TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest, Joyce Vance, is worried about whether American democracy is sturdy enough to withstand what she describes as the antidemocratic moves that President Donald Trump and his administration have spewed out with overwhelming force and velocity. In her new book, she writes about how to save the republic and what we can accomplish in the future if we renew our commitment to democracy. For people who are wondering - but what can I do? - she has suggestions. Her new bestselling book is titled "Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual For Keeping A Democracy."
You may know Vance as a longtime legal analyst for MSNBC, which has been rebranded as MS NOW. After 25 years as a career federal prosecutor, she was appointed by President Obama as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, a position she held throughout his presidency. She resigned in 2017, a day before Trump's first inauguration. She also writes the Civil Discourse newsletter on Substack, co-hosts two podcasts - SistersInLaw and CAFE Insider - and is a distinguished professor of the practice of law at the University of Alabama School of Law.
Let's start with a clip dating back to last March, when Judge James Boasberg had ordered the Trump administration to turn around deportation flights of Venezuelan migrants heading to El Salvador. When those flights did not turn around, it raised the question whether the administration was defying the judge's orders. Trump was asked whether he would ever defy a court order in an interview on Laura Ingraham's Fox News show "The Ingraham Angle." Here's Trump's response.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I never did defy a court order.
LAURA INGRAHAM: And you wouldn't in the future?
TRUMP: No. I - you can't do that. However, we have bad judges. We have very bad judges, and these are judges that shouldn't be allowed. I think they - I think at a certain point, you have to start looking at, what do you do when you have a rogue judge? The judge that we're talking about - he's - you look at his other rulings, I mean, rulings unrelated. But having to do with me, he's a lunatic.
GROSS: Joyce Vance, welcome to FRESH AIR.
JOYCE VANCE: Thank you for having me.
GROSS: How do you interpret the clip we just heard?
VANCE: Well, you know, this is an effort by the president to walk this tightrope that he's been walking between compliance with the courts while, at the same time, bashing the federal judiciary. And so this notion that a judge is a rogue judge just because that judge rules against you should be a nonstarter for anyone who's an elected official in a position of authority, but certainly for the president of the United States. In this country, we submit our most difficult sorts of problems - problems we can't resolve on our own - to the courts for a ruling on what's legal and what isn't. And then the expectation is that we will follow those rulings. That's the commitment we all make to become part of this democracy, and this president has abandoned it.
GROSS: So Trump is kind of challenging the separation of powers, and I'm wondering if you think that's going to have a long-term effect after he leaves office.
VANCE: You know, Trump is setting precedent in his behavior, and the Supreme Court is setting precedent in case law. Ever since the conclusion of the Nixon presidency in Watergate, there have been people who have believed that the presidency - the power ascribed to the presidency - was suffering and that the Congress had taken on too much power and the courts had taken on too much power. And over time, this came to be called the unitary executive theory, the notion that the presidency needed to become more muscular. That used to be sort of a fringe theory on the far right of the conservative movement. But it's come into increasing prominence with Donald Trump, who, of course, has been, I think, more than willing to grasp any sort of power that the presidency can obtain. And so we've seen him push the limits and see just how much power he can get away with assuming for the presidency.
At the same time, there are, you know, probably five justices on the Supreme Court who are willing to go along with the unitary executive theory to at least some extent. What we're observing now is the answer to the question, well, just how far are they willing to go with the unitary executive theory and the idea that this will survive beyond this presidency and become really a new normal, where the president will have far more ability to make inroads into powers we've traditionally ascribed to Congress? For instance, at risk right now - Congress' power of the purse as the president tries to withhold spending or Congress' power to declare war as the president tries to do it on his own using emergency powers. This is a fundamental reset of the balance of power among the three branches of government.
GROSS: But in the use of, like, the unitary executive theory, I've been wondering. Like, back when the Constitution said that the president has executive power, what did executive mean back then? Like, you know...
VANCE: So it's a great...
GROSS: ...Meanings change over time.
VANCE: Yeah. It's a great question because obviously, so much of our government is transformative. We don't have to look any further than the Second Amendment, where, at the time the founders created that right to bear arms, they were talking about muskets. And now we live in a world with far more powerful weapons, and we try to look backwards and give the language in the Constitution meaning in the modern context.
So the executive branch obviously has a much more far-reaching mission and purpose than it had at the time of the founding. We have a sprawling executive branch that includes a number of administrative agencies. And much of the back-and-forth over the power that the president can exercise as an executive has to do with that sprawling administrative branch, where many agencies have been created by Congress or have grown up to be either quasi-independent or to operate based on the expertise of people who are true experts - scientists and others - in their fields of endeavor.
Now, increasingly, there's a question of whether the president can fire those people at will and just how much ability the executive - the president and his cabinet secretaries - have to determine the course of those executive branch agencies. We're seeing a lot of that going on with HHS and the rescission of reliance on vaccines, for instance. So it's a modern-day controversy that goes back to the founding of the country in that sense.
GROSS: Last week, several members of Congress made a video of each of them addressing members of the military, basically saying, you can refuse illegal orders. And they basically advised them that they should do that. And Trump, in response on social media, posted, seditious behavior from traitors. Lock them up. Lock them up - with three exclamation points after each, lock them up. Then there was another post where he wrote, seditious behavior, punishable by death.
VANCE: This was an extraordinary move by the president, and I don't mean extraordinary in a positive sense. Look, these members of Congress, who were all former members of the military or the intelligence community, were in essence saying to their colleagues - they were reminding them of a very noncontroversial proposition, which is that you don't have to follow an illegal order. In fact, you have an obligation not to follow one. And there are established mechanisms for those public servants to challenge orders or to inquire into their legality through their chains of command. So nothing that these members of Congress were suggesting was in the least seditious.
And for the president to make that implication forces you to confront the question, is this a president who believes that any order he gives is per se legal? For instance, there are questions developing about these strikes in international waters. There are questions about deployment of the National Guard in American cities. It's important for these public servants to have recourse to their chains of command and to their legal advice in this enormously unusual, difficult situation. To suggest that they shouldn't have that really runs contrary to our traditions and our laws.
GROSS: I want to interrupt here with a brief update. After we recorded our interview yesterday morning, the Pentagon announced it's investigating Arizona senator and retired U.S. Navy captain Mark Kelly, who is one of the Democratic lawmakers in the video we're discussing, calling on members of the military not to obey illegal orders. We'll hear more of my interview with Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney, author of "Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual For Keeping A Democracy," after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Joyce Vance. Her new book is about threats to our democracy and what individuals can do to protect and preserve it. It's titled "Giving Up Is Unforgivable."
There are things President Trump has said that have really posed a direct threat to judges or prosecutors who have challenged him as we've been discussing. And I don't know if you were married yet when your husband's father, who was a judge, was murdered by a mail bomb. So your family is very familiar with threats against judges, and I assume your husband might have had his own threats. And you, as a former federal prosecutor and now legal analyst on television, I'm sure you've had your share, as well. So can you tell us what happened with your father-in-law, why he was mail bombed?
VANCE: Yeah, sure. So we were newly married. We were pregnant with our first child. And the bomb actually came to our home - to my in-laws' home at the time - disguised as a box from one of the judges on my father-in-law's court with whom he was friendly and had repeatedly shared packages back and forth, nothing really to cause alarm.
My husband and I were out of town. My father-in-law opened the package sitting across the table from my mother-in-law. He was killed instantly, and she was injured very seriously. By the time we got home, she was in surgery, which fortunately saved her life, and we were able to continue to live together for many years. You know, the reality is that that situation was a tragedy. It involved a dissatisfied litigant with a history of using bombs that had harmed people.
The difference between that situation and what federal judges are facing today is that today the threat is coming from inside of the house. It's coming from the presidency. And I think back to our experience and the notion that that package came to the house and could have been a threat to anyone in the household who touched it. You know, that's what all of these federal judges are living with now. To a certain extent, as a public servant, you assume the risk for yourself. But your spouse, your children, your parents - the notion that we're putting public servants' families at risk is something that's still very shocking to me.
GROSS: So in your book about what people can do to preserve democracy in the U.S., you quote Alexander Hamilton, who said, the judiciary is beyond comparison as the weakest of the three departments of power. Why did Hamilton say the judiciary is the weakest? And do you think it still is? Do you think what Hamilton said stands up now?
VANCE: It really does in this sense - the power that the judiciary possesses is dependent upon the public's confidence in the objectivity of the judiciary, in our willingness to go along with decisions that we may disagree with, even decisions that may be adverse to our personal interest, because we believe that the courts are there as a neutral arbiter of problems that people can't resolve among themselves. The courts don't have an army that goes out and enforces their decision. The Supreme Court declares what the law of the land is, and then it expects compliance. And so that's the core of Hamilton's commentary in that regard.
It's a remarkable system, this democracy of ours, where people are allegiant to the rule of law and follow the precepts and the laws because we understand that that's essential for us to be able to live together. There's always some form of discontent with the legal system. And to be honest, that system is not perfect. We've all experienced, for instance, the racial injustice that can permeate it. So in many ways, it's an aspirational system that requires our constant attention and improvement to ensure that it works better and is fair and efficient for the entirety of our population.
But now we have a president who objects to that system because it doesn't deliver the results that he wants. And that points out both the weakness and the strength of the system. It's weak in the sense that a powerful person can try to erode it. It's strong in the sense that the other branches of government can rightsize when one branch gets out of control, and a public focus and a focus in the media on the importance of the judiciary serves to shore it up and strengthen it.
GROSS: Well, now we have a president who is assuming as much power as he possibly can. We have Republicans in Congress mostly following the president's wishes, and we have a Supreme Court that is a supermajority of Republicans, made a supermajority by Trump's appointments. I don't want to imply that all Republicans follow him or that the Supreme Court is fixed in some way. Nevertheless, he exerts enormous influence on, you know, the Supreme Court and Congress. So do you see that as being out of balance in terms of the division of branches of government?
VANCE: Every federal judge who takes the bench gets there because a president from one party or the other appointed him or her, so that's the mechanism by which they all get there. But judges are remarkably independent individuals. They have their own view of the law and the fact. They consume the briefs and the arguments that are made by litigants before then, and remarkably, they do deliver opinions that carry the country forward.
But I think it would be just sort of ignoring what we all know to be true to ignore the fact that this Supreme Court has tended to weigh in heavily for the president in surprising ways. For instance, in the immunity case, where the court went further than many analysts and observers believed it needed to in protecting a sitting president from criminal prosecution and all but derailing the January 6 prosecution, which ended up dying on the vine because Trump was reelected. So the court, when it decided the criminal immunity case, determined that prosecutors were not able to prosecute a sitting president.
So the courts have played in, in many ways, to the power of this president. I think it's premature to suggest that they're completely coopted. For one thing, there are federal district judges across the country who remarkably, and despite the pressure and even the singling out that this president is prone to engage in of them when he doesn't like their decisions, these are folks who have stood up every day and tried to deliver decisions that abide by the dictates of the rule of law. We see that in the appellate courts as well. And in the Supreme Court, as we discussed earlier, there are a number of judges who ascribe to the unitary executive theory, who are willing to provide more muscular power to the presidency.
We're about to get to the time where this court will have to decide where it sits on these issues. And there was one early inkling of where their red line in the sand might lie. And that happened in the deportation cases when it became clear that the administration, that the White House had defied an order issued by a federal judge, James Boasberg, in the District of Columbia saying that men who were migrants could not be transported to a prison in El Salvador, to El Salvadorian custody, without first receiving some small, modest measure of due process. And the Supreme Court permitted that decision to stand. So if you're the Supreme Court, if you want to remain relevant in modern America, the one place that you have to stand up is when it comes to whether or not you have the ability to review decisions made by the president.
GROSS: So Judge Boasberg, who is the judge in question in the clip that we heard and who had ordered the deportation planes that the Trump administration had ordered to take off, the judge ordered the planes to turn around. And Trump did not fulfill that order. So Judge Boasberg recently said he plans to move ahead with looking at whether his orders were ignored, which could lead to contempt proceedings. Can you explain that?
VANCE: The government objected to Judge Boasberg's efforts to raise contempt proceedings in this case. So the judge had entered an order that would've required the planes to turn around. In his view, the government's position, to the extent that we understand it from what they've publicly filed, was that the planes had somehow flown out of the jurisdiction of the United States before this order was entered, and that meant it didn't apply to them. I'm not sure if I'm doing full justice to the government's argument because it hasn't been fully fleshed out.
But nonetheless, there's a new twist to this, which is a whistleblower who came forward and said that prosecutors were told by a high-ranking justice department official that it might be necessary to ignore court orders in order to effectuate the president's purpose. I'm not going to repeat the language that he allegedly used. So now there will be this proceeding where the ACLU lawyer who has been proceeding on behalf of the migrants, Lee Gelernt, will have the opportunity to present this new evidence in court. And Judge Boasberg will apparently hear testimony from live witnesses and make a determination about whether a criminal contempt referral to the Justice Department for certain individuals should be made.
We're taping on Monday morning. Judge Boasberg indicated that he would issue guidance to the parties by the close of business on Monday indicating how he wanted to proceed with this contempt inquiry because he needs to engage in a fact-finding inquiry to determine what happened before he can make a decision about what he does next. So everything is in flux until the judge issues that guidance to the parties.
GROSS: Let's take another break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Joyce Vance. And she has a new book, which is called "Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual For Keeping A Democracy." She served as U.S. attorney for the northern district of Alabama during the Obama administration and is a longtime contributor, legal analyst for MSNBC, which is now MS NOW. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Joyce Vance. Her new book is about threats to our democracy and what individuals can do to protect and preserve it. It's titled "Giving Up Is Unforgivable." You may recognize Vance as a longtime legal analyst for MSNBC, which has been rebranded MS NOW. She also writes the Substack newsletter Civil Discourse and co-hosts the podcasts SistersInLaw and CAFE Insider. Vance spent 25 years as a federal prosecutor before President Obama appointed her as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. She held the position throughout his presidency and resigned the day before Trump's first inauguration.
So before we get back to talking about the issues of the day, I want to talk a little bit about you and your experiences. You were appointed as a U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama by President Obama. So you were one of the first five U.S. attorneys that he nominated. And the first time you met Obama, what advice did he give you?
VANCE: So during my time as the U.S. attorney in Birmingham, and all of my colleagues across the country - there are 93 U.S. attorneys at any one moment in time - we didn't have personal meetings with the president of the United States. He didn't call us up and ask us to bring or dismiss cases. When we met him, it was very formally, in groups, and we had an opportunity to meet with him in the White House during the second year of my tenure.
And as you can imagine, President Obama was a very charismatic figure. He's a constitutional scholar, so someone who really resonates with a group of nerdy federal prosecutors. And when he walked into the room to meet with us, we were sort of standing very formally, and he spoke off the cuff and was funny and was pleasant. And then he turned serious. And he looked at us, and he said, I appointed you, but you don't work for me. You work for the American people, and I expect you to remember that. And that was a moment that stuck with all of us. It's something that we have discussed repeatedly among ourselves, how powerful that was as a charge to a group of federal prosecutors. You know, if the president gives you an order, you're going to execute it. Well, our order was to act with integrity, to serve our communities and to do justice. And that's something that I've always been singularly grateful I had the opportunity to participate in.
GROSS: Do you think you would have acted that way without Obama's advice?
VANCE: That's how prosecutors are hardwired to act. Really, it's a job that's about community service. That might seem a little bit funny because in many ways, the job is about putting criminals in prison. But really, if you're doing it properly, it's a job where you're thinking holistically about crime and community, and thinking as much about preventing crime as you are about prosecuting it if you're going to use your resources effectively. Having a boss, having a president who understood that and believed in that and encouraged it - that did nothing but give us the ability to go back to our communities and to act decisively and to do some really bold things that have, in many ways, become lost by what came after the Obama administration.
But we had started on a trajectory to reform the criminal justice system so that we would, for instance, use data-driven best practices to prevent criminal recidivism, to tamp down on young people committing first crimes, to figure out better ways that custody could reform and rehabilitate people as opposed to simply warehousing them. You know, in so many ways, I regret that momentum that was lost as the fight to save democracy itself took predominance during the Trump administration. I hope that there will be a moment when we can get back to criminal justice reform, which is both necessary and powerful.
GROSS: Is there a case you'd like to mention when you were a U.S. attorney that had the most lasting impact or that was most important to you?
VANCE: That is such a hard call to make because, you know, you don't have the resources to do every case that's out there, and so prosecutors are constantly using their judgment to bring the cases that are the most impactful. But there is a case that stands out. And that's a case involving a law that was passed by the Alabama legislature - HB 56 - which the legislature described as a deport-yourself measure for people who are in the United States - noncitizens - without legal status.
And one of those measures required schoolchildren to disclose their parents' immigration status to attend school. A lot of these kids were American citizens. And under a Supreme Court case called Plyler versus Doe, even if you're not an American citizen, you have a right to a kindergarten through grade 12 education in this country - a fundamental, basic human right to education. So by forcing students to disclose their parents' immigration status, in effect, Alabama had found a mechanism for destroying this right that young children should have.
There is also a provision in the bill which would have criminalized a very common practice for religious people in Alabama of banding together in church organizations to provide transportation to people to receive medical care. And that was something that many of these very religious people were deeply committed to doing. Again, they thought it was something that was right. They didn't believe that their conduct should be criminalized. So we challenged 10 or 12 provisions like that in the bill and were largely successful in court. And again, this was an important case because it brought our community together. It helped us find, in the face of a very divisive issue, points of common agreement about our joint humanity and then a path forward through the problem.
GROSS: I'm still thinking about how this bill would basically require children to turn in their parents or just stay home and not go to school at all.
VANCE: You know, Alabama is a headcount state, which means that the way our education funding comes in is that there is an actual headcount that's made of the number of kids in school on a certain day, and funding is allocated. And the year that HB 56 went into effect, before our challenge was successful, Alabama lost school funding because so many kids weren't in school.
And as we had the opportunity before we filed our legal challenge to speak with people in the community, we heard horrible stories from kids who were afraid that if they went to school, they would come home and one of their parents or both of their parents wouldn't be there. I had a conversation with a young man whose parents brought him to a community meeting. And he told me the story of how he could no longer go to the zoo with his uncle because his uncle wasn't an American citizen, although he was. And he was afraid that if they went to the zoo, his uncle would be taken away from him. You know, those are the sort of stories that live with you in memory for a very long time.
GROSS: What we're seeing today with the emphasis on deportations - it seems like a very loud echo of the case you were just describing.
VANCE: Sometimes in Alabama, we joke that we're 10 years ahead of the rest of the country, except that we don't mean that we're ahead. Often, when it comes to these sorts of plans, they're tried in places like Alabama first. That's been true with immigration. It's also been true in the area of suppressing voting rights. You know, the practical reality in Alabama was that that year, the tomato crop withered on the vine because there weren't people who were in place to pick those crops, and the construction industry suffered. And that's the practical reminder that when we assess immigration and talk about closing our borders, we're very often talking about harming our own economy. And so it's critical to have responsible leaders who, instead of these sort of knee-jerk, jingoistic policies, are willing to engage in hard thought and compromise on difficult issues like this.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Joyce Vance, and her new book is called "Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual For Keeping A Democracy." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Joyce Vance. Her new book is about threats to our democracy and what individuals can do to protect and preserve it. It's titled "Giving Up Is Unforgivable."
How surprised were you that the Supreme Court ruled that a president was basically above the law in any alleged crime if that alleged crime happened during a presidential action?
VANCE: So I was very surprised. I've had to hock my crystal ball for predicting Supreme Court decisions because I don't think I'm very good at it, based on that case. You know, what it came down to for me was I didn't believe that the Supreme Court would rule that a president could order SEAL Team Six to execute a political rival. That was one of the hypotheticals that was aired during oral argument in that case. And yet a majority of the Supreme Court provided the president with full immunity for official acts. How that would have stood up if the prosecution had continued and the case had gone back to the Supreme Court is something that's not clear. It didn't happen.
It seems to me that there's a bright line that the Supreme Court could still invoke between conduct committed by a president as president and conduct committed by a president as a candidate - right? - candidate Trump versus President Trump, which would, for instance, have permitted prosecution of events surrounding January 6. But we don't know how this court would have come out because that opportunity was foreclosed by the reelection of Donald Trump.
GROSS: What would it take to overturn the Supreme Court decision that says - that basically says the president is above the law?
VANCE: In large part, Supreme Court decisions are only infrequently reversed outright, although we've seen a lot of that in recent years, right? We've seen, for instance, Dobbs, the case that took away Roe versus Wade and women's abortion rights. You know, this is a relatively new case. Theoretically, it could be possible for the Supreme Court to say that they've decided to reverse it. But I think what's far more likely, if there is a challenge - and I don't want to pretend that there's a challenge on the horizon because, in essence, this case is very unlikely to be revisited unless there is a prosecution of a president, which is frankly not going to happen while this president controls the Justice Department. But let's theoretically say that there might be a future challenge.
In that case, then we're back to that sort of a line-drawing exercise, and perhaps the Supreme Court might draw some limits based on the Founding Fathers' intention to create a government. You know, they created this government in reaction to the rule of kings. That's why this notion that no man is above the law, that we have no kings, is so powerful in our democracy. The Supreme Court might see fit to reinstitute that and to clarify that, although they intended to immunize core presidential functions from prosecution, that they were not speaking to, for instance, personal conduct by a president or certain kinds of behavior that would be perceived as blatantly criminal, like violent acts.
GROSS: Trump has several personal lawyers in high-placed positions now in his administration. Pam Bondi, the director of the Justice Department, was a former personal lawyer. The deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, former personal lawyer. And - who am I leaving out?
VANCE: Emil Bove, who's now...
GROSS: Yes.
VANCE: ...A Third Circuit Judge.
GROSS: So it strikes a lot of people as being very unethical to have your former personal attorney, who is obviously on your side, be the head of the Justice Department, who will be making rulings pertaining to you. So that seems like a conflict of interest. But is there anything official that would prohibit it?
VANCE: Trump is a unicorn. He's the only sitting president who's had, for instance, a former impeachment lawyer - Pam Bondi - or a former criminal lawyer - Todd Blanche - who he can appoint. I think that we need to be clear that presidents appoint Justice Department officials who they believe are aligned with them and who will serve them. Not Justice Department officials, however, who will commence prosecutions in order to fulfill their desires for revenge or avoid prosecuting their enemies. And that's the line that's been drawn here. That's the fundamental corruption of the Justice Department, which at least since the end of Watergate has maintained this stoic separation from the White House.
There's always been a communications or a contacts policy between the White House and the Justice Department that severely restricted the people between those two offices who can communicate to only the highest levels of government. And that's specifically done so that the White House can't exert influence over prosecutions or civil cases. That's the line that this White House has violated and the conflict that's created with the appointment of these people who are so closely aligned with the president that they serve him personally out of loyalty in many cases, rather than hewing to the oaths that they took to uphold the Constitution.
GROSS: I want to play another clip. And this is a clip I think a lot of our listeners have already seen. It's from last week after the House and Senate approved release of the Epstein files. And now there are new investigations that will be under way based on those files. This is Pam Bondi last week at a press conference after the Epstein files were approved for release.
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PAM BONDI: We will continue to follow the law, again, while protecting victims, but also providing maximum transparency.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Quick follow-up to that. Madam Attorney General, the DOJ statement earlier this year saying that the files would not release mention the fact that the review of the documents and the evidence did not suggest that any additional investigation of third parties was warranted. What changed since then that you launched this investigation?
BONDI: Information that has come. Information. There's information, new information, additional information. And again, we will continue to follow the law, to investigate any leads. If there are any victims, we encourage all victims to come forward. And we will continue to provide maximum transparency under the law.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: On Ryan Wedding, Madam General. On Ryan Wedding, you mentioned...
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: Excuse me, excuse me.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Oh.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: Madam Attorney, the issue with the new information that you just indicated. Is the department seeking information perhaps from the Epstein estate because Mr. Blanche did not have that information when he interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell? What new information? And would you limit the new investigation to just those named persons that the president talked about, or is this a broad, open-ended investigation?
BONDI: I would refer to the deputy attorney general's post that he put out on X. And we're not going to say anything else on that because now it is a pending investigation in the Southern District of New York.
GROSS: What was your reaction when you heard that?
VANCE: For starters, this is clearly a pretextual investigation designed to give the Justice Department an excuse for not turning over the Epstein files, despite this new law that Congress has passed and the president has signed. It lets the president maintain the pretense that he's willing to turn over the files, leaving the Justice Department to do the dirty work, which they seem to be more than willing to do. The Epstein case was fully investigated in the Southern District of New York. They indicted Epstein.
They indicted his coconspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, and they convicted her. She's currently serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison, although in greatly improved circumstances because after she met with the deputy attorney general, she was transferred in violation of Bureau of Prisons policy about how sex offenders are handled this early in service of their sentence - and is, according to media reports, leading a far more luxurious life than most inmates, treating prison personnel like a concierge service. So there's that aspect of this situation.
Case has already been investigated and prosecuted. In July, Pam Bondi announced that she was closing it. And now she says four times the word information as though that's somehow a justification for reopening it, which clearly, it's not. There would have to be information that would indicate that there were people who were Epstein coconspirators or people who committed some other sorts of crimes who could be prosecuted. And instead, what we see is a request by the president that only people who are Democrats whose names appear in Epstein's communication be investigated, regardless of whether those communications provide some sort of a basis for believing that they were involved in criminal conduct.
It's ironic that Donald Trump's name appears so preeminently in these communications. But he has of course excepted himself from any sort of investigation. So really, from multiple different sorts of ways you can look at this situation, it gives no appearance of legitimacy or credibility or of an effort to resolve the horrific abuse that the survivors endured at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein and people that were involved with him.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Joyce Vance. And her new book is called "Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual For Keeping A Democracy." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF RANKY TANKY SONG, "FREEDOM")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Joyce Vance. Her new book is about threats to our democracy and what individuals can do to protect and preserve it. It's titled "Giving Up Is Unforgivable."
The main point of your book is don't give up. Whatever it is you're capable of doing to preserve democracy, do that. But I want to bring up something you bring up in the book, which is the example of your youngest son
VANCE: Yeah.
GROSS: And his disengagement from American politics. And you point out, when he was growing up, things were already eroding. He didn't lose what older people have lost, which is the assumption of democracy. Can you tell us more about that?
VANCE: So in a series of conversations with my youngest son, who's 22, I came to understand a fundamental issue that we need to confront, which is this. My kid is young, well-educated, smart and he's a voter. He votes in every election. His friends vote in elections. What they seem to not have is this fundamental love for democracy that's so deeply ingrained in many of us - certainly in my generation and even younger people - and our understanding that democracy - you know, to paraphrase Winston Churchill - is maybe a bad form of government but better than everything else that's ever been tried, right? It's through democracy that we have the ability to influence outcomes because we elect our officials and they have to be responsive to us, at least in some measure, if they intend to hold onto their jobs.
So the point that my son Olly (ph) made to me was that he was very young when the Occupy protests happened, but he remembered them. It was sort of his early touchstone. And nothing had changed. He said to me, Mom, you know, wealthy people, billionaires, still control Congress and the caucuses. And the idea that me and people like me in their 20s could stand up and combat that in a meaningful way, that's just silly, and it's wrong of you to try to impose that responsibility on us.
It was a series of conversations that we had, and it forced me to take a step back and to realize that, especially for our youngest generation of voters, we need to take the time to make the case for democracy and to explain to them why it's meaningful and important not just to pick a candidate and vote for that candidate, but to constantly be thinking about reinvigorating democracy because that's how we accomplish our own goals and make our lives look the way we want them to.
GROSS: Are you surprised that your son is thinking the way he's thinking about politics?
VANCE: Well, you know, to be honest, with a 22-year-old - right? - you're never sure what's going on in their head. And I was very surprised by how strong his pushback was. In our first conversation, he was almost angry. You know, I was saying, don't you want to go out and protest with me? I mean, what do you want to do? Do you want to work on a campaign? And he was angry that I would impose the fix for a broken system on his generation, which took me a minute to accept. But I think in many ways, his response was a righteous one, as though it shouldn't be our effort to make his generation be responsible for something that we broke and failed to fix.
We need to make as many steps as we can towards fixing this problem, while at the same time, there's this obligation, I think, to renew our idea about what civics education means. It shouldn't be something that happens only in the classroom. We need to make sure that folks have hands-on experience with democracy, that they understand that it's critical to vote, often in down-ballot elections, which can be more important for your daily life than even the national elections - who your mayor is, who's on your city council, who's on your school board. Those roles have profound influence on our lives. And so we have to live civics education and make it a part of our daily existence rather than something that we just do in the breach.
GROSS: In your book, you make it clear you think our institutions will hold. The Supreme Court, Congress - what makes you think that? You've been so critical of moves made during the Trump administration, Trump One and Trump Two.
VANCE: The architecture that the Founding Fathers created for our democracy is a sound and a sensible structure. And over the course of our history, it's demonstrated that it's nimble enough to survive serious challenges. So the institutions are nimble. It's up to us as voters to keep our eyes on them and who's populating them. And of course, we'll have the ability to do that in the midterm elections, which is our opportunity to begin to reestablish some guardrails.
GROSS: Joyce Vance, thank you so much for coming on our show.
VANCE: Thanks for having me.
GROSS: Joyce Vance's new book is called "Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual For Keeping A Democracy." Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, our guest will be Michael Shannon. He's best known for playing intense, unhinged characters like Nelson Van Alden in "Boardwalk Empire." Now he plays President James Garfield in the new Netflix series "Death By Lightning," and he is a prosecutor trying Nazi leaders for war crimes in the new film "Nuremberg." I hope you'll join us.
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GROSS: To keep up with what's on our show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram, @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
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