LEILA FADEL, HOST:
For more, we're joined by Joyce Vance. She's a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. She was appointed by President Obama after nearly 20 years as a career prosecutor in the office, and she joins us now from Tuscaloosa. Good morning and welcome to the program.
JOYCE VANCE: Good morning.
FADEL: You were a career prosecutor. When you decided not to go forward with a case, which is what we saw the now former U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, do with the case against New York State Attorney General Letitia James, what fueled a decision like that?
VANCE: Right. So when prosecutors decline on a case, there can be a number of reasons. There can be weak or insufficient evidence. That might mean that, for instance, some of your evidence isn't admissible if there was a search that violated the Fourth Amendment or something along those lines, or it might just mean that there's insufficient evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It could even mean that no crime was committed. So there are a lot of different reasons. Prosecutors always make very disciplined decisions in these situations, working through the case with an entire team and often with their supervisors before they decide to decline.
FADEL: Could there be politics behind it? I mean, we saw the president over the weekend post online that - and he nominated Siebert as U.S. attorney in Eastern Virginia. And he was saying, oh, well, he's supported by the Democrats. He's a, quote, "bad Republican." Is there any plausibility to the accusation that Siebert was driven by politics?
VANCE: Well, when you hear a president complaining that a U.S. attorney nominee is a bad Republican, that does suggest that politics are involved, but not on the side of the prosecutor. You know, career prosecutors are remarkably good. I guess this seems shocking in this day and age, in setting aside politics when they evaluate cases. They look at the facts, they look at the law and they decide, as the federal principles of prosecution require them to, whether they have sufficient evidence to obtain and sustain a conviction. And despite these sorts of allegations from the president, when you have a team of FBI agents, perhaps agents from other agencies, and prosecutors all working together, there's no room for personal animus to slip in. These decisions are made in a very professional fashion.
FADEL: Now, in that same post, we saw the president demand that several other of his perceived political enemies, including James, be prosecuted, quote, "now." The president has made no secret that he planned to go after his opponents, but were you surprised by this very public demand directly to the attorney general of the United States?
VANCE: Well, it's unusual this post on social media that Trump made. It starts out as being addressed to Pam. It looks in some ways more like a text message than it looks like a social media post. And that, I think, is interesting. It's also very concerning that the president expresses that these individuals are guilty. That, of course, is a decision that's made by a jury in the American system of justice. And so this cry for revenge and for what Trump labels justice, but what seems to be far more personal than the sort of justice that our criminal justice system delivers, all adds up to, in many ways, a break-glass moment. This is something we've never seen, this clear, direct evidence of interference or attempted interference by the White House with the process of delivering American justice.
FADEL: When you say a break-glass moment, say more. What do you mean?
VANCE: Well, what we're seeing here is a prosecutor being fired because he refused to indict a case that the president of the United States clearly thinks should have been indicted. You know, that's the stuff of banana republics and something that folks have been concerned about and have looked at really since the first Trump administration has been whether there will be this sort of perversion of the Justice Department and an effort to turn it into little more than a political tool in the pocket of the White House rather than this beacon of clarity and independence that everyone aspires for it to be. That's one of the key elements of American democracy, is having a free and fair system of justice where no man is above the law. Anything that erodes that a step further is really important and really a discouraging development. But here, it's on full display for folks to see.
FADEL: Joyce Vance is a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama and a professor of law at the University of Alabama. Thank you for your time.
VANCE: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
