, a gynecologist, and my understanding is
there will be a movement towards personhood
starting at conception based on the 14th Amendment,
justice and liberty, et cetera.
and could not the 14th Amendment be used to protect women?
So the question is about reproductive rights.
Could the 14th Amendment be used to protect women?
I think it could because there is the Equal Protection
Clause that is in there.
And so one of the arguments I think you could make,
in fact, this is one that Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg thought She always thought when she
was, before she was a Supreme Court Justice, when she was
an advocate, she always thought Roe versus Wade was wrongly
decided, that it should not have been based on this idea of
the penumbra of privacy rights and substantive due process.
Love that word, penumbra.
What she thought instead was they should have made an
equal protection argument.
That is, men have the right to bodily autonomy.
Women should also have the right to bodily autonomy.
And any law that deprives women of bodily autonomy
violates the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.
So I think that is a valid argument.
I also think any advocates out there,
you know what's a good argument that I haven't
really seen raised is the idea that it could
be a violation of the First Amendment right
to free exercise of religion, because life begins at
different points for different religious traditions.
For the Jewish religion, I believe it begins at birth.
For the Muslim religion, I believe it begins at
something called ensoulment, which is at viability when
there's first fetal movement.
And so I think that's a great lawsuit as well.
So I think both of those arguments could be raised.
Now, I don't know whether this current Supreme Court would
buy it, but it's prevailed in some states, including
the state of Michigan, this equal protection concept.
Thank you.
Hi, Barbara.
I'm Jerry Kronk.
There's a lot of former lawyers out here.
I'm one of them, or maybe current lawyers.
So, and being at sort of the end of the line, a lot of
things that I wanted to ask have pretty much been covered.
But one thing I have difficulty explaining to
my friends is how do these injunctions against Trump's
illegal executive orders, how do they get disposed
of on the supreme courts I guess it's a shadow
docket or whatever it is I need to explain to my
friends how does this happen these things
disappear into a procedural black hole and we never
hear of them again I'm so glad you brought that
up because I had that in my notes too about
the shadow docket.
Yeah, so the shadow docket, thank you for that question,
is kind of a euphemism for what was once referred to,
and I guess is officially referred to, as the court's
emergency docket.
And so it used to be that
the emergency docket was reserved for things like
this inmate is going to be executed tonight.
We want to
get a stay from the Supreme Court
until they can have time to review the case carefully.
And so in the meantime, they're going to grant the
state to halt the execution so that they can buy
themselves some time.
But it was used quite rarely, and that was sort of the thing.
Are the wrecking balls about to knock down the building?
Can we just get a stall on that?
What we're seeing now, and it began, the New York Times
had a good article on this, it began during the Obama
administration with a climate change rule,
and it was Chief Justice Roberts who essentially said,
well, this thing can't stand, and so we're
going to shut it down.
The idea used to be that a lawsuit gets filed,
a lower court might issue an injunction and say,
stop, we're not going to let this executive
order go into effect, and then the case would work
its way through the courts, and it might take a year or two.
And now what we're seeing is if a court strikes down
a Trump executive order, the Trump Justice Department
immediately appeals to the Supreme Court on the emergency
docket and says, you have to stay this lower court order
and allow this executive order to play out until it works
its way through the court.
So in the meantime, they are making decisions, but without
the benefit of oral argument, without the benefit of briefing,
without the public being able to see the reasoning of
an opinion, we get like a two-sentence order that says
the order of the district court is stayed until further notice.
And then it's not for two years or so.
So these things that disappear.
One of them is a decision that the Supreme Court made on a
Trump administration policy
that said you can stop immigrants and question
them and detain them briefly to determine
their nationality on the basis of language spoken, whether
they speak with an accent, their job, and their location.
So if you're working in the hospitality industry or as a
farm worker or you happen to be in a neighborhood with a
lot of undocumented immigrants, that alone can be reasonable
suspicion to stop you.
That was decided on the shadow docket despite the
fact that it conflicts with Supreme Court precedent that
was decided in the 1970s.
And we still don't know the reasoning because
it's on the shadow docket.
Eventually, it'll work its way up to the court and it'll
be fully briefed and we'll get a real decision on it.
But in the meantime, you can see why it's
called the shadow docket.
It's because it kind of happens offstage, and we don't really
get the benefit of seeing it and understanding it.
So I think it is a bad development for the court,
and it is absolutely to be attributed to Chief
Justice John Roberts.
That's a good question, too, because it's in the book.
In the meantime kind of thing, is the USAID is gone.
The education department is decimated
thank you
I'm a naturalized citizen
I've lived in this country for almost
40 years now
and I hear rumbling
of denaturalization and
that scares the heck out of me like here we are talking about
being involved and you know doing pretest and you know
and just as he alluded to a few minutes ago you know
being or whoever the authority is being able to
stop and talk to me and and I talk differently
and I know that I talk talk differently, but, you know,
or I talk in my local language.
I mean, like, all this, there's a lot of concern.
I'm not saying that I'm living life in fear, but before I
take any step, I think about these things.
You know?
So, and obviously, I look different, too.
Well, you are as much as an American citizen as anybody who
was born here, and we're glad that you're here and you're
glad you're one of us.
But there is this anti-immigrant sentiment
that President Trump has stoked.
This creation of this impression of other and
how people don't belong here.
If you ever want to feel as patriotic as
you can feel, you should attend a citizenship ceremony at a U.S.
courthouse. It is a beautiful thing where people pledge
their allegiance to our country and their loyalty
and their patriotism to our country, and yet
there is this fear that is being instilled.
I think, unfortunately,
you're right to feel some fear because we've seen
in many communities where we've had these surges,
people who are thrown to the ground and detained
because they don't have papers with them,
and they say, I'm a citizen.
Well, why do you have that accent?
I've lived here for 40 years.
We don't have an official language.
You're perfectly permitted to speak any language
you want in this country.
That is part of our freedom.
This idea of denaturalization, though,
I do want to reassure you that even if efforts are
made to denaturalize people, The only basis for that is
if someone obtained their citizenship by means of fraud.
Fraud, yeah.
Now, that has gone on forever in the Department of Justice,
although in the past the number of cases per year
has been like 10 to 15, and it's because someone
was involved in maybe a terrorism case,
and it turned out they procured citizenship and they made false
statements on their application.
And so denaturalization is part of the judgment
of the court order.
I don't think they have the ability to just drum up
things without court scrutiny.
But, you know, based on the charges against people
like Jim Comey and others, I do worry that people could
be targeted even baselessly.
But I think I still have faith in our courts that if
there is no basis of fraud in someone's naturalization
Application they should feel safe that they will not be
denaturalized and that their citizenship will give them
that freedom that they need Thank you.
Thank you
So the literacy level is variable in this country,
even though we live in a knowledge-based economy
economy, we live in a paradigm of group think who succumb
to the amplification of noise over signal.
How do we create a viable coalition to turn around the
country at a local, state, and federal level?
Yeah, great question about how we do not have great media
literacy in this country.
And I think that is something that we could remedy.
other countries have done so.
Italy has done some work on this, and in
particular, Finland has done some work on this.
Because of their proximity to Russia, they
have dedicated themselves to educating their population
about disinformation.
And there's some very basic tactics about when
When you read something, don't react emotionally.
Think about something before you react to it.
Look for the evidence for a particular claim.
Is it supported with evidence?
Make sure the headline matches the story.
So often, a headline is just click bait these days
and does not resemble the story.
If experts are quoted, are they an expert in this field?
- And don't use AI.
Make sure that there is a second source for every fact
that you believe to be true.
So there are basic lessons of media literacy that we
could be teaching people, and I think we need to do
that in our schools and with our adult population.
The other thing I think we need to do is recommit ourselves
to teaching civics in schools.
As we have moved to a STEM education model, which is fine,
and I think we need plenty, we need to educate our kids
on STEM topics, we can't give up civics because if people
don't understand how our government works, it makes
it easier for us to fall prey to the kinds of
claims we see like when JD Vance claims courts are
overreaching by checking the president's executive
power. That's exactly what they're supposed to do and
people would know that if they had civics education.
Thank you.
One of the things that you have mentioned
our power is in voting, protesting, doing all
those things, which we're doing.
And we're seeing in the primaries that
have been happening, a lot more people are coming
out in primaries, which doesn't always happen.
But at the same time, we also are seeing Mr.
Trump using the constant words state of emergency.
And he's repeating it a lot.
And so I think a lot of people are worried that something could
happen in that next election.
He could declare a state of emergency.
So I don't know legally, is there anything
that we can do now to somehow protect ourselves
from that happening?
You mean so we don't have another January 6th?
So we don't have another January 6th?
Like we don't have another stolen election BS?
Yeah, great question.
I don't know if we can make the system completely foolproof.
I think you are right to be concerned.
I think what we're seeing now is the president sort of putting
out a lot of lines in the water to try to take control
of the upcoming election.
He has already said he regrets not seizing
voting machines in 2020.
So I worry a little bit about that.
Now, there's no legal way for him to do that.
Elections are conducted, as we all know, by the states.
They can be, the rules can be modified by Congress,
like the Motor Voter Act and counting of military ballots
and other kinds of things like that, the Voting Rights Act.
But the president has no role in elections,
but not for lack of trying.
He has used the Justice Department
to try to file civil lawsuits to obtain ballots
from swing states.
He has used the FBI, who has seized ballots in
Fulton County, Georgia.
We just saw some search warrants executed in Ohio
with a voting rights organization.
And I think some of this is an effort
to try to limit the number of people who get to vote.
There was an executive order just today that was struck down
that would have directed the Postal Service
to refuse to send out absentee or mail-in ballots
to people who are not on their list.
So, you know, the courts are serving as a check on this.
But I do worry that what if he does declare
a state of emergency?
You know, we've got intelligence from a national security threat
about our election, and so I'm stopping the elections
or I'm seizing the voting machines
or I'm sending federal agents to polling places.
I don't know that we have the ability to stop that.
But I think one thing that we can do now
is to prepare ourselves to have lots of volunteers
out at polling places, to have lots of poll workers
out and properly trained to deal with things
that might come our way, and to pre-bunk
some of the myths to let people know that there
is this effort out there to advance a false narrative
that people vote who don't have, who are not citizens.
I mean, it's just not true.
And the more we can share that fact with others,
maybe we can help to pre-bunk some of this.
Right, thank you.
Uh-oh, look who you have up here.
Hello. Hey, council member
for House of McCray.
Hello, hello, nice to see you.
How do you approach teaching law,
and especially constitutional law,
differently under the second Trump administration?
And in doing so, how do you inspire courage
and help your students overcome a pessimistic mindset
about their power?
- Yeah, great question from a former student, thank you.
How do we teach constitutional law these days?
Our constitutional law faculty jokes
that it's now become a history course.
- Oh, wow.
- You know, I think we try to do it realistically.
I think, you know, many students were motivated
to come to law school today, either by George Floyd or the Me
Too movement, or even the first Trump administration,
because they want to be part of the solution.
So I think they're pretty
eyes wide open.
And although I try to keep partisan politics
out of the classroom, I'm not I'm not pro-Republican or
pro-Democrat in any way, but I am pro-rule of law.
And so I think pointing out some of these outrageous efforts
to destroy the norms that we've had in society
or to upend our constitutional notions
of how the three branches of government
have worked traditionally, I think is really important
to try to instill in them an understanding
of that the founding fathers were trying to
separate from a monarchy and not to put systems in place
that would restore a monarchy.
So I think we have a healthy discussion.
We can't always explain what's currently happening in the law,
but I think our students are not pessimistic.
I think they are actually inspired and motivated
to go out and make a difference.
Thank you.
Good question.
I'm going to try to close this out with just a few
thoughts and I just, thank you.
Those are all really good questions, so thank you,
Thaddeus, for showing up.
I'm sure she gave you an A.
That's what she told me in the back.
The book is such a good read, and not just for lawyers, and
what you were talking about, about civics, you know,
yes, STEM was great.
As a lawyer, former judge, public defender,
and a legislator for the city of Seattle,
I'm always astounded at a couple generations
of not understanding the basic principles
of the three branches of government that are co-equal,
what we can and cannot do, but also what I love
about Barbara's book.
Besides, you know, she's just...
I learned a lot from her book, too, like,
oh, I didn't know that's when they decided
that a president could only run two terms.
I learned that in your book.
I think the thing that struck me the most,
the humanity piece, is when she talked about
not just the corruption and the chaos,
but what really I felt the presence of
is when she talked about the cruelty
and that is not who we are as a country
yes, we have had those chapters
genocide, enslaving people, the trail of tears
we could talk about all those dark things
and as Obama said, yes, and that made us and
arrived us who we are today but as Americans we look
forward to always go better and go where we need
to be because that's what we believe in
and those were our leaders.
That was this great experiment it was supposed to be about
and it continues to be about.
So I just want to ask you this last question again, Barbara,
is that, you know, this idea of this cruelty
that has become so normalized and commodized
and it's just been okay to not only be cruel
and to have this wage inequality and wealth inequality
and this greed which is just surmounted into just hoarding,
knowing that you can park your yacht out here
and there are people here living under a bridge.
How did that strike you when you were writing the book,
when you were talking about the cruelty piece?
Yeah, it's a tactic, and I really want to
expose that tactic.
It is a tactic that is designed to give license to people to be
greedy, to not see the humanity of our fellow Americans.
It's an effort to divide and conquer.
And I think once we see it as a tactic, and, you know, I
think we need to label these things and call them out so
that people can see it and recognize it as a tactic.
Because that's how I think we counter it and overcome it.
We are better than this, and I think it's good
to remind ourselves, just as they defeated
hate and fear in Hungary, I think we can do the same here.
We see it, we call it out, we take action to do better.
Thank you, Barbara.
Big hand for Barbara McQuaid.