The New Yorker Radio Hour - An Interview with Merrick Garland, and Susan Orlean on Animals

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

At The New Yorker Festival, the renowned investigative journalist Jane Mayer asked Attorney General Merrick Garland about the prosecution of January 6th insurrectionists, the threat of domestic terrorism, and what the Justice Department can do to protect abortion rights. Plus, the staff writer Susan Orlean talks with David Remnick about her obsession with animal stories, and her new book, “On Animals.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. No Attorney General of the United States has ever had what you'd call an easy job. But Merrick Garland's brief is maybe something else. Donald Trump tried his hardest to make the Justice Department into his personal legal team. So Garland now has to reestablish independence at the agency, but he can't exactly avoid politics. He has to decide, for example, how to prosecute the January 6 rioters who try to overturn the election results. He also has to figure out how prosecutors should handle Trump officials who may have broken the law.

He can hardly avoid the current legal battle over abortion that's engulfed the country. Merrick Garland spoke with the New Yorkers Jane Mayer last week as part of the New Yorker Festival. So you've been in this job now for more than six months after having spent 20, 25 years at your previous job? How do you like it? How does it compare? Well, you're right. I seem to spend a long time in my jobs. I think we can be assured I will not be spending 25 years in this one. One of the things I gave up was life tenure.

I loved being a judge. I really did. But I love this job as well. There are definitely differences. Some of the advantages of this job are I no longer am barred from issue doing advisory opinions, which I could not do as a judge, and now I could do six advisory opinions before breakfast, nobody stops me. The other thing and quite important is that in the previous job, I had to wait until an important case or even an interesting case came before me. And now, if I read something in the New Yorker online in the morning, and it strikes me as the government's

doing something wrong or the country is doing something wrong, somebody should be protected, I can do something about it. And sometimes by the end of the end of the end of the government. end of the day. So there's a good things. There are some disadvantages like that I'm on the wrong side of lawsuits, the wrong side of the V. My name, I miss my judicial immunity. So you're being sued, like basically every day. It gets sued quite a lot. Yeah, yeah. But in the end, judges and attorneys general have the same bottom line requirement. We're obligated to uphold the rule of law and to be sure that equal justice, under law is done. So in those ways, the jobs are very similar. Well, listening to you talk about

how you miss immunity brings up the something we would all like, but it is actually something that the former president said that he had while he was in office. And one of the first questions I had for you was because the Twitterverse is very much alive with, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, people who are on fire about the need to go after the former president and hold him accountable for things that he did in office when he was in office now that he's out. And it's not just the Twitterverse. You know, there are a number of critics. And even your former law professor, Lawrence Tribe, wrote a column and he said that he thought that Trump should be prosecuted for his role in setting off the insurrection and that he should be prosecuted for inciting insurrection and seditious conspiracy.

Now, I know that you can't really talk about cases that are ongoing, but it did make me wonder whether you worry that by going after the foot soldiers and not the commander in chief, there may be a kind of a dangerous message being sent that there's no accountability in high places. and that others may sort of try to copy what happened before on January 6th. So how do you see that issue? Well, like I've said many times before, January 6th was a heinous event, which almost interfered with the cornerstone of our democracy, which is the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another.

We have taken actions commensurate with how important this act was. So we have every U.S. Attorney's Office in the country. We have every FBI office, I think, except maybe Puerto Rico has been involved in investigating this and making arrests. We've brought in U.S. attorneys from all over the country to be detailed to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, which is the center of our investigation. We've already charged more than 600 people. We've gotten terabytes of information from citizen sleuths all over the country who have not. noticed someone that they recognize or been able to match with other pictures. We are doing everything we can to ensure that the perpetrators of January 6th are brought to justice. My very first thing that I

did when I came to the Justice Department, the very first day was to go to the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C. to discuss where the investigation is and where it's going. Every single week, I get briefed by the FBI director, the Deputy Attorney General, as to where this investigation. is going, we will file the facts in the law wherever they lead. I'm not, as you're quite right, I'm not able to talk about any particular individuals or particular investigations. There's a long-standing policy of the Justice Department. It's an element of the rule of law. It's a very good reason why we follow that policy. Well, what would you, if there's criticism that too many of the, kind of the foot soldiers are being prosecuted and maybe

there's actually also been some criticism even from a couple judges that the charge is being brought against them are misdemeanors and maybe not as serious as they could be. What would you say to people who are making those criticisms? The prosecutors involved in this case are making determinations in every case about what charge fits the offense, what charge fits the law.

I am quite aware that there are people who are criticizing us for not prosecuting sufficiently and others who are complaining that we are prosecuting too harshly. This is, you know, part of the territory for any prosecutor in any case. I have great confidence in the prosecutors who are doing these cases. They are committed to pursuing them until they find an answer and to making sure that the prosecution's charges and ultimate sentences fit the offenses. I wanted to ask you about another subject that I know that has been really important to you,

which is voting rights and elections. You know, you've made, I think, a very impassioned speech about the importance of voting rights and shown that you want to make this a priority to defend them. But yet the Supreme Court's been cutting off, it seems like every avenue, to enforce the Voting Rights Act. And so I wondered what really can the Justice Department do to ensure voting rights, to fight voter suppression, and to also fight election subversion,

which is what people are beginning to talk about more as a threat moving forward. So I do feel deeply impassioned about this. This was the purpose of the Justice Department founded during Reconstruction, by President Grant for the purpose of protecting the right to vote of African Americans in the South during Reconstruction. The Voting Rights Act in 1965 was maybe the most important piece of legislation to ensure that there would not be discrimination in procedures and practices involving voting. That act gave the Justice Department powers, particularly Section 5, which required preclearance of changes in cover. jurisdictions of practices and procedures. Now, you are right that in a Shelby County case, the Supreme Court effectively eliminated Section 5, throwing us back to where we were before

the Voting Rights Act with respect to the requirement to go after individual cases. We're left with Section 2 questions, which also prohibit violations discriminatory procedures in that regard. Then in the Bernovich case, the Supreme Court again narrowed what we have under Section 2. So the premise of your question, which is our tools weakened, yes, they are. But our passion hasn't weakened. The Voting Rights section and the Civil Rights Division as a whole, it was greatly depleted previously when I got here. So one of the first things we did was insist upon doubling the size of the voting section we have. We will. and have used Section 2 to bring actions.

This is what we did in Georgia. We are seriously and urgently investigating and examining other changes in procedures and practices, and particularly looking at all the redistricting that's done as a consequence of the decennial census. But again, I think we need Congress to help here. We need a change. We need a legislation to give us back authorities that we need in order to do this. into another hot topic of the topic of abortion. The Justice Department weighed in on the Texas state law, SB 8.

It was clearly crafted with the intention of avoiding judicial review, and yet you jumped in, and I'm just curious, how did you see that issue, and why do you think it was important for the DOJ to get in there? I think we sought in the way the premise of your question put it. You know, our job of the Justice Department is to protect the Constitution and to protect the constitutional rights of Americans. They've deputized any person in the United States, whether they're in Texas or not,

whether they have any relationship with a woman or not, whether they have any injury or other connection or not, to bring a case when that Texas law is violated or is tempted to be violated and receive at least $10,000 in bounty. This is not only obviously intended, but expressly intended to prevent judicial review of an unconstitutional statute. And because clinics are not willing to risk or unable to risk the financial costs that will occur

if they go forward, they have stopped providing services. So women are both unable to get service, and unable to get judicial review of an unconstitutional statute at the time they need the services. Every American should be worried about this, regardless of your party and regardless of your politics, because this can easily be a model for any constitutional right, not just the right we're talking about. It can be pursued by any state and not just Texas. And it doesn't take long to think about what the consequences for America. democracy are, if states start deputizing private bounty hunters to prevent citizens from exercising

their constitutional rights. So when the Supreme Court declined to stop the case and the private case was brought, we felt it was our obligation to jump in immediately afterwards. It was a week afterwards and to bring our own case. Are you fairly confident you'll win on this? We are confident. We brought a case that is well established in the law. We brought the case directly against Texas and against its officers, including judges, and including against anyone who is purporting to be deputized on behalf of the state.

And we believe that is well-founded. in the law. There is an area, another area that I think that I gather is something that you care a lot about, and that is the antitrust area. And I wanted to ask you about that. I read that antitrust was your favorite subject in law school. It sounds very dry, but I guess I'd love to know why, and I think what many people want to know is, I mean, at this point, there's sort of a growing feeling of concern, worry about the power of the big tech companies in this country, and people are trying to figure out what to do about that. And I wonder if specifically if you see the big tech sector is in your sites or in the

sites of the antitrust division, basically. Well, you're right. I have said it was my first love in law school. I think this is because I had a great industrial organization. economics professor in my last year in college, and because I worked for some really great antitrust giants, both in my legal practice in the Justice Department and in law school. When I came in, just as was the case in the Civil Rights Division, the antitrust division, was seriously depleted in terms of resources and personnel. So the first thing we did, and is in our request to the Congress

for the FY22 budget is to greatly increase the budget. And particularly with respect to personnel, we hope to increase the division by 90 personnel. You're adding 90 people to that, to the antitrust division? If we get the money from the Congress, yes. Are they likely to support that? Yes, I think so. I think there, you know, I spoke at the budget hearing.

I was attacked for many things, but not for the suggestion, and not for that suggestion. Well, there's bipartisan support to some extent for some of this, isn't there? I think there is, and we've been off to a really strong start. You asked about big tech. We have the Google case, which was begun in the previous administration. It's been aggressively followed in this administration. We've been working on stopping mergers that would foreclose competition.

We've succeeded in stopping a merger of two of the three largest insurers. brokerages. We just filed against what I call a quasi-merger between American Airlines and JetBlue. We've brought both civil and criminal cases in efforts of companies to foreclose wage competition and allocate markets with respect to the labor market. We have ongoing matters involving everything from agriculture to banking to real estate. So we're, we're a very important. We're the antitrust division is energized and eager to go forward. And we do think that ensuring fair competition is an essential element of our obligation to ensure that justice is done. Thank you, Mr. Attorney General, so much for giving us your time.

Great to be with you. Thanks. Attorney General Merrick Garland, speaking with staff writer Jane Mayer at the New Yorker Festival last week. Now, an important update. After they spoke, after the interview, A federal judge issued a ruling that temporarily blocks the Texas abortion law, and that's in response to the suit brought by the Department of Justice. Garland called that a victory for women in Texas and for the rule of law. The state of Texas has appealed. You can find out more about the New Yorker Festival at New Yorker.com slash festival. How's it going?

How are you? So we're going to talk about my absolute favorite subject in the world. Critters, you're such an animal person, right, David? you have so many pets. Okay, I may not be an animal person exactly, but Susan Orlean most certainly is. Her books include a biography of Rin Tin Tin, as well as the Orchid Thief, and the Library Book.

Susan is also the author of a million great pieces in the New Yorker, some of which appear in her new collection of essays. The book is called Simply and Accurately on Animals. It includes a profile that ran in the New Yorker called Show Dog, So listen carefully, because Susan's opening here is pretty much unbeatable, though it does feature some language that is, let us say, polite only in dog circles. If I were a bitch, I'd be in love with Biff Truesdale. Biff is perfect.

He's friendly, good-looking, rich, famous, and in excellent physical condition. He almost never drools. He's not afraid of commitment. He wants children. Actually, he already has children and wants a lot more. He works hard and is a consummate professional, but he also knows how to have fun. What Biff likes most is food and sex. This makes him sound boorish, but he is not.

He's just elemental. Food he likes even better than sex. His favorite things to eat are cookies, mints, and hotel food. soap, but he will eat just about anything. I have to tell you, when I first read this, which is some time ago, I thought, and I think I'm right, that you were doing a lot of things at once, and one of them is a parody of the profile form of human beings. So tell me a little bit about this piece.

You know, I began my career, like many of us did, doing a lot of celebrity profiles. That was the grist of the mill of journalism in the magazine world. And they have a very formulaic quality. When I decided I wanted to profile a show dog, I thought of it almost as if I were being dispatched to profile Linda Evangelista. I mean, it's like, is there a real person beneath the kind of layer upon layer. of the posse that is there to make this thing stand as an article of perfection. I loved elevating the profile of the dog to that same degree of scrutiny and seriousness that you would apply to a person.

Well, I always talk about the gods of nonfiction providing, you know, actual facts becoming almost too good to be true. One of them begins with the name of the dog, Biff Truesdale. It's like the name of the star of a surfing movie in the 60s like Troy Donahue or something like that. I know. I know. It's so funny. And the fact that it is such a human name, and I agree with you, I think the miracle of writing nonfiction is that facts are just so fantastic. And if I were writing a fictional profile of a dog, I wouldn't have the nerve to name him Biff Trusdale. I wouldn't have the nerve to have some of the elements or some of the quotes from the people around him because they're just too fantastic and too funny. Now, we've known each other for a long time. We used to have

offices right next to each other. And I didn't really know this about you. In fact, I don't even think, certainly when you lived in the city full time, that you were that much of an animal nut. And here what's happened is that a whole bunch of pieces have accumulated over time in the New Yorker and occasionally elsewhere on animals and your love for them.

And let's just say, I can't relate, but I love the book. So what's your history with animals? How did this turn out to be such a passion? I always just found animals delightful. I liked looking at them. I liked interacting with them. I fantasized about being around them.

I didn't have the desire to become a naturalist or somebody who was out in the woods. But I happen to have a real soft spot for working animals. That gives you a little bit of a tip-off where a lot of these stories come from, which is the place where animals and people actually work together. What does that even mean? I think animals, wild animals are amazing and fascinating, but I'm more interested in the animals that we live closely with, whether it's our pets or whether it's a mule that is. is delivering anti-aircraft missiles in Afghanistan, the idea that we've crossed species to create some sort of agreement that we are going to work together. To me, it's a source of endless fascination or animals that are meant to be wild that we have brought into our sphere

and then we're stuck with the problem of what do you do with that. Well, I guess this is what I innately as a child didn't understand. Whatever chaos was in the house, I didn't understand. Why is there also a dog here? Right. Where did that come from? Right. Although occasionally the dog is the quiet place in the household and the place with the least complicated emotional baggage that, you know, you come home, your dog licks you, whether you've done good or bad things,

day out in the world. So there is a simplicity to our relationship with animals. What was the hardest animal to have? I half expect to read soon that you're going to have a panda bear in your backyard. Oh my God, I would love that. Actually, in a way the hardest was having chickens, not because they're hard to take care of, but because everyone in the natural world likes chicken. and it's the only animal I've ever had that I many times had killed by other animals. So I remember in your essay The It Bird, you said that you could not kill and eat a sickly chicken. You had to take it to the vet.

Yes, this was the moment where, you know, I fancied myself a farmer. I was having my Ava Gabor Green Acres moment of living up in the country. country and thinking, well, I'm a farmer. You know, I go and get hay and feed. And then my chicken developed a neurological ailment. She couldn't stand up. She wasn't eating. And I asked a neighbor who was a longtime resident of the, this was the Hudson Valley of New York, and he was a guy who lived up there forever. And I said, what should I do? My chicken's sick. And he made a motion that indicated the ringing of the neck of the chicken. That's what I would have thought.

Yeah, which is you have a sick chicken, you kill it. But being a suburban girl who really had only experienced interacting with animals as pets, I thought, I'm not killing her. I'm going to seek the finest medical attention. And I took her to the vet who... I got to ask you, how much did the veterinary care of the... sick chicken cost? Well, I am going to withhold that answer because it's a source of conflict with me and my husband

who pointed out the price of rotisserie chicken at the supermarket versus the price of my of taking care of my chicken. And there was really nothing to do for her, so I had her euthanized. And again, this was something where my husband could not believe. believe that I was paying $150 to euthanize my chicken. I've always thought of you as a writer who's a very, is a comic writer, but very cunning about it. In other words, you use your comic skills when needed or it comes and it goes.

Like your book on the library in Los Angeles, obviously, is not a comic subject. And not all these pieces on animals are innately comic. Talk to me about the role in your writing life of comic voice as opposed to a more serious narrative voice. First of all, you know, I think what you try to do as a writer is to move ever closer to your actual authentic voice as a person. And I like making jokes. I like seeing the irony in things. And even things that are very serious, I invariably find some twist of the story

that gives me a moment of laughter or at least a chuckle. And it seems to happen in all your work. And the Orchid Thief in your book on Rin Tin Tin, the Serious has comic undertones and the comic, has serious meaning at the moments you want it. So in the essay, the It Bird, you write, many philosophers, including John Berger, maintain that what we consider modernity

began at the moment when we no longer relied on animals for utility. We didn't ride them or raise them or milk them, and they were absent from daily life, except as ornaments. So are these animals ornaments, really? And ornaments of what? We're attracted to animals in part as texture.

It's, there's a pleasure in having your eye land on a living being that's not a person. There's a great pleasure in communicating in some wordless way with another species. And, you know, whether you like animals or not, there is something kind of miraculous and, and marvel. about being able to cross the divide of species and communicate. And then there are some animals that we like just because they're amazing to look at. And when we were living on our farm, my husband coined the phrase landscape animals because he felt like part of the reason for having some animals was that you could look out and see them and they were an attractive part of the landscape, a little bit like kinetic sculpture.

And I do think that, you know, there's a way you collect animals when you live in the country and you have enough space for them. That's a bit kind of antic and crazy because why not? Like, bring a donkey home. I have to tell you as an editor and you as a writer, every Tuesday afternoon at 4 o'clock, we have an ideas meeting. And people come to the meeting with three ideas. you know, we should do more about the war in Afghanistan, or we should write a profile of this person or that person, or whatever it might be.

I can't ever think of an instance where somebody came in with what I would call a Susan Orlean type idea. And I guess the silliest question that writers get or songwriters get or whatever it might be is where do you get your ideas, but I've got to ask you, where do they come from? It's flotsam and jetsam. It's the sign hanging on a telephone pole. It's an overheard conversation. It's a magazine, a specialty magazine that mentions some odd thing. And it's burr that gets stuck on your jacket. And it just clings. And you think, wow, what is that? I need to know more about that.

And it can be so random. I mean, when I think about the story that I did about taxidermy, I was visiting a friend who's an artist, a painter, and he had a taxidermy catalog for taxidermy supplies. I love gear, and I love any hobby that has a lot of gear. And I thought, oh, my God, you know, you can order bare noses. Like, that's amazing. And I said, oh my God, how could there be a five-inch-thick taxidermy supply catalog?

I mean, aren't there only two or three taxidermists in the world? And I got home that night and thought, wait, I'm still convinced there are only like three taxidermists in the United States. So I Googled taxidermy. And I got like 11 million hits. And the first thing that popped up was that the world taxidermis champion. were coming up in a week or two. And, you know, to me it's like... That's Mauna from heaven.

Yes, like the top half of my skull just lifted off. And I'll never forget because I came running into the office the next day. And I didn't have any idea of what the story was about. And I said, can I cover the world Taxidermy Championships? And you said, let me think if I've already assigned that to some. Susan Orlean, thank you. The book is On Animals. In case you haven't guessed, thank you so much. Thank you, David. That's our program for today. I'm David Remnick. Thank you for joining us. Hope you have a great week.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. And we had additional help from Harrison Keithline. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.