All Episodes
Previous Next
April 27, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
51:20
The Dark Side of College Admissions: Uncovering the $25 Million Scam | The TRUTH Podcast #19
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Meritocracy is at the heart of what it means to be American.
You've heard me say it many times.
We need to put the merit back into America.
That's why I'm a chief proponent of eliminating affirmative action in America.
That's something that a U.S. president can do.
I think that when it comes to college admissions, that's something that the Supreme Court is likely to do later this year.
And I think that's going to be a good thing for the country.
Where people know when they look to their left and look to their right in a college classroom, for that matter, in the workplace, that they know the person who got that seat got it because they were the best person for that job, the best person for that spot without, say, race-based preferences entering into that game.
And so that's something that's near and dear to my heart.
I intend to end race-based affirmative action, and that's part of a pro-merit campaign in America.
But race-based affirmative action isn't the only impediment to merit in America either.
We have corruption in every one of our institutions, starting with the federal government, by the way.
Civil service protections that say you can't be fired even if you're doing a bad job.
You know what?
If you can't fire somebody, that means they don't work for you.
It actually means you work for them.
It's anti-meritocratic where the people who we elect to run the government don't run the government.
anti-meritocratic strains pervade American life.
But there's one area where we've seen the rise of an anti-meritocratic cancer, too, and rise of a certain form of corruption that nobody else had really taken on in quite the way that my guest today had in his tenure as a prosecutor.
I'm joined today by Andrew Lelling, who was the main person, the U.S. attorney out of Boston, who led actually the national case.
We'll talk about why it is that he had jurisdiction to do it nationally, but led the national purge of a corrupt system of determining who actually gets into college and who doesn't.
And yes, there is corruption in the race-based admissions policies.
I've talked about that earlier.
Maybe even endlessly in other settings.
But today we're actually going to focus not on the race-based affirmative action cancer, but on the insider rigging of a system that determines who actually gets to make it into America's most elite ranks, starting with our universities and what we can do to actually stop it.
And we'll also take some counter arguments to whether or not this should be prosecuted legally versus pursued in other ways.
But that's going to be the first of several topics we cover from there to actually the fentanyl crisis, something else he knows well as a prosecutor.
I'm excited to dig into the discussion and joined here in Columbus by Andrew Lely.
Andrew, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, so I'm excited to dig into a topic.
I know you've talked A lot about.
Oh, yeah.
You know, just talk a little bit about what the factual backdrop was here for these cases.
And then on a first personal level, why it is you took an interest in it, when really any prosecutor across the country could have.
You're the person who took the football and ran with this.
Why did you do it?
Why did you prioritize this relative to the range of other things you could have been pursuing?
Why was this important?
And I think that relates to the facts.
So I'd ask you to lay out both.
Yeah, no, that's a good question.
Basically, what happened here is...
This guy named Rick Singer who used to himself be an assistant basketball coach on the college level decided to set up a scam where he would on the one hand bribe college coaches To take students that he identified to them, meaning each college coach in first-tier or second-tier sports has a number of slots they can play with where they can go to the admissions committee and they can say, hey, this guy or gal is a great prospect.
You should take them.
So what Rick would do is he would bribe those coaches to use those slots on high school students that he identified.
What Rick would do is he would go to parents and he would advertise himself as a college counselor.
Who could get their kid into a given university?
Guaranteed.
And parents would sign up.
But he would charge inordinate amounts of money for this.
And so, for example, he would say- So he would market it as a guarantee.
He would market it as a guarantee.
And what he would do is he would say to wealthy parents, look, if you wanted to guarantee your child's admission the old-fashioned way, you'd have to give that elite college $10 million.
A million dollars isn't going to do it anymore.
It has to be about $10 million.
I'll only charge you about 250 grand.
That's all it takes.
You give it to me.
I'll make sure your son or daughter gets in.
And what he's doing, like any good fraudster, is finding a sector of the economy where the customer base is emotionally driven.
And he's tapping into that ongoing fear across America that parents have that their kids won't get into a name brand university.
So he was wildly successful.
He probably brought in about $25 million over the course of the 10 years or so that he pursued this scam.
One, he would guarantee admission to a university.
What he would also do in a side scam is he would help your child cheat on the SAT. He would sell these services to parents who were unscrupulous enough to buy them.
What was fascinating about the case and what drove public attention to the case is that when we put the case together, Over time, what we realized is that the parents who had bought these services for him were, as I said at the press conference, a veritable catalog of wealth and privilege in the United States.
Hedge fund titans, CEOs, two famous actresses, A prominent vineyard owner in Napa.
I mean, you had just this mix of uber wealthy people who had signed up for this from many different walks of life.
And so, oh, one of my favorites actually, the managing partner of a global law firm.
Someone in a profession.
Where professional ethics are meat and potatoes for your day-to-day job.
I believe actually, if I'm remembering correctly, now that you bring that fact up, I think one of the leading ESG fund managers, which was about sustainable investing was ensnared in this, right?
Bill McGlashan?
Yes.
It was the TPG RISE fund, right?
Doug Hodge from PIMCO. Yeah, but these are guys who preach about the importance of exercising virtue through capital markets.
Yes.
Behaving the other way.
Yes.
These are practitioners of, you know, woke capitalism who in their private lives are pursuing this kind of petty corruption.
Practitioners of corruption, really.
So I am – the reason you're here is I'm so interested in what you did.
And I think it's actually really important to have highlighted – This strain of anti-meritocratic cancer, which actually in some ways provides legitimacy to other cases for affirmative action or otherwise to say, well, if the system's already corrupt, then let's at least even it out.
You're seeing this tremendous disconnect between the perception of the American public and what actually happens in the college admissions system.
Middle America thinks that it is roughly a meritocratic process to get into college.
That's the myth you're sold.
That's the myth you're sold.
But you have race-based affirmative action, you have legacy admissions, you have other aspects of the process, and you have just petty corruption, like what Rick Singer was peddling here.
And so, this case really grabbed the country's attention.
For two reasons.
One, approximately two million students a year are applying to American universities.
So maybe that's 10 million people who have a vested personal interest in their success.
Yep.
And two, it was so jarring.
When people see famous actors in the cover of People magazine who bought their kids way into college and the breadth and scope of the scam, it really undermined their confidence in a system that was already teetering on the brink.
So on this podcast, one of the things we believe in is embodying the values of free speech and open debate here.
And I know you're an attorney, you're a prosecutor, so you can handle it.
So I'm actually mostly admiring of...
What you did in exposing this problem, but I want to just put some pressure on some different aspects of this and then come back at me with respect to counterarguments to the points that I want to make because I think it will be useful for people to – on the other side of it, I think you'll actually persuade people more effectively if you understand some of the objections here.
So the first of them was – okay, I hear you on the scam artist of this guy who's putting this together.
Actually, I'm going to get to this separate question in a second about why the parents, but even in the scam artist for a second, what's his name again?
Rick Singer.
Rick Singer.
So usually the way you would think about a scam artist is he's selling something that is false and you dupe the consumer into it.
Here, he wasn't really duping the consumer.
He was selling them something that was true.
And so if it's a scam, who was actually the victim of the scam?
It's a great question.
That was a controversial point.
The consumer is not being duped.
The universities are being duped.
Because what would happen here is Rick Singer would work with the student to fabricate an athletic resume.
He gives the athletic resume to the coach at the university.
The coach knows it's fake.
The coach takes that fake athletic resume, goes to the admissions committee and says, this kid is a phenom water polo player.
We need to take this.
Because he got a bribe on the side though.
Right.
And did that coach get paid personally in his pocket?
It varied.
Most of them, yes.
One of the coaches, the Stanford sailing coach, whose name I forget, didn't take a dime for himself.
He actually took the money that was given to him by Rick Singer and put it into the sailing program.
The Stanford program.
Right.
Also a controversial point in the case because it's still a crime.
So, he was prosecuted, but obviously more sympathetic.
But why, let's just, just because that's more interesting, and let's go there.
Why is that or should that be a crime relative to what you just said at the very beginning, which is – everyone knows this.
I mean Stanford or Harvard or anywhere else, you write the $10 million check or maybe after post-inflation, maybe it's 20 now.
But you write the check and you get your kid in.
It goes to the university's coffer, the university benefits.
Kid got in.
I don't love it.
I think we should end legacy admissions.
I think we should end affirmative action.
I want to be consistent on that.
But I'm just making an argument here if – Why is that okay if the university is the beneficiary here in the Stanford case?
The university, an arm of the university, was a beneficiary.
Why is that a crime?
Because you're defrauding the school.
So look at it this way.
The admission slot is property of the school.
Okay.
The school gets to decide what to do with that property.
You've now deceived the school into dispersing that property to someone who they otherwise would not- And who deceived this school?
This coach, really?
The Rick Singer conspiring with the coach- To deceive school into believing that student X is an athlete when student X is not an athlete.
Inducing the school to take that student when they would have taken somebody else.
There is a social cost in that it's a zero-sum game, as you know.
College admissions is a zero-sum game.
Something we talk about a lot in race-based affirmative action programs.
There's a kid who didn't get that spot.
Yeah, there's a social cost broadly, right?
So there's no identifiable victim.
But I think the nature of the way a case like this is charged would be under laws that presume an identifiable victim, right?
And that's the university in this theory.
I'm just having a little fun with you wearing my old legal hat a little bit.
But what you're pointing out, these were controversial aspects of this case.
Oh, of course they were.
Yeah, it's interesting.
And there was a lot of pressure.
And as you pointed out, there's still litigation going on on some of these points.
So on this, let's just – because a couple of these rabbit holes I just want to go down because I think it will help people understand.
This is such an interesting case, but people went by so fast that the details may have been missed.
Suppose you're Rick Singer and as the fraudster guy, you know, so – Suppose you're him and that was the only case in the Stanford case.
You could say that was the university itself, right?
The coach is a representative of the university.
So in one case, I talked to the president of the university and I write him a $10 million check to the university and my kid gets in and that's normal course.
In the other case, I write a – I don't know how much was it?
$100,000 check or whatever.
$250,000.
$250,000.
What's the standard rate?
$250,000 check to the university's athletic program and the coach is advertising it to me as such and I get the kid in.
What's the difference?
The difference is one involves fraud and one does not.
And I got asked about this a lot.
I got asked about this right out of the box.
None of these are new questions for you.
But it's a point worth making because a lot of people were curious about this distinction.
If you go to a university and you say, I will give you $10 million and you take my kid, there's nothing illegal about that.
What you would hope is that the universities would be transparent about this.
And I'll even say, it doesn't strike me as necessarily problematic for a university to say, we will take that deal.
That $10 million, that's additional financial aid.
That's a new neuroscience lab.
That's a lot of ways we can make student life better, right?
Or sailing team better.
Or sailing team better though, right?
We'll take your 10 million bucks and we'll take your kid who maybe we otherwise wouldn't take.
There's no fraud.
In the varsity blues context, there's fraud.
You are deceiving the school by telling the school this is an athlete and the student is not an athlete.
There is a fraudulent misrepresentation.
So in that Stanford example of it, for example, or in that example where the coach didn't even take this – because if the coach takes the side money, okay, there.
That's a bribe issue.
But in the case where the hard case, right, which you hopefully brought up, Yep.
In the hard example, where is the fraud?
The fraud is that the only – what happens in that case is parent pays $250,000 to Singer.
Singer takes his cut, gives a bribe to the coach, says to the coach, here's the bribe.
I need you to take this student.
Who's not really a sailor, but you're going to pretend that this student is a sailor.
It's the pretension that he's a sailor.
And so, coach goes to admissions committee and says, this kid's a great sailor, we need him.
That's a lie.
Admissions committee, thus deceived, agrees to use this law.
So, then there's a question of choice of defendant.
We'll get through these early legal questions just because I think they're fun and interesting.
I mean, in that case, let's just since we took the trouble of walking through that example, why is Singer the defendant and not the coach who's actually the agent of the university?
Coach was.
We prosecuted the coach.
Okay, you did too.
So, we prosecuted three levels of defendants in that case.
Look at it that way.
Rick Singer and his organization The coaches who conspired with him and the parents who were the consumers of the fraud.
And then why were the – I mean, let's just talk about the parents there.
I know a lot of these parents are – they're not particularly sympathetic defendants.
In my case, I have no cultural sympathy for them.
But in the use of the legal system, right?
We're talking about people potentially facing jail time for these crimes.
Yes.
I wear a different hat.
It doesn't ask a question of whether I like them or their behaviors or not.
not.
The question is whether or not it was unlawful and intended to be the kind of behavior that the laws were intended to put people in the prison in the back of.
Suppose they didn't know about the fraudulent nature because the essence of the fraud is a coach lying to the university in conspiracy with this middleman, Rick.
If a parent is just getting a deal to say, I pay $250,000 and my kid gets into college and that's a lot cheaper than paying $10 million, which is the natural other alternative, then Like if you put yourself in the shoes of that parent, I don't like this game one bit, okay?
But suppose you're one of those parents and you say, okay, I could pay $10 million and get my kid into college.
Instead, this guy says, I can pay $250,000 and get my kid into college.
Why, if the fraud was downstream of them, why does the customer of that service themselves bear criminal liability?
They do not unless they were aware or should have been aware of the fraud.
Okay.
Let's talk about the should have been aware case.
You have to be intentionally conspiring.
It has to be willful conduct.
If you don't know anything about it, you're not going to be guilty of fraud.
Did you find parents who were clients of Rick who did not know about this?
I'll say this.
There were potential defendants against whom we did not proceed because we were concerned whether we could prove that they had the sufficient intent.
There were those defendants.
So, in fact, there's one I can think of, a potential target we had.
Where for that person, English was very much a second language.
Unclear whether they really understood what Rick Singer was saying to them.
We did not proceed.
You have to be able to prove at trial that the parent knows that it's going to be a fraud.
And there is a doctrine in the criminal law of deliberate and willful blindness or deliberate indifference.
Deliberate ignorance, not deliberate indifference.
And there's a jury instruction for that.
And so, you can see scenarios where someone makes sure they are not aware, right?
And so, we confined ourselves to instances where we could prove that the parents knew that this was not on the up and up.
And primarily, the way you would do that is Rick...
Speaking in explicit terms with the parent about fabricating the resume.
That's usually how this went.
And there were some unfortunate instances where the son or daughter was involved in the conversation and in on fabricating the resume, which was too bad to see.
You know, it's interesting.
I mean, let's get into the philosophy of this a little bit.
I think the problem that you exposed is a big problem.
I think that seeing a problem, even if you don't solve it, alone is a service because that helps build trust in institutions that have lost the trust of the public.
Our university and education system is very high on that list.
One of the rationales for doing this case.
Right.
Thank you.
Which is actually what brings me to a philosophical question that I, you know, struggle with, actually.
And this is, look, U.S. President actually runs the executive branch of the government, the Department of Justice, which you're a part of.
You stepped down, by the way, as prosecutor when?
Yeah, about two years ago.
At the end of the Trump administration.
At the end of the Trump administration.
I went to private practice.
So, until you understand this, and I think you have to have a theory as a chief executive here, I struggle with using the Judicial – using the justice system to put select individuals here in prison as a way of exposing what was a deep rot.
The rot needed to be exposed.
For the longest time, it wasn't.
Everyone sits by and looks the other direction as this corrupt, anti-meritocratic system plays itself out.
The attack on merit is an attack on the American soul.
And so someone needs to do something about it.
At the same time, there's a part of me that feels like those parents who, from their experience of it, just think of like an ordinary American, and this goes to the willfulness, where you're really willfully blind if everyone knows that you can write a $10 million check to a university and get in, that somebody else comes along and says they can do a $250,000 check and without doing due diligence on it, sort of says, okay, $250,000, fine, I'm just playing the same game and getting a cheaper rate.
That there's something about that, not for that Rick guy, and maybe not even for the coaches who knew what they were doing, but for that parent to be behind bars as a way of solving that problem.
You're putting your finger on an inherent unfairness in the criminal justice system that we actually readily accept.
I'll tell you what I mean.
There are two different paradigms here that you're really talking about.
In the law enforcement paradigm, one of the reasons why we prosecute people is that other people don't do the same thing.
So getting stopped for speeding is unfair when the 500 other people who drove by that cop didn't get stopped.
Deterrence.
This is like that.
Yeah.
So, there is a general, what we call general deterrence value to prosecuting Rick and prosecuting these parents and prosecuting coaches for doing this.
So, maybe it doesn't happen the next time.
Ideally, you wouldn't have to do that.
Ideally, you would use a different paradigm.
There'd be a regulatory approach, a more legal or legislative approach, something that makes universities I'm better at this, which they are now after Varsity Blues, or somehow otherwise programmatically weeds out of the system this kind of corruption without having to make an example of people.
Traditionally, that does not work.
Traditionally, what has happened is in America, we've done this slightly backwards, and Varsity Blues is a good example.
You do the case, it uncovers the problem, you prosecute a bunch of people, and then legislatures pass laws or schools improve their internal procedures.
It tends to go that way more.
Yeah, I mean, let's talk about the two theories of criminal justice, right?
Proper retribution and reform versus deterrence.
On the deterrence count, two sub-questions there, right?
One is I think everyone is in favor of – or whatever.
We've accepted as a system that we're okay with a cop pulling the one person who runs the red light over even if every person doesn't get pulled over and that that person bears a punishment that deters everybody else from doing – because there's the possibility the same thing could happen to you.
I think that in principle, you could achieve deterrence by then putting a person who runs a red light in for prison for 10 years makes it definitely less likely that somebody is going to cross a red light.
But it's constrained by the justice of that situation too, that there would be something fundamentally unjust about putting someone in prison for those 10 years.
And so I think question number one… Portionality is a break on deterrence value.
Right, right.
And that relates to my second question, and I'll put both of you together, but one is whether or not the idea of putting that parent in prison… Was the equivalent of the 10 years for the – I'm exaggerating it, but for the red light.
And then combine that with the fact that even when you're doing it for the person who crosses the red light, you're still deterring the other person who crosses the red light.
Whereas the social good that came out of this that you pointed to, universities have begun to reform their behaviors – Is a little bit different, right?
Because the theory of this case is that the university was the victim, and yet the party whose behavior you're reforming is really the party who in the legal theory was the victim.
So universities are reforming their behavior for the better.
It's better policing.
Yeah.
Well, it's better policing but by the university.
That's what I mean.
Figuratively.
Yeah, which is different than the deterrence of saying somebody who runs a red light, you don't want other people running a red light, you punish them.
Here you're saying the police system that's policing people who's running red lights, it's like the traffic light, really, or whatever.
You're saying that the person runs a red light, punish them so you fix the traffic light, which is a little bit different.
So I guess I wanted you to respond to both of those, both the proportionality and the indirectness.
The second point first...
What you're doing is exposing a flaw in a system, and so fixing it requires a few things.
There's the university side of the equation.
So in light of varsity blues, most universities scrambled to improve their internal compliance procedures so that they would avoid this kind of problem, right?
No longer take the coach's word for it that this kid is a great water polo player, but do a little more due diligence.
That's good.
On the other side of the equation, maybe we have deterred the consumer population, the parents, a little bit more than they otherwise would be From getting into this sort of behavior.
So, hopefully it has healthy effects on both sides of the equation.
I agree what makes it a little anomalous.
What you're not doing is deterring predators like Rick Singer, right?
So, Rick Singer may or may not be a deterrable person.
Like the resolute fraudsters, right?
In any context, when it comes to securities fraud or the kinds of investment fraud, this kind of fraud.
It is questionable whether they can be deterred, but the surrounding systems can be improved so that less of this happens in the future, right?
The universities are more on guard, parents are more afraid to do this kind of thing, and so the ground isn't quite as fertile for this kind of fraud.
That's the best you can do, right?
It's not nothing, but it won't guarantee this doesn't happen in the future.
To your proportionality point, I'll tell you, there were some days when I was a federal prosecutor where I would have done the job for free.
Because you get paid to wrestle with these amazing issues of legal and moral responsibility that other people just don't get to deal with.
And we had that here.
So, I remember saying to people, You remember the marathon bombing?
And one of the things I had to do toward the end of my tenure was decide whether to recommend to the Attorney General whether we should continue to seek the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving bomber in the marathon bombing.
I remember saying to people that was an easier decision at the end of the day than figuring out what to recommend for some of these Varsity Blues defendants for reasons that you point out.
Do these parents really need to go to jail?
That was the question.
It's a good – especially against the backdrop of we're bringing the case against this guy Rick.
We're bringing the case against the coaches.
Against that backdrop on the margin, are we doing the right thing or not by criminally charging the parents who were willfully blind to it?
And obviously, we concluded yes.
And there's a few things that we thought about.
The parents are knowing participants in a federal fraud.
Or knowing or willfully blind for many of them.
Sure.
And there was the occasional hard instance where you were thinking about willful blindness, but the majority of them, we had direct evidence that they knew, right?
They're on the phone.
We had wiretaps.
They're on the phone, the Rick Singer, sort of figuring out what's the best way to position the kid as an athlete when the kid's not an athlete.
The explicit discussion of the fraud.
They're in on the lie.
Very much in on the lie.
And so, what do you do with these people?
I'm more interested in the hard case because the easy case, you know.
Good point.
But in the hard case, let's say the willful blindness case.
Well, the Stanford sailing coach got no jail time.
Okay.
Right?
The hard case, right?
Didn't take the money.
It went to the sailing.
Got no jail time.
Was that a sentencing matter or is that how you wanted it charged?
Or was it settled?
Or pled?
He pled guilty.
He was charged with roughly the same thing everyone else was charged with.
But we had no issue with him not getting jail time.
He pled guilty.
He pled guilty.
And you guys negotiated no jail time.
Exactly.
What was his penalty, if anything?
That's a good question.
I don't remember exactly.
Well, he was fired.
I mean, if you're a white-collar offender, there are serious collateral effects to this kind of thing.
Right.
Even if there's no prison time.
Right.
So he was fired.
I forget if there was a fine.
He was on probation for some period.
Can I just ask you a question about him?
Do you think his intentions were – Maybe – Did you ever talk to him?
No.
Okay.
I did not personally.
So it may be harder for you to answer this.
Like, do you think that he as a human being thought he was doing the right thing for Stanford?
No, I don't.
You don't?
I think based on the evidence and the – well, let me put it this way.
Keep in mind, these two things can coexist.
One of the interesting things about criminal law.
He can, on the one hand, know he's committing a crime, but on the other hand, think that it's good for the school.
Of course, of course.
And I think there was some of that here.
But here's – it's just an interesting question, which is like, if it's not that he's doing good for Stanford's sailing team or rowing team or what was it?
Rowing – say whatever it was.
Yeah, the sailing team.
The sailing team.
Sailing team, fine.
I mean, it's hard to imagine what else his motive was.
Well, my guess is that – My guess is that – Like you haven't used it as self-interested or some wrong motive.
People are messy.
My guess is that he had a few things going on.
One, he genuinely wanted to help the sailing program.
Two, a successful – Which would make for a weird criminal theory against him.
Sure, but a successful sailing program also helps him as its coach.
And three, I'm guessing – I don't know – that he changed horses midstream perhaps.
Meaning, after having gotten into the situation with Singer, perhaps having originally thought maybe he would take some portion of this money, at the end decided not to take the money, either because he thought it was wrong to take it or because he was afraid to take it.
On the technicality, let's say the money had been paid directly to the account of the Stanford Sailing Team rather than via the coach's account and then him trying to fix it backwards.
That might have changed The case?
Still be bribery.
If you bribe me by saying, you do something for me in an exchange, I'll give money to a third party.
Not a third party, but it's like, let's draw the parallels to the provost.
That's making my point.
It could be a third party.
Yeah.
It could be anybody.
But let's say you're talking to the provost though.
The provost is representative A of the university as the provost and representative B is a sailing coach.
Let's suppose I'm the parent in this – for this play fiction here.
As parent or Rick or as a representative of the parent or whatever, says, Provost, in return for putting this money in the bank account of Stanford University, I get my kid into college.
No fraud there.
Totally fine.
Right.
Maybe distasteful, but totally fine.
Second case, we have Representative B of Stanford University, sailing coach.
And you say, for the purpose of getting my kid into Stanford, I will put $250,000 in Stanford's sailing account.
It is, I have to admit, hard for me to see why that would be – Well, that could be totally fine.
But again, you've gained the fraud element.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right?
What's happening there is Rick Singer saying, coach – I'm going to give you 50 grand.
The parent paid me 250, but I'm going to keep 200 of it and I'm going to give you, coach, 50. In exchange, what you're going to do for me is deceive the university into taking this kid.
This kid's not a sailor, but you're going to tell the university he is a sailor so that the school takes him.
That's what's happening.
Can I go to the other case actually, which is back to the giving money through the front door is It does seem – I mean, I've been – so I went to Harvard.
I went to Yale.
My parents didn't have money, first-generation American, and also I'm not in one of the protected racial categories.
So I understand what the – You had to do it the hard way.
Yeah.
I mean, I understand what that looks like and great.
I'm proud of that and got more out of the experience because of it and whatever.
But I also understand how the game is played from – been through a double dip in this Ivy game.
Here's the thing.
There is a deception and a fraud at the heart of the other one too where the university – I'm using not a criminal fraud here, but a lowercase f fraud.
Is the idea that that person who got in was still on a holistic review every bit as meritorious as somebody else except for the money.
And I just – we can leave this soon, but it just seems like on the hard case, it does seem to me a little bit – and I'm glad that guy didn't do prison time because that would just feel fundamentally unjust to me if he did.
But it feels to me that either a parent in that case or that guy, especially if the money found its way to the university's coffers, especially if it went there directly – That that be something that we ought to be putting people in prison over.
And we don't have to agree on this.
It's fine.
But I just – it's something I struggle with a little bit.
To your point, the – The technically legal situation where a person says, I give school $10 million, you take my kid.
My view has always been that while that is not illegal, schools should be required to report it.
There should be transparency.
But they're not today.
No, they're not.
It's actually very closed door.
No, no, very much so.
I could as a student figure out who these kids were over a couple of years of being in classes with them.
If you had to report it, one, some quantum of parents would be deterred from doing it.
And two, the universities would be a little deterred from doing it, right?
Because if you do it too much, it looks a little piggish.
And this came up in some of the trials in the Varsity Blues cases.
So, while not technically illegal, it does strike me as there's a benefit to, you know, the antiseptic of sunlight, right?
You want to do it university, Harvard, whatever, fine.
But annually, you need to report to the Department of Education or wherever.
All the deals that you have struck.
All the donations you have accepted in the same calendar year that a student related to the donor has been admitted to the university.
I like that.
I like that.
That's not something a prosecutor is able to deliver.
Either a policymaker or even a university board can make it a norm.
It's very much policy.
It doesn't even have to be a government body.
No, it could be a best practice.
A best practice, exactly.
And something that stands for, I mean, Harvard's motto is Veritas Truth.
Well, why would truth hide from sunlight, right?
So, it's a cultural question.
Interesting conversation, man.
I appreciate it.
Of course, this is not the only case you've prosecuted, to say the least.
Actually, do you have a little bit of a transition to some of the other kinds of cases you've dealt with?
Just a little bit on the managerial bureaucracy side of this.
Who knew that you were going to bring that case before you brought it?
The Varsity Blues case.
The way that works.
Up the chain, I'm talking.
The way that works in a bureaucratic sense is when you have a case, quote, of national importance, unquote, you send a report.
It's a form.
To the Deputy Attorney General.
Just to the Deputy Attorney General.
Just to the Deputy Attorney General informing that person of the case.
Now, of course, it's an interesting game within the bureaucracy of when do you do that?
What's national importance?
Yeah.
And that was that hypothetically, you might wait as long as you possibly can before you tell DC that you have this case brewing.
But we told DC at some point in advance, but deep, deep, deep into our investigation.
And in fact, almost to the point.
Eighth inning, ninth inning.
Eighth inning, ninth inning.
And you deemed it to be of national importance.
Oh, we knew this would be huge.
Okay.
So if there's a case of national importance, you have to let the deputy AG know.
Yes.
Is it permission?
No.
No, it is not.
What you are doing is, you're just giving them a heads up.
You may then get a phone call, and I got several.
But it's just a heads up.
You do not need permission.
Now, they, you know, obviously can, the AG, I suppose, can say, stand down on this case.
Oh, sure.
Absolutely.
That has happened within the department.
It's fairly infrequent.
Have you ever had that experience?
No, I have not.
But what it's really for is not for Washington to say no, but for Washington to prepare for the questions they're going to get.
But they could say no, right?
They could say no, or more likely, they could sort of impose their input.
Right?
So, you know, I've had conversations with attorney generals about my cases over the years.
A deputy AG or AG? No, with the attorney general.
And as I think something you'll probably sympathize with, having been an employee and having been a leader, is when you are speaking to the attorney general, what you're dreading is the attorney general making some offhand remark, which really in substance is an order.
Right?
So, if I'm talking to the Attorney General about a case, the Attorney General says, oh, wow, no, I can't see doing that.
Why would we do that?
Then, boom, I can't do that.
I mean, it's just an offhand remark in the conversation, but then afterward, I can't go off and do the opposite of whatever it is the AG observed during that phone call.
And so, it's always a little fraught having those conversations because you know how you want to do the case.
Right?
But now you're on the phone with somebody who has the power by just saying X or Y to drastically alter how you pursue that case.
So it's – Presumably on this case of national importance, the deputy AG would consult the AG to make sure they're all lined up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And varsity blues – I would bet this is one of the cases that made it to the AG. Absolutely.
Yeah.
We knew this was going to be a very big case.
Do you think it would have made it to President Trump?
That's a really good question.
I don't know the answer to that.
I would be not surprised if it did, actually.
It is like right at the heart of middle America.
I mean, I used to say to people, if you want to know if a case is big news, forget the New York Times or forget CNN, right?
Look for the cover of People Magazine.
If you're on the cover of People, not me, if the case is on the cover of People Magazine, You have hit a cultural nerve.
You are reaching millions of Americans standing in their supermarket checkout lines if you're on the cover of People Magazine.
And I think this case was on the cover of People Magazine three or four times.
It's for that reason that I'm not surprised if this would have gone to the White House.
I'm going to be president.
I don't know about it.
Yeah, there's nothing esoteric about this.
I don't know about that.
This is a rite of passage for millions of American kids every year.
And would you consider it a legitimate use of executive authority?
Let's play that out.
It comes up the chain to the presidency and I say something like, we're not going to interfere with that, but take anybody who the public could perceive legitimately as an Either innocent bystander or even victim and make sure we go hard at everybody who's an obvious perpetrator, but take the parents off.
Yeah, I think that...
I mean, that's the way the system works, right?
That's the way the executive branch works.
If the question is, would that be an abuse of prosecutorial discretion?
No.
I don't think so.
No.
Or an abuse of executive authority.
I don't think so.
I mean, you're reporting to the executive branch for a reason.
Well, it's not an abuse of executive authority.
I mean, what you run into there is a slightly different question, which is just how much or how little should the White House be saying to the Attorney General about who to prosecute or not?
Yeah.
It would not be improper...
DOJ and the White House, they're very controlled in the communications between the two, or at least they're supposed to be.
And it would not be improper for the White House to today.
Between even the AG and the U.S. President.
Between even the AG and the U.S. President.
Yeah, exactly.
So I'll give you a perfect example.
Back in the Bush administration, we were involved in litigation over affirmative action back in those days.
The Grutter Supreme Court decision came out in the early 2000s.
So the Michigan case, right?
Michigan case, tremendous debate within the Justice Department.
I was in the Civil Rights Division at that time.
What do we do?
What do we say?
What position do we take, right?
The White House counsel at that time, Al Gonzalez, a good guy, Had a lot of input on that subject.
Now, that's the White House talking to DOJ, but this is an issue that goes right to the heart in America.
People have opinions on this.
Voters have opinions on this.
It affects Americans in many walks of life.
What the department is going to argue in court about affirmative action, yeah, the executive has a view on that.
And the executive is entitled to express it to the AG and the Solicitor General in that instance.
So yeah, that happens from time to time.
And I think that there's...
When you think about the propriety of...
Chief Executive Presidential influence on this.
I think that there's a difference between saying less or to understand a case whose genesis came through the normal channels of generating an investigation and then to exercise discretion in constraining that scope versus a top-down affirmative mandate to say that this is the target we need to actually pursue.
The second would be extremely problematic.
Yeah.
Hopefully, we never live in that country.
The former is fine.
The latter is fine.
It's not legally prohibited.
It is not.
Even the nature of that, that's a norm, right?
It is a norm.
It's a norm.
It is not legally prohibited.
It is not a constitutional problem.
I mean, the AG is a member of the cabinet, works at the pleasure of the president.
The president wants to say, you really should be looking into X. There's no constitutional impediment to doing that, and the AEG, one of the difficulties of being the Attorney General, is you have to have both the fortitude to resist when resistance is needed, but also have the judgment to discern one from the other, right?
So, if the White House calls and says, hey, this looks like a huge problem, can you look into that?
It shouldn't be a reflexive no.
You should take that for what it is.
Treat it as any one of a number of inputs that come into the department when it decides who to go after.
Treat it that way.
Not as more, but not as less.
That's one of the hard things about being the attorney general.
And I think you think about – there's a beauty to that too.
I mean the criminal justice system is still backstopped, at least on the prosecutorial side, by some backstop of democratic accountability to the people.
So it's not necessarily a corruption of the system.
No, it's not a corruption.
It's part of what actually builds trust in it.
But there's a sense in which none of us want that justice system to be politicized in the literal sense either.
You can see the risks.
We recently saw the risks.
Yeah, of course.
Look at the school boards.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
So, Merrick Garland is attorney general and Merrick, super smart guy and a guy who wants to do right.
He's put in as attorney general.
His first substantial issuance to the field is this memorandum about school board meetings, about parents at school board meetings.
It turns out we find out afterward that there was a letter to the White House.
The White House, I think, undoubtedly had contact with the Attorney General and he proceeded.
Reasonable people will differ whether he was proportional in his response or not, but you see the risk there.
That generated a tremendous amount of distrust.
Because now the view of a significant segment of the public is that Merrick Garland and the FBI is coming after parents at school board meetings because someone petitioned the White House.
Not a good look, right?
So maybe they stumbled there, maybe they didn't.
But it highlights the risk that you are identifying when you have the White House talking to DOJ. It would be, I think it would be malpractice in this conversation not to touch on, you know, the issue hanging over the cloud of the country.
You could say right now, as we're having this conversation, we're recording this on, you know, whatever date today is, Friday in late March of the day, 23rd, 24th?
March 24th.
March 24th right now, we'll release this in due course.
But as of right now, I think we're good to go.
His campaign promise was to investigate and potentially in a way that leads to the indictment of Donald Trump.
We don't know whether he's going to follow through with that.
It is the subject of wild speculation and interest now as we have this conversation.
I've been very public, though it would be politically convenient for me if Donald Trump were not in this race.
I don't care about that.
I think it feels fundamentally un-American and wrong for a prosecutor here to carry out what is really fundamentally, in my opinion, politically motivated.
Yeah, but here's the evidence of it.
It was a campaign promise, right?
So leave even the Democrat versus Republican stuff about this to one side.
I've talked about that elsewhere.
How are we supposed to feel about elected district attorneys or attorneys general carrying out campaign promises?
This is a great issue.
I've written on this in the past.
The short answer to your question, and then I'll back up some.
The short answer to your question is my personal view is that district attorneys should never be elected.
Prosecutors should not be elected.
You have too much power.
Good.
Prosecution is often a counter-majoritarian function, meaning there are cases that you will bring even though they are unpopular.
Yep.
And the bigger risk, there are cases you won't bring even though they would be popular.
And so, I don't think I'm really giving anything away here, but I remember vividly interviewing to be the United States Attorney in Boston.
And one of the things you do is you interview with the Attorney General.
And I go to DC and I sit down with Jeff Sessions and he hands me a Diet Coke and he says, Andy, do you think prosecutors should be elected or appointed?
And I had a view on this.
I've been a prosecutor a long time.
I begin to express a view.
He just cuts me off and starts, you know, ranting about – ranting's a little strong – speaking passionately about how prosecutors should never be elected.
They should always be appointed for precisely the reason that you describe.
I see the counterargument.
You want prosecutors to be pursuing what are the utmost law enforcement concerns of the community.
Okay, I get that.
But there are tremendous risks, like you're highlighting, in having prosecutors elected because it will affect their prosecutorial judgment.
And just can I get your opinion just as a human being and as a citizen?
I mean, as we sit here today, pending knowledge of whether or not Trump will be indicted by Alvin Bragg, On the facts as we have them, do you believe that is a politically motivated and unjust prosecution or do you think that he is approaching this with the clear-eyed vision of somebody who is actually effectuating justice?
This is an issue I've thought about a lot in the wake of Varsity Blues.
My personal view, I don't know the man, is that he's either motivated by politics and or by fame, by glory.
Both can affect prosecutorial decision-making, meaning either it is a partisan political episode for him, or it could be merely that he wants to be in featured articles in the New York Times and he wants to be made famous off this case.
Both of those things can happen.
One of the things you look at is if no one had ever heard of Donald Trump, Would that office still be vigorously pursuing the case?
I mean, even if they hadn't campaigned on pursuing it, would they be vigorously pursuing it?
But put that aside.
Even the politics, using just the fame piece of this.
Fair enough, fair enough.
Put that aside.
So in Varsity Blues, you thought about this a lot.
You know, and I would think to myself, sitting in my office, literally, am I prosecuting Felicity Huffman because we should do that?
Or am I prosecuting Felicity Huffman so that someone will say, Andy Lelling prosecuted Felicity Huffman?
And it's hard.
It's hard.
You're human.
You're a human being.
We all have egos, hubris.
It is part of the discipline of that job.
And the elected portion of it has got to make it even harder.
Oh, yeah.
Exacerbates that.
Your future depends on it.
So this may be the last question.
I mean, this hour has flown by.
We didn't even get to fentanyl, which is what we were supposed to talk about.
So if you're open to it, let's do it next time because I can tell we can go deep on this.
We'll do it next time.
But I'll close with this one for you.
So you talked about being elected and being put in that position, but that's actually on the retrospective because you were at least elected before you got into that position.
How do you feel about this?
There's a lot of discussion in my circles, policy circles, et cetera, about whether, for example, elected officials should have a cooling off period from lobbying the government.
I'm actually quite favorably disposed to this.
But put that to one side, I'll ask a different question about it from a prosecutor perspective.
So let's say you're in a situation where the prosecutors aren't elected.
Should there also be a cooling off period before prosecutors are allowed to run for elected office afterwards too?
Because that's really at least one better deterrent on cashing in on the same factor.
That's an interesting question.
I haven't thought about that.
I am overall, I'm a fan of cooling off periods.
The law has a bunch of them built in.
This one isn't, though.
This one is not.
In fact, many people jump straight from prosecutor to elected office almost in a way.
Republicans do it, Democrats do it.
I was considering running for governor of Massachusetts, coming off the platform of being the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts.
Since you opened up so first personally there, you said you looked yourself in the mirror, right?
Thank you for being vulnerable.
I appreciate that.
Just seeing that isn't – it feels to me like the system working like it is where you can't go off of that and just run for governor of Massachusetts on the back of prosecuting Felicity Huffman.
Yeah.
There is an argument that if you could do that, that also would influence your decisions as a prosecutor.
So the law strikes these balances.
And you didn't though.
Why didn't you run for governor?
Oh my gosh.
You'd have been compelling.
You had the fame.
You had the momentum.
Well, there's a 10% Republican registration base.
Yeah, of course.
Now Massachusetts is a complicated equation.
Occasionally you do get some Republicans.
It's very complicated.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, anyway, thanks for having me.
Thanks for joining me on the podcast.
Sure, of course.
We'll pick up where we left off and start on fentanyl next time around.
Yeah, happy to do it.
It's a great conversation.
I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.
▲
Export Selection