STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
People watching this include Joyce Vance. She's a former U.S. attorney for the northern district of Alabama. She now writes a Substack called Civil Discourse, and she's on the line from Birmingham. Good morning.
JOYCE VANCE: Good morning.
INSKEEP: Is there any reason the president could not simply release everything today on his own?
VANCE: Absolutely none. He has that authority.
INSKEEP: Wow, OK. So we don't need this vote, we don't need the Senate to vote, we don't need the president to sign anything? He could just tell the attorney general what to do?
VANCE: He could do that. And of course, the reason that we're having a congressional vote reflects the fact that Congress, under the Constitution, has the duty to engage in oversight of the executive branch when it believes it has stumbled.
INSKEEP: OK. Let me ask, though, the president in the last few days, in addition to saying, OK, I'm for this House vote, he has also instructed the attorney general to investigate Democrats who are named in these recently released letters from a House committee. Of course, he's not telling the attorney general to investigate him - he's mentioned more than 1,000 times - but investigate his political opponents yes. Does that investigation get in the way of releasing everything because suddenly there may be an active criminal investigation?
VANCE: I suppose that there's a difference here between what's actually happening and what should happen because it's clear that this is a pretextual investigation. For one thing, the southern district of New York and a very highly esteemed U.S. attorney's office has had a case open. And it only closed earlier this year followed by the July 7 DOJ announcement that that investigation didn't uncover any evidence that the office could predicate an investigation on or charge additional uncharged third parties. There's been no explanation for what has changed since then. And so opening an investigation in this context really looks like it's just something that the administration can now hang its hat on to try to turn over all of these documents to Congress.
INSKEEP: However fraudulent you may believe it to be, can they get away with that? They go to the judge, they say, listen, we've got to protect these files.
VANCE: So DOJ historically has had a deal with Congress where Congress defers to DOJ when it has an ongoing criminal investigation and waits until the criminal investigation is concluded to engage in its oversight function. Congress doesn't have to do that, of course. It could push the point here. And you, I think, landed on one of the key points, which is that Donald Trump is not included within the ambit of this renewed DOJ investigation. So there's no reason that Congress, for instance, couldn't push to get documents that involve Donald Trump.
INSKEEP: Oh, this is very interesting. So Congress might say, OK, we don't need the files about Bill Clinton since you want Bill Clinton investigated or, you know, whatever Democratic donor. But it wouldn't apply to Trump. Another question here - the attorney general, as you noted, back in July said nothing more in these files warrants a criminal prosecution of any kind. Then the president tells her to fire this back up and she says, yes, sir, right away, sir. Does that undermine any future action that she might take?
VANCE: Well, what it should do is it should, unfortunately, undermine public confidence in what's going on at the Justice Department because cases are indicted based on the facts and the law, not based on the president's preference. And because all of that happened in public - with Donald Trump in essence posting on social media and Pam Bondi responding to his orders on social media - that really sets up, I think, an inference that we've reached the dangerous point where the White House is telling the Justice Department what to do, rather than the Justice Department making decisions on the basis of the facts and the law.
INSKEEP: I want to follow up on that point because that's become more and more blatant as the year has gone on. And the White House and its defenders have offered a defense of, essentially, whataboutism - that this is the way that it always is, that this is the way that Biden did it, that this is the way the Democrats did it. And they're just doing what other people are doing. This is the response. They claim that what they're doing is, in fact, a response to the past weaponization of the Justice Department. You spent a couple of decades at the Justice Department. Is this normal?
VANCE: It's not normal. And it's painful for everyone who's ever worked at or continues to work at the Justice Department because that tradition of independence really stems from the post-Watergate moment where it was very clear that there had to be a distinction between DOJ and the White House. That has always been observed until very recently.
INSKEEP: And there's no president who told you what to do when you were in there?
VANCE: No. No president who told us what to do. We did our cases on the basis of the facts and the law. That's what should happen here, too.
INSKEEP: Joyce Vance is a former United States attorney. Her book "Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual For Keeping A Democracy" is out now. Thanks for taking the time.
VANCE: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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