Transcripts For CSPAN2 William Barr One Damn Thing After Another 20220823

Im Christopher Nixon cox, a board member here at the Nixon Foundation and it as my middle name impliesthe grandson of president richard nixon. [applause] and i want to say the proud grandson of richard nixon. Thank you so much for being here tonight for what i know will be a fascinating discussion. We are delighted to have you all here again in person, not in front ofthe zoom camera or computer. Over the years, weve had the honor to host many distinguished guests here in yorba linda. We have never however had the opportunity to welcome someone who has served as attorney general of the United States not once but twice ndand not in one president ial administration but in two president ial administrations separated by 25 years. Its pretty unique. That is a unique distinction in American History and it says a great deal about William Barrs atria cousin and commitment to Public Service. And perhaps his two tours of duty as attorney general under two very different president s were the inspiration of his book, one damn thing after another memoirs of an attorney general. Our guest of honor tonight has had a very distinguished career in both the public and private sectors. He began Government Service in the administration of president reagan as a member of the white house domestic policy staff from 1982 to 1983. After several years in privatepractice , he returned to government and president George Hw Bushs administration serving as assistant attorney general of the office of Legal Counsel. Next as Deputy Attorney general and then as the 77 attorney general of the te United States from 1991 to 1993. He returned to the private sector where from 1994 to 2017 he enjoyed Great Success and earned an enormous respect as one of the nations preeminent legal minds and im sure he didnt have to deal with as many damn things in the private sector. Then in 2018, when he was undoubtedly enjoying the fruits of a long and successful career he answered our countrys call once again when President Trump nominated him and the Senate Confirmed him as the 85th attorney general of theUnited States. His book debuted last month at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and to date has remained on the list for the last five weeks. So i know tonight were going to keep it on the list for a sixweek because not only will you all like book for yourselves, this will make great Summer Reading so get a w book for all your friends and were going to keep it on the list one more week for sure. If you need any more reason to go out and get this book one reviewer wrote the book this is an incredible story of the life of a great public servant. So many lessons about how Government Works and how Public Service operates atesits finest. This was a courageous book to write andi couldnt put it down. I think that as you read this book you will come to the exact same conclusion. We are also very fortunate tonight to have joining us professor matt pardo, the executive Vice President and chief Investment Officer and worker s kennedy professor of law at Chapman University. Yes, round of applause for that. Professor carlo earned his jd from Yale Law School after which he served as a clerk for the us court of appeals for the ninth circuitand then in private practice. Do the good fortune of students first at Marquette Law School and now at chapman , professor carlo left private practice for academia. Voted professor of the year at each school he has enriched the studies and minds of countless ntfuture attorneys. Professor carlo has also served on the boards of several nonprofits noas well as on a number of state and local Government Task force. In addition he consults with several professional sports leagues and teams which makes him my new best friend and i hope he enjoys his introduction so he can take me to visit nsome of those professional sports teams. The Nixon Foundation of course is established a Great Partnership with Chapman University which has led by jim byron, president of the nixonfoundation and a proud graduate of chapman. [applause] among the many benefits of that partnership is having professor carlo here with us this evening to discuss attorney general barrs book with him. I know tonights conversation between major attorney general are professor carlo will be lively, informative and fascinating. So please join me in welcoming the 77th and 85th attorney general of the United States, william d barr and professor matt carlo. [applause] you very much. Thank you. General, its an honor to be with you here tonight. We are honored to be here at the library and i appreciate everyone coming out. Welcome to the land of seven dollar gas. So lets jump in at your second attorney general extent. You had a great life in retirement. The book talks about all the interesting things you were doing. The balance in being able to do consulting and have lots of time for family andother interesting things what called you back into Public Service . I thought we were at a critical juncture in our history. I felt the 2016 election was absolutely essential to win. I was worried for the republicans. I was worried that the progressives were pretty close to pushing thecountry over the cliff into the of this from which it would be very hard to ever recover. And trump turned out to be, i didnt originally, i was never a never trumper but i was happyto support him once he won the nomination. And i think that his policies were excellent policies. Which were just what the country needed but i felt that the democrats were trying to hobble his wadministration with this russia gay thing which i was skeptical about it didnt add up completely to me. And i was worried that we were headed towards a constitutional crisis. The department of justice and fbi were in turmoil and you know, i have lost a lot of credibility with people and these were two institutions that i loved and i think are very important in our system. Originally i started pushing other people out in front of me that have tried to get the white house interested in other candidates. And none of them really gain any traction and the president wanted to talk to me and i didnt wantto talk to him unless i knew i was willing to accept the job. I didnt want to wastehis time. So we had a cudiscussion in the amfamily and people agree that you know, if this was something i was asked to do i really should do it. I felt that as i say, we all were headed towards dangerous waters as a country and my friend bob gates who i have immense respect for who had been the secretary of defense and then when i first served as attorney general and the head of the cia he said look, youre serving the country and were facing a lot of challenges. Whats important is that the best people serving these jobs, people that know what theyre doing. Thats the reason i took the job. One of the most interesting things that ive seen written or said about the book is a friend of the Nixon Library said that your book may be the fairest assessment of President Trump that hes read. Could you talk about your sort of relationship with him and your assessment of him as a president . I was never under any illusions about trumps persona and how difficult it was to deal with him. I had never met him before although i had worked in new york for 15 years as general counsel of the Verizon Corporation and most of my business friends who knew him, some very well and had worked forhim told me he was very difficult person. And advised me not to go into his administration. H so i was under no illusions about that. I wasnt going in to be his best buddy or build up a friendship with him. I was there to serve the administration as attorney general and try to help his administration succeed. And on a personal level we hit it e off very well. We both grewup in new york around the same time. And i thought we had an easy rapport and i talked very bluntly and nddirectly i can assure you. I also felt that his policies were generally sound and that his policy instincts were good and i think what people view as some of his downsides and which occasionally were his downsides had served him well at other times. Perhaps in 2016 it took someone as pugnacious, as aggressive, as direct as he was to surmount the media, the medias hostility in getting his message out and also to tangle with the organized left wing attacks against him and to stand up against them. And also to push his policies through the bureaucracy, the resistance in washington. These were things that helped him win the election at the time and helped him get things done by taking control of the border which was a hard slog for four years but w we did eventually succeed. But he also, his style could be very excessive and alienated a lot of people and his advisers including me kept telling him he should dial it back a little bit especially in 2020 as we went into the Election Year and there was friction between us during 2020 that came to a head and which i explained in the book. I want to come back to that. You were talking now about Public Service and you start out your career working at the cia but then you idecide to go to law school. What are you to a career in the law . My mother. [laughter] id always wanted to be , in high school in the 11th grade when you met with your college advisor, counselor or whatever he said whats your career goaland i said to be director of the cia and he almost fell out of his chair. This was during the vietnam war. So it wasnt an obvious choice. I went to columbia, i studied chinese. Ne i got my masters degree in government and chinese studies because i figured everyone else was studying russia and the other longterm arrival was china. Which i felt over the long term would be the more serious challenge so that when i went into chinese studies. And as we all know, president nixon went to china and all of a sudden china was the craze and the cia was knocking on my door. And thats why i went into the cia and i worked parttime there for two summers before i joined up. My mother said you know, being a child of the depression she said you need a profession. You need a career to fall back on. Though to law school. My father said do what you like to do because thats what youll do best. I went to the cia and i went to law school and later on under jimmy carter won the election and appointed someone i didnt think was the director. I left, but having gone to cia through a series of remarkablecoincidences , i was brought in. They elevated me to the legislative office to help work on all these investigations of the cia and that way i met the director, George Hw Bush who had come in to head the cia. He had been the ambassador to china and came to head the cia yand i established my relationship with west, i was 26 at the time and that relationship was obviously pivotal in my life because he eventually made me attorney general. He served in that role for a year. He was in that role as head of cia for one year and during this time the cia was under investigation by fixed committees and one commission. This was for alleged excesses during the cold war. Things like attempted or successful assassinations and thingslike that. So he had to defend the agency during a time when everyone was trying to tear it apart. He did such a great job in that one year and won the respect of the agency professionals. Who were the oldtime cold warriors in those days. That they named the cia campus and building after him. Thats the George Hw Bush Intelligence Center so thats the kind of impact hehad after just one job. Youre at doj, youre the number two there. You become acting attorney general and attorney general thornburg gets convinced to run for senate with the unfortunate death of senator heinz. It was supposed to be the dog days in washington and in august, sleepy time but you had to deal with a very major issue early on with a prison in talladega. Tell the audience about the storythat was a compelling part of the book for me. So i initially had justice, bush put me in as the office of Legal Counsel which is like a legal beagles office. We give the constitutional on advice and i only had that job for a oryear but then he made me number two which is the chief operating officer, the Deputy Attorney general. And then dick herbert had to go and run for the senate because john heinz had been killed in a plane crash. And the president said look, we will make a decision about whos going to be the permanent attorney general after Clarence Thomas confirmed but you just hold nt the fort as acting attorney general till that happens so i was acting attorney general and 120 illegal cubans who were the hardest core sociopaths that had come over when fidel castro opened up his prison and let a lot of criminals come over here in connection with the left, these people have been over here for a long time and committed serious crimes over here and we were getting ready to ship themback to cuba , fidel castro had agreed to take them and they thought probably with some good reason that they would die if they went back to cuba but we had them in a federal prison and they took over the prison, seized 11 hostages and i was confronted with the head of prisons comes in and the prison unit is like a fortress. You couldnt see in, it was solid concrete, big metal gates and so forth though to. Make a long story short i realized we could never give in to their demands, their demands were to stay in the United States. They rather be in a federal prison then go back to cuba and i knew we couldnt give in. And that eventually we were going to have to do a hostage rescue. So i actively did the hrt, Hostage Rescue Team of the fbi and they started planning for operations. I worked very closely with the top guys in the fbi on this and after nine days we had did anything. Its an interesting story, the kindof thing that would make a good movie. John candy died, there was no one left to play me. [laughter] although i hear on twitter that john goodman. [laughter] so anyway, i finally gave the order to conduct a hostage rescue and it was implemented at 4 am in the morning. It was all very dramatic. There were lastminute curveballs as to whether we were going to get in there and whether we were going to find the hostages in time because arthey had knives and we were playing russian roulette by putting their names in a bag. But anyway, it was a success. It took less than a minute to reach the hostages and they. Ere all rescued and so that was an interesting thing and when people say what was the most satisfyingthing you did as attorney general , certainly the first of that, it wasnt in the law books or anything like that but dwhen i went down there that morning, i met all the hostages andthe family. It was the most meaningful thing that i did. Because their lives were at akstake. Shortly thereafter, the president appointed, decided he was going to appoint me as attorney general. When you went into the oval office to have that conversation with him, you said to him mister president , i appreciate that i dont bring you much politically. Can you tell the audience what he said back . After a Cabinet Meeting i was waived in with john soon he knew who o was chief of staff at thattime said bill, heres the deal. He wants to go with you. That he had at the teller and all that stuff but you dont get him anything politically. Because the other people at that time being considered were toward who you all know and john ashcroft. There are two governors, the former governors and he said but were going to pick your deputy and hope thats not a problem. I said actually, im not crazy r. You better tell him about that. When he offeredme the job , he said im very excited. Im but to have you as attorney general. John told you about that other thing. Um and he said actually it is a problem. And i said look, the department of justice if theres any daylight between the attorney general and the deputy , youre going to have turmoil at the department. And you know, they just cripple the political level of leadership that way. And he was looking at me and i said let me put it this way mister president. The attorney generals balls are in the deputys pocket and im not putting mine in anyones pocket. Who i dont know. This look of recognition came over his face. Okay. Do you have someone in mind . I said yes, he said fine. Talk to some other people. If we have someone to talk to fine but if you still wantto go with your guy thatsfine too. That was that. [applause] he also said the best politics at doj is no politics. And in reading your book that seems to be your ethos. Can you maybe reflect on that as a shared value between you and president bush . The attorney general performs a number of different functions. One is providing legal advice. You are acting as a political official who is politically sympathetic tothe administration. And you try to give advice that will you know, be in accord with the law but also from the standpoint of trying to help the administration get to where it wants to go within the law. The other is policy advisor. And executing programs Like Fighting drugs or crime and so forth. Thats a political position. President wants to do something for political reasons and the primary arena, fine. Theres nothing wrong with the attorney general acting that way but the thing thats sacrosanct in the department of justice is the enforcement of the criminal law and trying to make sure there are not different standards for different people depending on what party therein or ne anything else about them. The same has to apply to everyone. I like i think most of you believe that weve moved away from that and in fact in practice we do have two standards of justice. And but thats what the president meant when he said that the best, when i say i know i dont get you anything politically as the president said, thebest politics at the Justice Department is no politics. And thats what he meant by that and i agree with that. And i tried my best to apply one standard for everybody and not allow politics to be played. If i didnt have the evidence sufficient to indict someone whether it be james comey or anyone else, by the way, biden went around saying this person should be indicted which he has with respect to the president. People object to that. Was saying i want the Justice Department to indict comey and so forth. That created a problem but the fact is i didnt have the evidence sufficient to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, i wasnt ntgoing to indict someone simply because the president wanted to indict. We cant go down that road and i kept on saying president , i cant do. Bleep] for tat i know they behaved unfairly. I know they applied double standards but the answer to that cant be ithat i politicize the department and tried to use it as apolitical weapon. Orsometimes i paid the price for that. When i saw, i felt lying prosecutors were going to see a penalty on roger stone who by the way, i dont likeroger stone. Hes a jerk. And i thought he violated the law and i thought heshould go to present myself. But he didnt deserve to go to prison for 2 to 3 times longer than other people would go for that same crime and thats what they were trying to do. And that came on my desk wand once it came on my desk iwas going to make the decision. I wasnt going to dodge it. I did what i thought was right even though i knew the media would attack me as the president s friend. No, i did it because its one standard of justice for everybody and the president s friends are treated differently, thepresident s enemies are treated differently. [applause] it seems that when you started each of your stints as attorney general Something Big was going on. Talladega as one example, the russian investigation. Can you talk about what kind of hornets nest that wasto navigate as attorney general . I knew i was getting into it a very highly charged situation. The left and their media allies which is essentially almost all the National Media invested a lot in the russia gate narrative and they were trying to bring down President Trump and they thought it was going to be st. George killing the dragon. So i d realized that this was going to be a can of worms. And i also walked into a department that had been fighting both republicans and democrats onthe hill. Everyone was attacking the department. And so i knew it was going to be, require some fancy footwork here if you will. But as you know, mueller as i described in the book, mueller came in. He talked to me and i saw that there were signs that he wasnt the same mueller i had worked with before. I hadmade friends over the years with. And he came in finding not to my surprise found no collusion but he tried to opunt on the issue of obstruction , just throw out all these facts and a lot of verbiage, 200 pages of stuff that come to no conclusion. Eso i had asked him what he thought he was going to do. I said are you, could somebody make a decision based on your report . He said yes, someone could make a decision as to whether there was a prosecutable offense. So after he gave me the report, heres one of the things. The media has always claimed ei lied about the report and i think anyone who knows english language will know thats crazy. I told muellerlook, heres the problem. If you give me the report and i cant make a very quickly and there is a delay the country is going to be at risk everyone will think thats because the president s about to be prosecuted and that will affect our national security, the stock market and so forth. The economy. If you give me that report you have to already indicate in the report what has to be redacted under the law. If somethings illegally have to be redacted. I want to know what they are. You guys should tell us and he said he understood but when he gave us the report he did not indicate any of that stuff i knew we were talking about a two or three week delay. In that situation i thought the only responsible thing to do was to tell the public the bottom line. There were news reports that friday epgoing into the weekend the president was about to be indicted and his family and the press was all roiling. So i said gid tell the public the bottom line which is there was no findable collusion. He did not reach a decision onobstruction. He said he did not exonerate the president. He said that in my letter but i said im going to make the decision and then i explained the decision i made which was no instruction. And the media was so deflated by this and so upset that they claim that i misrepresented the contents of the report. A report which i knew was coming out in two weeksanyway. Anyway, thats thestory there. Following on the heels of that obviously ukraines ypresident zelensky has been in the media a lot lately but back then he was at the center of the storm which would be a trigger point for impeachment proceedings. How did you try lto steer doj through the time when you learn about the call between president zelensky and President Trump and then eventual release of the transcript delayed it may have been which wasthe triggering for impeachment proceedings. So the day mueller testified in june of 2019, i realized his testimony was not going to be what the president s opponents wanted. And so when he testified for all intents and purposes whole russiagate scam was over and the next day the president had a call with zelensky so thats one damn thing after another. We thought the night after mueller testified which we were happy in my office. We were pouring our scotches at the end of the cday, clinking of glasses and we thought we had gotten past russia gate and now we could focus on the Successful Program of the administration. And then boom. The whole zelensky thing happened. I didnt find out about it immediately because i normally wouldnt find out about a call with a foreign leader but over the ensuing weeks we heard about thiscall. I looked at the transcript. I was angry with the president because the president lumped me in with Rudy Giuliani. The president and his typical discursive way of talking was saying i want you to cooperate with the different investigations, put bill barr on that. I want to investigate by then, that has to be looked at and you should talk to giuliani and the attorney ne general about that. We were not in estimating biden at that point. Joe biden and we didnt investigate him on his attorney general. But i was angry because he lumped me in together with Rudy Giuliani but i didnt raise that. Lumped me and as if im doing this free booting assignment he was up to. But what i was focused on was was this evidence of a crime because they were claiming he was soliciting a political contribution, that he was trying to bend the law. Thats what politics is about now, mainlyprosecutors trying to bend the law to prosecute their political opponents and i didnt think there was. And then congress moved out very sharply to impeach him and basically overtook anything that apartment would be doing. Its very interesting. My read of the situation was they were so upset that i made the decision, in russia gate that i made the decision there was no obstruction and that was the end of it. They didnt want me to act on the ukrainian thing. They wanted to move impeachment first so that the same thing wouldnt happen to them on ukraine. So they went to hell for letter to go on impeachment. The department is not a party andthat we dont really have a mission. We sit back and watch the show. Tbut i never thought the president was really in jeopardy. Do you think things might have gone differentlyif the transcript had been released earlier or would itnot have mattered . I dont think it would have mattered. In the book you say you think the civil rights issue of our time is religious liberty and any particular examples during covid and how some liberties were infringed upon. Can you talk about your thoughts on religious liberty and some of those cases during the shutdown . During covid a lot of the governors and mayors and other people who thought that they had this unfounded power for a long time would do this work clearly treating religious activity as secondclass activity. They would leave a lot of commercial activity and a lot of comparable nonreligious activity free of restrictions or freer of restrictions but they would impose very draconian restrictions on churches. And we said no, it cantbe worse. You cant treat religion worse than your treating other people. But the reason i say its a civil liberty of our time is because it goes back to the speech i gave at notre dame which got a lot of attention which is to say the framers always, the foundation of our system of government and our political philosophy is actually religion. Not in the sense that we established religion. In the sense thatwe compel people to be religious or what have you. People have freedom of conscience but the framers believed that the constitution, that our society could have limited government, a limited role for government because people would be able to control themselves because they would be a virtuous people who were generally religious people. And therefore they had internal moral compasses and therefore they didnt need external coercive power that was overweening. It could be curtailed and limited. That was their philosophy and what weve seen in the west generally and in the United States specifically is a crumbling of thatfoundation. We have fewer and fewer people have that self discipline and self s government, ability to govern themselves. Thats by the way what they mean by selfgovernment, its not so much out of town votes, its governing yourselves and i have a whole chapterdiscusses this and its relationship to education. There used to be a consensus in this country that education should require some sort of moral moral formation but starting in the 60s , they started stripping away all vestiges of religious belief and what i said is starting in the Obama Administration they been trying to secularize Public Education not by subtraction of religion by addition of secular philosophies itand its almost like Critical Race Theory and other things. An alternative system to support a set of values. And im saying, where does the government get off teaching people ideology, instructing and indoctrinating people in ideology and telling people what to believe especially if its subversive traditional o beliefs that their family is tryingto raise their children . And so i think that raises some serious constitutional issues. [applause] it seems like your number one issue as attorney general both under president bush and trump was Violent Crime talk about why you were so passionate about making the top priority. People right now say American People are upset by e. Crime. They should be more upset by crime. Crime, fighting crime protecting citizens from violent predators is the number one duty of government. [applause] its the reason we established government. And were getting to the point in many jurisdictions where people would be just as safe if they protected themselves. They were there on policeand security service. And thats an outrage. Now, weve been here before. We apparently have to learn this lesson every 40 years. But heres whats happened with Violent Crime. In the 60sand 70s , it tripled, almost quadrupled at the time we were releasing people from prison. Reagan comes in and flattens the trajectory. To the 80s. So its still going up. It peaks the time i attorney general the first time in 1991 and the crime was twice as high as it is today. It was up until the last couple of years. The reason was, we all know what it is. The cops have always done their job pretty well. Its the rest of the system thats a revolving door. Its not a mystery. Most predatory violence is committed by a small group thats one percent of the population probably. But they are repeat violent offenders. They are career criminals. They start cryingwhen theyre young and keepon committing crime and have long rap sheets. There will be violent for a long time to come. They commit hundreds of crimes a year. You have to get these violent predators into prison to serve long sentences. Incapacitate them. Thats the only thing that happens. In 1990 when the government havent done much on Violent Crime , but in 1991 we started leaning forward using our gun laws, our gang laws and our drug laws setting up joint taskforces with state and local and going after the shooters, the violent criminals and putting them away. The da loved this. If they could only get 18 months we could get 18 years with some guy who got a long criminal history and still using a gun for crime. We pushed the states to stop their releasing of prisoners and stop the revolving door. C422 consecutive years putting in 1992, four last year i was attorney general, 22 years crime rates went down. Guess what . The prison rate wentup. We doubled the prison population in the United States from about 700,000 to 1. 5 million. But crime was cut in half. Murders went down to from 24,000 the year to about 14,000 a year. The beneficiaries of that were mostly African Americans who were victims of homicide. Under obama, 2014 the war against cops, ferguson. The crime started going up again. So after 22 years of going down it started going up under obama. Vi under trump it went down again in the second half of 2020. The bottom line is, its not like we dont know the answer hfor dealing with Violent Crime and weve heard all these arguments about we have to give these guys more chances, more chances. The only way that its ever worked at reducing crime and protecting society is get the violent repeat offenders off the streets and its just a question of will. After that is done, crime goes down. [applause] when you all get a chance to read the book theres so much rich policy in there that general barr worked on from mexican drug cartels to big tech to china. Its really worth a read and we wont be ableto cover all that tonight because theres 20 20 stuff id like to jump into. Its spring of 2020 and election was looking good for President Trump in your eyes at one point and then it starts to look not as good and like you did with president bush when you saw the tide start to turn you tried to give advice. But it seems to frame your relationship, can you talk about what yousaw and what you were hoping to help the president with in terms of reelection and advice . From my standpoint i was worried that the president was going to lose the election. I thought the president was going to lose the election and i thought he was going to lose because he had alienated about 10 percent roughly of educated, suburban voters, typically voted republican either as republicans or as republican leaning independence and they were completely repelled by trump. Mostly women but not exclusively women. And i saw this in my own state of virginia where the Republican Party essentially collapsed from cta party that could actually win in virginia to one that was hopelessly behind because of the defection of suburban republicans under trump. And this was true and a lot of the key states. And he was advised by his campaign advisors, by his other advisers who had been around the track. Youve got to stop the pettiness. Youve got to stop punching down and getting into these fights with some grade b movie actor that insulted you or something. Its been a office and it makes you seem petty. Stop this stuff and he wouldnt listen and hismantra was, is based like to. He would get his base out and people wanted him to be a fighter. I said yeah, people want you to be a fighter. You are a fighter and stuff wbut youve got to sometimes take your flights. Ill went in to suggest that it was time to sort of pull back a little bit and address this problem in the suburbs. And he listened as he listened to everyone else who told him and all the cabinet secretaries agreed its not like i was taking an unusual position. Most of you probably saw the same thing. And he just would not listen and i think its because, it was funny. In 16 when he made that offcolor remark to billy bush shortly before the election, he was really shaken and people thought he might actually pull out when the election was over but he was scared enough to listen to advisors and he mended his ways for the last few weeks and hepulled out a narrow victory. In 2020 he thought he had mystical relationship with his face and he knew better than everybody else so he wasnt listening to advice. And i think thats why helost the election. And so later in after the election was results, the whole question of fraud obviously tis in the room. People sort of meld together a lot of different things. There are things that changes to election law and practices that are unfair andskew the Playing Field but theyre not necessarily against the law. You pass a law or some rule and it helps one side and not the other, it may not be against the law. A lot of this stuff was like that. Its stuff the Republican Party has to fight tooth and nail to level the Playing Field. The other kinds of violations were not fraud. They were where rules thatare designed to prevent fraud were not observed. Like not requiring an application for an absentee ballot in a state that required one or you know, allowing people that harvest talents in the state. The point is that is not a negating of the votes. You still have to show that the votes that were cast under that situation were not t valid votes. And then theres fraud where actually votes are stolen. Votes are put in for good votes are taken out. And there was no evidence before that of any degree of scale that could have affected the outcome of the election. And all the stories circulating and all the excessive remarks made by the president about theres proof and more people voted in philadelphia is false. The turnout in philadelphia was actually lower than the average turnout in pennsylvania. It was in the 70 percent range, it was high but it was the same statewide. So i looked at the votes later and to me it was sort of obvious why he lost which is what people have been telling him. In states like arizona there were 75,000 republicans in these counties who didnt vote for him. They votedotherwise republican. A number in wisconsin was at least 60,000 the same and in pennsylvania it was 60,000 the same. He ran weaker in those three states that the republican ticket. The state candidates, the congressional candidates, statewide tickets did well. He was the weak link on the ticket. You cant win that close of a race if youre running weaker than the republican ticket in the battlegroundstates. Thats why we lost the election. Youre pretty critical of political leaders from both parties who you describe as being more attached to selfserving narratives than the actual truth. You juxtapose that seeming disease with the role that doj plays in our federal government upholding the truth. Can you reflect on that in terms of these troubled times we live in . Can we just work as a government to uphold the truth or is politics so sour pothat seems an impossibility . Right now the politics are pretty intense, sour and you know, the Justice Department is probably the agency thats the most battered because you know, we have to say that the evidence is and what wethink the truth is regardless of politics. And we live in an age where thats not considered being part of the team. I do think that, i hope. Im very worried about the country. I think this is probably the biggest crisis weve gone through thother than the civil war. And i think theres a lot of different aspects to it that would take us all night to discuss. A lot of different factors at work when people get discouraged, i always say look. The first step on the road back is a decisive victory that will, that we can translate into lasting changes and addressing some of these things that are offtrack like education or the fact that we have moved away from the principle of federalismand so forth. We have to start addressing the basicsbut we need a decisive electoral victory. And i think that what were going through today is like what we went through in the 60s and 70s where with a Democratic Party to a sharp turn to the left. I think theyre actually lackey are now than then. They are essentially , they cannot be called liberal, theyre not within the liberal tradition. There are totalitarian in their approach. But theyve taken a sharp turn to the left. Dividedtheir own party. They tore down president nixon who had 149 states in 72 and then they come up with this empty vessel in jimmy carter that everyone could see what they wanted to see and he was overwhelmed by the problems and he was a one term failure. Remind you of somebody . So what i say to the people who i agree with and it grieves me that many people are maga supporters are mad because i think the president lost the election but i say to the maga supporters, thats what i want. I want to restore america but that will take more than just one narrow victory and a president who punches back publicly all the time. What that will take is a reagan victory. Reagan was a reaction against the democratic excess. He won 40 states the first time, 49 the second time. His Vice President George Hw Bush 140 states. The democrats had to go to the middle. They had a democratic Leadership Conference in clinton again had to reform welfare and passed to top crime bills. So the debate and the policies for over 20 years were dominated by the republicans and liberal was a dirty word in those days. Thats the kind of victory we need and we rsneed people who can produce that kind of victory. [applause] and i am not hostile to trump but i think that 78 is a lameduck president who wants to settle scores,hes not the guy to deliver that kind of victory. Thats a hard pass. Does that mean everything is solved by that . No, its going to take hard work and take an administration that has on talented president s. Nixon was this way, reagan was that way. I think its hw bush that can strategically figure out what we need to do todeal with the educational crisis in our country. And some of the other factors at work. That are leading to this poisonous atmosphere and at least that will be the first step on the road back but that is the essential step and until that happens i dont see anything preventing this or reducing the trench warfare that wehave today. Final question and is a quick one because we have a book signing right after this t. You and john are the only two people to be in theattorney general for two different terms, would you go for a ha third . O first like to say i am the only one to do it in two different centuries. [applause] thank you very much. You much for your time tonight. The attorney general will be uravailable to sign your books in the front lobby. Had your right down the hallway. Thank you forcoming tonight, god bless. Bye. Weekends on cspan2 are an intellectual feast. Every saturday American History tv documents americas stories, and on sundays booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. Funding for cspan2 come from these Television Companies and more including cox. Homework can be hard, but squatting and a diner for internetwork is even harder. Thats why we are providing lower income students access to affordable internet so homework can just be homework. Cox connects to compete. Cox, along with these Television Companies, supports cspan2 as a Public Service. Andrew yang former president ial candidate, former bestselling author, new book, forward to guide sod, much fun on the campaign trail with you. You were always someone who i