The Daily - Monday, Apr. 2, 2018

Episode Date: April 2, 2018

President Trump’s son-in-law wants to overhaul the prison system. The president’s attorney general bitterly opposes such a move. That has set the scene for a highly personal battle inside the White House. Guest: Matt Apuzzo, a New York Times reporter based in Washington. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the president's son-in-law badly wants it. His attorney general bitterly opposes it. The highly personal battle inside the White House over prison law. inside the White House over prison life. It's Monday, April 2nd. Today I want to focus on one aspect of American life that remains particularly skewed

by race and by wealth, a source of inequity that has ripple effects on families and on communities and ultimately on our nation. And that is our criminal justice system. For Barack Obama, and certainly for his attorney general at the time, Eric Holder, their administration was a moment to really reconsider the way the United States has been fighting crime for a long time. America spends $80 billion a year keeping folks locked up. Billion dollars a year keeping folks locked up.

We represent 5% of the world's population, 25% of its inmates. That's not an indicator that we want to be the leader in. The big issue here, right, is that the United States has the largest prison population in the world. Matt Apuzzo covers national security for The Times. So what Obama and what Eric Holder started to do is say, what's driving that? We need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, to deter, and to rehabilitate, but not merely to warehouse and to forget. Are there unfairnesses in the system? And can we reverse that?

Can we actually reverse the trend of where every year the prison population is higher than the year before? This is our chance to bring America's criminal justice system in line with our most sacred values. This is our opportunity to divine this time, our time, as one of progress and innovation. This is our promise to forge a more just society. And this is our solemn obligation as stewards of the law and servants of those whom it protects and empowers to open a frank and constructive dialogue about the need to reform a broken system.

Holder told prosecutors, hey, don't use mandatory minimums unless you absolutely need to. Let's be judicious about what charges we seek. Among the key changes that we're implementing is a modification of the department's charging policies to ensure that people who commit certain low-level, nonviolent federal drug crimes will face sentences that are appropriate to their individual conduct, rather than stringent, mandatory, across-the-board, mandatory minimums, which will now be reserved for the most serious criminals. Obama pushed for more clemency applications.

Holder pushed for more people who are in prison to seek presidential commutations. And they pushed for changes in the way sentences are handed down through the sentencing commission. They got sentences reduced retroactively. Now taken together, these reforms reflect the department's age-old commitment to a criminal justice system that is fair, that deters serious criminal conduct, that holds people accountable, accountable for their crimes, and that utilizes incarceration wisely to punish, to deter, and to rehabilitate, not merely to confine and to forget. not merely to confine and to forget. And so what happened was you put all those things together and Obama leaves office,

and he's the first president in decades to actually leave office with a smaller federal prison population than the one he came into office with. Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation. So what happens to this idea of criminal justice reform when Donald Trump becomes president. Remember, from the moment that Donald Trump was sworn in, in his inaugural address. The crime and the gangs and the drugs

that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now. He is signaling very clearly that we're going to go back to the old way of getting tough on crime and stepping up enforcement of drug crime. And so almost immediately, you start to see policies at the Justice Department get rolled back. The president wants Congress to pass laws reducing the amount of drugs needed to trigger mandatory minimum sentences for drug traffickers. Dropping the hammer on sentencing reform, instructing prosecutors to charge criminals with, quote, the most serious and readily provable offense. And that is a complete

reversal of the leniency policies imposed by the Obama administration. And this is Trump's doing and his thinking. I actually think the most important person on this is not the president, but the attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Justice Department is reversing an Obama era policy that led to a drop in the federal prison population. Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants federal prosecutors to push for longer prison sentences for drug offenders. If you are a drug trafficker, we will not look the other way. We will not be willfully blind to your misconduct.

I mean, Sessions was, before he became attorney general, he was a senator from Alabama. And perhaps more importantly, he was a United States attorney in Alabama during the crack epidemic, during the worst days of the drug war in the 80s and early 90s. And Jeff Sessions takes a lesson from that. He says, when I was United States attorney, crime was rampant and we got serious about it. I was there when we had the revolving doors in the 60s and 70s. And we as a nation turned against that.

Democrats and Republicans got together and passed really tough laws that said we give no quarter to drug dealers and gang members. And we're going to put them in prison for a long period of time. And you know what? Crime went down. We've created a system that requires certainty and punishment, swifter trials, and the result is a very great drop in the crime rate. And so to Jeff Sessions' mind, when he sees crime ticking up in some cities, he says, well, hey, look, why are we being so politically correct about this? Those laws worked. We locked people up.

We took bad people off the street and crime went down. And here comes Obama and he's rolling back these laws, but nobody wants to talk about it. And so what Barack Obama saw as a key part of his legacy, which is the declining prison population in federal prisons, Jeff Sessions sees as a really dangerous sign that the United States is walking back its commitment to enforce criminal law. So now it's 2018. Something a little bit surprising is happening. surprising is happening. The White House is now throwing its support behind prison reform. It's not prison reform like Obama style, but they are talking about improving education inside prisons and reducing recidivism, maybe helping people get a high school diploma

or take classes to learn a trade, something to help ease them back into society. I'm not going to say it's been a quiet rollout, but, I mean, they're not doing a lot of speeches on it. The president kind of flicked at it. He had a one-liner on it in the State of the Union. As America regains its strength, opportunity must be extended to all citizens.

That is why this year we will embark on reforming our prisons to help former inmates who have served their time get a second chance at life. But for the most part, this has just sort of been briefings with reporters, meetings on Capitol Hill, and they released a document that said, here are our seven principles on prison reform, things we'd like to see prisons do better. seems like a complete reversal from what you described as the Jeff Sessions ideological approach, which was that moment has passed. We're not doing this. So what's actually going on? Well, Jared Kushner is what's going on. New Jersey-based developer Charles Kushner is charged with hiring a prostitute to blackmail two witnesses in a federal investigation where he is a target. His father, Charlie Kushner, actually served prison time for violating campaign finance laws and tax evasion. Turns out, Kushner hired a prostitute to have sex with his brother-in-law

since he was cooperating with investigators looking into the campaign contributions. Kushner had the sexual encounter videotaped and sent that tape to the man's wife, Kushner's sister. Serve time in federal prison. And frankly, when people have family members, loved ones who've been through the criminal justice system, they often leave that process going. And that was really messed up. Years ago, his son, Jared, told New York Magazine about his dad. His siblings stole every piece of paper from his office and they took it to the government. All he did was put the tape together and send it. And so Kushner has, for, I don't know, the last six months or so, kind of been quietly

meeting with people, advocates, lawmakers, experts, trying to build a coalition around changing the approach to criminal justice. Matt, I remember from my own reporting on the campaign when I profiled Jared Kushner that the experience of his dad going to jail was pretty consuming for him. He used to use a wallet that his father crafted while a prisoner, and it was something that meant a lot for him. He used to use a wallet that his father crafted while a prisoner,

and it was something that meant a lot to him. And he would visit his dad a lot of the weekends in prison. And so it seems to me that for both Kushner and for Sessions, their convictions about criminal justice reform come from either family or career, but that they are deeply held personal convictions. Absolutely.

No matter how much Jared Kushner wants to address broader systemic criminal justice reform, if the Attorney General of the United States is going to say publicly that this is bad and makes our streets more dangerous and is going to say publicly that this is bad and makes our streets more dangerous and is going to result in people getting killed, there's almost no chance that Kushner can succeed on the big sweeping reforms that everybody says he really actually does support. We'll be right back.

So I think there are two buzzwords here that I think anybody paying attention to this could probably benefit from understanding. There's prison reform and there's criminal justice reform, and the two are very different. So criminal justice reform is what people say when they mean, let's talk about fundamental systemic unfairness in the criminal justice system, like mandatory minimum sentences, the tough-on-crime drug war era laws that helped fuel ever-increasing prison populations. That's criminal justice reform,

rethinking that. Prison reform is much more narrow. Prison reform is, let's talk about how people are treated in prison and the education they get and the training they get and how they are helped or not helped when they reenter society so that they don't come back. they are helped or not helped when they reenter society so that they don't come back. So how much progress has Kushner made with his support for larger scale criminal justice reform inside the Trump administration? Almost no progress on the broad issue. And that's because you have an attorney general who is adamantly opposed to broad criminal justice changes. So what Kushner has done is he has basically said, there's no way that I'm going to be able to push forward any broad criminal justice reform when the attorney general is adamant that it not happen. I can't do this

over the objection of the chief law enforcement officer in the nation. So Kushner sort of carved off a piece of this and said, let's just deal with prisons. And frankly, he was able to get Jeff Sessions to not stand in the way of addressing prisons. So he said, here are the prison priorities. Here's what I want Congress to do. Make it easier for people to come out of prison and get a job and not go back to prison and, you know, get their life straight and contribute to society. Jeff Sessions agrees not to stand in the way of prison reform, but we're just going to table the larger questions of reforming

sentencing and broader criminal justice unfairness. All of that stuff gets tabled and the administration can move forward and try to push for a bill on Capitol Hill that addresses prisons, but not sentencing and the broader issues that at one point seemed like maybe they would get done. Which sound like the kind of reforms that President Obama and Eric Holder supported. Absolutely. Jared Kushner was supportive of many of the very things that were being rolled back under the Trump administration. What about the president to weigh in on. I haven't seen anything to suggest that Jared Kushner has gone into the Oval Office and given his full-throated support for broad sentencing reform or anything like it.

I think he has read the room, he's read the administration, and realizes that right now the best they can hope for is to address prisons. He got the support from the president to do that, and they're going to push ahead with that. And Matt, while this fight or compromise or whatever we're going to call it is unfolding in the White House, what's happening inside America's prisons? Well, I mean, look, this isn't just palace intrigue, right? This is real people and real lives. There are a lot of families who very much want to see changes to the criminal justice system. Whether that happens, I think very much unknown.

The prison population did fall under Barack Obama. And that isn't something that's going to be able to be turned around overnight. So I have every expectation that the prison population will start to tick back up. I have every expectation that the prison population will start to tick back up. And ultimately, that's about real people and how they're going to live, in some cases, the rest of their lives. Thank you, Matt. Anytime. On Sunday, The Times published a rare interview with Jared Kushner's father, Charles Kushner. Despite early hopes that his son's White House appointment

would serve as a kind of redemption for the family 12 years after he left prison, the ties to the presidency have actually brought further scrutiny, inviting a slew of criminal and regulatory inquiries into the family business and questions around whether Jared discussed business with foreign officials. But in his interview with The Times, Charles Kushner dismissed all of it,

inviting investigators to, quote, go knock yourselves out for the next 10 years, pouring over the family's business records. We didn't do anything wrong, he said. He also insisted that he wouldn't want a presidential party, even if it was available to him. Here's what else you need to know today. In a series of tweets on Sunday morning from Mar-a-Lago,

President Trump claimed that DACA is encouraging immigrants from Central America to attempt a legal entry into the U.S. These big flows of people are all trying to take advantage of DACA. They want in on the act, the president wrote, adding, no more DACA. Laws still matter. We are a nation of immigrants, but we are a nation of lawful immigrants. That needs to be the message going forward. Trump was apparently reacting to a segment on immigration that had run just moments before

on Fox and Friends. Well, we need to get serious about this. We look at these people, we can have compassion for these people, but it doesn't mean that the laws don't matter. That's where the left gets it wrong every single time is because they talk about humanitarianism, they talk about being good people, they talk about being gracious to these people,

but they have to remember that laws matter. Americans come first in our own country. And again, let me say, build that wall. But the president's tweet misrepresented DACA. It only applies to children of undocumented immigrants who have lived in the U.S. since 2007 and therefore would not apply to anybody seeking to cross into the United States today. Anybody seeking to cross into the United States today.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.