Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade, who prosecuted ex-Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick for racketeering, accuses the Trump administration of adopting many of the same corrupt practices.
She’s the author of a new book, “The Fix: Saving America From the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government.”
McQuade says there are ways to rein-in the worst impulses of federal officials.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
Barbara McQuade: One of the lessons of this second Trump administration is how important it is to have three vigorous branches of government. I think the courts have largely done their part. But Congress has really just kind of rolled over. We’ve had the president encroach upon their power of the purse when he said he wasn’t going to fund things that they had already appropriated funds for. He violated the powers to levy taxes when he imposed tariffs. And now he’s violating the right of Congress to declare war.
So, I think we need a better system of electing our members of Congress. And there are a few ideas for doing that. One is ranked choice voting. That exists in a few parts of the country and I think has a tendency to weed out extremists.
We need to get our arms around gerrymandering. Michigan has been a real leader in this regard with our citizen-based redistricting through an independent committee. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that it is powerless to prevent political gerrymandering. They say it’s part of the political process, a political question that courts can’t stop. Of course, Justice Elena Kagan dissented from that Supreme Court opinion in the case Rucho v. Common Cause, saying it was antithetical to democracy to let somebody put their thumb on the scale like that.
But I think there are other things we need to do as well. We have seen, in my opinion, terrible abuse of the U.S. Department of Justice. The Justice Department was created by an act of Congress. For that reason, I think Congress could probably also add some conditions to how the Justice Department wields its power. They could make it much more difficult for a president to change what Justice does with just a stroke of a pen. And they could make it much harder to do that under the radar. There’s also a policy that restricts communications between the White House and the Justice Department. I think we could put some conditions on that to improve transparency, such as requiring that those actions be reported to the inspector general.
Quinn Klinefelter, WDET News: Justice is supposed to be an independent agency. Yet you often hear people say that, depending on which kind of administration is in place, they’re gonna ask Justice officials to focus on particular issues or individuals. When you were a U.S. attorney, did you get any of that? Don’t look at these cases as much because we really want you to focus on something or someone else?
BM: What was always normal during the time I was U.S. attorney in the Obama administration, as well as during the 12 years I was an assistant U.S. attorney under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the presidents would set broad priorities. They might say, “We are interested in pursuing violent crime,” for example. When Obama came into office, that administration was interested in pursuing mortgage fraud. But they weren’t directing you to focus on any particular case. They allowed you to follow the facts and the law. They just said, “This is a serious problem. We’re going to fund positions to pursue this particular problem and we would like you to investigate in this area.” But they were not directing you to charge any one individual. And I think that’s what’s so different about this moment, where we see the president directing the attorney general to investigate individuals by name for vague allegations of criminal behavior. That is what I think most people consider “weaponization,” as opposed to independence.
QK: It does sound very similar to “mob-like” tactics.
BM: It most certainly does. When I I first started writing this book about a year-and-a-half ago, I thought maybe it was a little out there to compare the president to a mob. But all that we’ve seen has only fulfilled my thesis that the tactics he uses are similar to the mob.
I think he learned them from Roy Cohn, the lawyer who represented Donald Trump and his father in the 1970’s, when they were sued by the Justice Department for race discrimination in housing. Roy Cohn was a lawyer for the mafia. He was a lawyer for Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare. He learned that the best defense is a good offense. Turn the tables on your accusers, admit nothing, deny everything, and accuse them of things like Trump Derangement Syndrome or “lawfare” or “fake news” if they criticize you. All of that, I think, are tactics he learned from Roy Cohn, who learned it from the mob.
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