Jon Lovett joins Melissa and Leah to climb inside the mind of one of Project 2025’s biggest boosters: J.D. Vance. It’s nasty in there! Then, Leah and Melissa discuss the proposed SCOTUS reforms. Finally, Leah chats with Olivia Warren and Deeva Shah about misconduct in the federal judiciary–specifically, the investigation into certified creep Judge Joshua Kindred.

TRANSCRIPT

 

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Show Intro Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the court. It’s an old joke, but when an argued man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they’re going to have the last word. She spoke, not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity. She said, I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.

 

Leah Litman Hello and welcome back to Strict Scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. We’re your hosts for today. I’m Leah Litman.

 

Melissa Murray And I’m Melissa Murray. And as promised, this episode contains the next installment of our deep dive into project 2025, or as we’re calling it, Disaster Peace Theater. And to be clear, for all of you who are expecting a more linear trajectory, we’re actually going to go out of order today. So we are going to cover all of project 2025. But today we are going to cover most of part three, which is labeled the general welfare. This is basically all of the social policy issues that project 2025 is tackling. And it’s the biggest segment of project 2025. So we wanted to cover all of it. But because it’s so huge, because they literally want to reform every major social issue of the last 80 years, we decided to break this up into a couple of different segments. So we’re going to wrap this up in another episode, but we’re going to dig in and get started today.

 

Leah Litman We may also cover today one of their ideas for the economy, if we have time. We know project 2025 kind of suggested that it had wrapped up and that the director of the project, a former Trump administration official, announced he had stepped down from the Heritage Foundation. But we don’t think that makes project 2025 any less relevant, like the plans have already been drawn up.

 

Melissa Murray We also don’t think it’s true, right? So there’s that.

 

Leah Litman Well, for reasons we’re about to explain, it’s like project 2025 database for potential personnel for a second. Trump administration still exists. Like they’re going to need that in the event of a transition. And there’s a project put together by court accountability action, state democracy defenders action, an American oversight action that has profiles of all of the project 2025 personnel network creepers. And they already have some judicial profiles up, and we’ll add more if you want to check it out. It’s at project 2025 admin.com. But basically we’re staying on it. And we think you should do.

 

Melissa Murray Think of project 2025 as your most comfortable couch and just settle in, have a seat. Get really really comfortable. All right. So after we go through that part of project 2025, some of the social issues, maybe some of the economy issues, we’re going to then pivot to discuss the recently announced Scotus reform proposal, and then Leo will have a conversation about another aspect of the federal courts that’s absolutely crying out for reform, and that’s the federal courts as an actual factual workplace with employees who may be in need of protection. So yes, this is another jam packed summer episode.

 

Leah Litman But before we can enjoy some Supreme Court reform dessert, we have to eat our vegetables, in this case, radioactive vegetables that were grown in a meth lab of conservative grievance. So it’s time to talk about project 2025 and to help us dive deep into the conservative ecosystem as part of Disaster Peace Theater, we are delighted to be joined by the high Lsat scoring Jon Lovett, Crooked Media co-founder and host of Lovett or Leave It, and co-host of Pod of America. Also recently an epic competitor on Survivor. Who else could be a better guest to help us help America survive the wilderness of the Heritage Foundation? Welcome back to the show, Jon.

 

Jon Lovett Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. So excited to be here. Such a lovely topic.

 

Melissa Murray We’re really excited to have you back. And for those of you who are just recent listeners to Strict Scrutiny, get on it. Get on those back episodes, because this is Jon second time on Strict Scrutiny. Longtime listeners will recall that we had Jon on an episode last summer that was a retrospective on the Dobbs decision, and in that episode, Jon played with Oscar winning flair for the part of one Samuel Alito. And he did such a stupendous job of channeling the male grievances of Sam Alito that we felt compelled to come up with a new role for him today. And so, ladies, gentlemen and non-binary listeners today, Jon Lovett will be playing the part of JD Vance, Republican candidate for vice president of the United States. We thought this would give us an untouched, if you will, opportunity to ask one of the people who’s most into project 2025 about project 2025. So, Jon, are you ready to channel JD.

 

Jon Lovett Yes, I am. I mean, it is a challenge to play someone younger, you know, that’s hard. It’s hard to accept that JD Vance is younger, that the Republican VP candidate is younger. But I’ll do the best that I can. I, I don’t know if I can do so much of an impression. But I’ll, I’ll try to inhabit, I think the philosophy as best I can.

 

Leah Litman That should work great. And we should note that Kate, unfortunately couldn’t make the segment, and a strict scrutiny with just Melissa, me and Jon Lovett has the potential to be both messy and feral. So before we get started, I think we should settle on a safe word. That. Jon will allow you to break the fourth wall and temporarily step outside of your role as JD. So I would propose as a safe word. So fucking what do you think?

 

Jon Lovett Oh, I like that. I like so fucking. Yeah. No, I see, that’s good. So fucking. So. Got it. Perfect.

 

Leah Litman We’ll be listening for that. So the social welfare components of project 2025 are really frightening. Although some of them are also a little funny or perhaps revealing. So the first question for you, JD, is on our last episode, we talked about how project 2020 fives forward calls for a federal ban on pornography. It says that porn should not be entitled to any First Amendment protection, and generally seems to call for the adoption of Clarence Thomas views on the First Amendment. So the question I would put to you, JD, is why are you guys so obsessed with porn?

 

Jon Lovett Well, for two reasons. The second reason is. We here at, JD Vance HQ. We don’t define pornography the way that you know it. When you see it types, it might differ. In pornography. You’re picturing, lovemaking in a brightly or dimly lit room, whatever your preference. But we define pornography. Permissive Lee, to include a whole host of speech, not just explicit sexual material, but by the words of of project 2025, anything that includes what they described as gender ideologies, right. Which could be a whole swath of materials that most of us would not consider to be anything close to pornography.

 

Melissa Murray Senator JD, can I ask a question about that? Based on that definition. So pornography is a much broader term than perhaps we liberals are used to. So it’s not just, you know it when you see it, but it’s basically anything that puts forth a kind of radical gender ideology. So with that in mind is the 19th amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote pornography.

 

Jon Lovett It definitely creates a lot of emotions in me, and I can’t tell if it’s, you know, the fine line between a kind of my blood pressure is up. Am I hot, am I mad? I don’t know, because I’ve never been in therapy. So it’s probably so. So it’s probably it’s definitely it’s yes, it’s definitely illicit.

 

Melissa Murray Probably pornography.

 

Jon Lovett And it’s pornography. It’s illicit. And I remember photos of those suffragettes and I saw ankle I absolutely saw ankle.

 

Melissa Murray I mean, I know as Mulholland was running around naked on a horse. So anything’s possible. All right, so, Senator Vance, you like project 2025 also seem kind of obsessed with. Not that you like it. Know you like project Tony. I mean, like, you are similar to project 2025, and that you also seem relatively obsessed with women’s bodies or at least surveilling and controlling women’s bodies. So let me first lay out some of the ideas that project 2025 proposes for doing this. So one, there is a section that details potential reforms to the Department of Health and Human Services. Then those sections proclaim that the goal of the next Republican administration should be protecting life. Quote. From the moment of conception, when every human being has inherent worth and dignity, end quote. This, to me seems like a very fetal personhood forward kind of take. I’m eager to hear what you think. Project 2025 also calls for the centers for Disease Control to ramp up its, quote, abortion surveillance and, quote, and that is an actual phrase, and to withdraw federal funding from states that do not report information on abortions to the CDC. So let’s take a quick pause here. We know that you’ve called for menstrual surveillance. And now project 2025 wants to create a federal abortion surveillance system. So, seriously, what the f is up with monitoring women’s bodies so closely, especially given your interest in avoiding gender ideologies and women’s pornography more generally?

 

Jon Lovett Well, you know. I recently took down from my website all of the information I had there about my, restrictive position on access to abortion. And I’m also on the record in interviews, describing a the argument against allowing women to have access to abortion, even in the cases of sexual assault and incest and B, creating a logic for a federal law or a federal rule that would prevent women from leaving a state that bans abortion to get to a state that permits abortion. Because my view is that there is no need to balance the human being that is the woman, in any way. There’s no need to consider their interests in this whatsoever.

 

Leah Litman Did you just concede that women are human beings? That sounds borderline pornographic to me.

 

Melissa Murray It’s also not in the Republican platform. Yeah. So is this you going rogue?

 

Jon Lovett Yeah. No, I. Look, I misspoke, I obviously misspoke, and, you know, I’m doing a lot of I’m doing a lot of press these days as part of my rollout of my new personality. And I just went a little far there. And also, by the way, is that I had said, woman, I woman. I’ve never heard it. I’ve seen it, I’ve read it.

 

Leah Litman It’s I’ve never actually said. And since a woman is only a woman.

 

Jon Lovett Yeah. Yeah. Yes. You? No, man. I prefer to think of women as sort of like a suitcase. And we’re into which in which, fetuses are transported. And that. And, you know, that’s sort of the how I that’s what with kind of arms and legs.

 

Melissa Murray It’s like those pneumatic tubes that I used to have in the drive through at the bank. Yeah. That’s right. Put your chest. That’s right. Yeah.

 

Jon Lovett That’s right. A woman ought to be quiet until she goes and a baby comes out, you know, like out of the tubes. I’m doing the tube sound.

 

Leah Litman So, that that was.

 

Melissa Murray It was good JD.

 

Leah Litman That conception of of womanhood is actually quite helpful to explaining some other parts of project 2025 which lay out a plan to implement a nationwide abortion ban without having to go through the inconvenience of Congress passing a nationwide abortion ban. So it calls on the Food and Drug Administration to reverse their approval of a stone, the first drug in the two drug medication abortion protocol. It calls on the Department of Justice to enforce the Comstock Act as an abortion ban. The Comstock Act was enacted in 1873 after much lobbying from vice crusader and compulsive masturbator Anthony Comstock. And it prohibits the transmission through the mails of materials intended for immoral purposes, including patients, contraception, sex toys, and even information about contraception, abortion and sex toys. And it’s never been taken off the books.

 

Melissa Murray So, JD, what are your views on Anthony Comstock? Do you feel a special kinship with him?

 

Jon Lovett Yeah. Look, and that’s why I think illicit materials, like sex toys, which I do include.

 

Melissa Murray In the 19th amendment.

 

Jon Lovett I include. I include things like. Yes, sex toys, abortion medications, chaise long, anything of that nature that is, I think, ultimately immoral. I think here’s, here’s sort of where, here’s the the reason I think it’s so important that we have project 2025 to pursue these policies, which I think these these sort of, you know, these coastal, women that you’re women, the coastal women, we may we mean.

 

Leah Litman Technically I’m in the Midwest, but you know.

 

Jon Lovett Well, well, what’s strange is that the e that it’s you say women, you know. So it’s a strange word and it makes me very suspicious. But but, but but fundamentally we are trying to we are trying to claw back what we view as as decades and decades of losses, that we believe that the conservative movement has lost over and over again in our war against cultural leftism, and that whatever logic there was for removing things like no fault divorce, for, allowing women to have control over their bodies, that all of that freedom has destroyed the traditional, family structures. And we must we must we must preserve those structures. Start with clawing back some of those, prerogatives so that we can prevent divorce, so that we can prevent, the kind of cosmopolitan leftism that has decimated, the, the, the traditional Christian family structure.

 

Leah Litman So I guess, when did you all decide that incels were kind of like the core swing population that you wanted to target? Because a lot of the platform seems pretty incel adjacent or appealing, including the recommendation to reverse the protections of and collar the federal law that would actually prohibit states from denying emergency care when that emergency care is abortion. So I guess, like. Our Intel. The plan to get to the white House.

 

Jon Lovett Such a great question. You know, it’s just a kind of happy accident. We didn’t set out to become a campaign directed solely at the, the kind of, kind of boiled minds of internet dwelling, angry men. But because we’ve only been talking to ourselves about this for so long, we’ve kind of coddled our own brains a little bit. Do you remember when when the Chicago Tribune got into a room and a bunch of marketing executives and senior executives and branding people sat there all night, had coffees and chicken fingers and all the rest, and they came out the next day and they were looked exhausted in their eyes. And they said, we’re naming the company trunk. You’re going to call us trunk now. And everybody was like, hey, you fucked up because you spent too much time just talking to each other. You got so far from normal you didn’t realize it. You baseline moved, and now you sound weird. That’s what happened to these people. Because normal people know that. Hey. Yeah, like nobody thinks divorce is a good thing, but banning divorce doesn’t make happier marriages. But they’ve talked themselves into a way of believing that they have no choice but to restrict basic freedoms. And that’s just not going to fly with anybody except a bunch of people who believe the permissiveness of the sexual revolution is why they’re so lonely and angry.

 

Melissa Murray So. So, JD, are you advocating for DEI measures in the Republican Party and in the Chicago Tribune?

 

Jon Lovett Well, yes. Absolutely. Sure. I see you’ve caught me in a. Gotcha. I look, I do believe we need some kind of policy to help men with terrible personalities. That no diversity, equity inclusion policy has included the the curdled minds of bitter men who are looking for blame for their problems outside of anything other than their choices and their behaviors. Those people live and exist, and they need work too. And sure, I decided that the blame for those men’s problems exist in, say, Nancy Pelosi and, I don’t know, Glee. But of course, the problem with that is, all of my my efforts to blame, like academic Marxism for the downfall of the American family, forces you to ignore that divorce rates are higher in red states than blue states, and divorce rates are higher among, non-college educated than college educated people. That if you want to find people that are living by the values that J.D. Vance is trying to espouse, you kind of have to go, to the to the people he seems to despise the most. And that’s interesting to me. Wait, I lost, I broke character. You have to go to the people I despise the most.

 

Leah Litman Just say so.

 

Jon Lovett Sofa King. Sofa King. SofaKing.

 

Melissa Murray I’m going to help you out, Senator Vance. Help you get back on track by going back to project 2025. Because some of the things that we’ve outlined so far, the restrictions on, Tala, the effort to claw back no fault divorce. That’s a lot. But it doesn’t even begin to exhaust project 2025 plans for reproductive freedom. Or as we might put it, anti freedom. So we want to note a few other Gilead Forward proposals that are deeply nested in project 2025. And then we’re going to pivot, Senator Vance, to ask you about your party’s pro-family platform.

 

Jon Lovett Gilead Forward is great. I’m sorry. I just have to say.

 

Leah Litman You forgot Sofa King again.

 

Jon Lovett Sofa king, sofa king, sofa king I just like it’s like it’s like it’s an it’s an it has bite. I’m getting a hint of cherries and there’s a Gilead finish. All right. Sorry.

 

Melissa Murray And it has legs. Okay.

 

Leah Litman [AD]

 

Melissa Murray So one of the things that project 2025 does, it proposes ending Planned Parenthood’s participation in the Medicaid program. Medicaid is the means tested federal health care program that provides access to health care for under-resourced Americans. And Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of women’s health care in the country. And although it’s known perhaps best known and reviled by the right for providing abortions, it actually also provides a lot of other women’s health care, including mammograms and pap smears.

 

Leah Litman Sounds like pornography to me.

 

Melissa Murray I mean, there it is. It’s also the principal provider of these kinds of services in small communities in rural communities. So ending Planned Parenthood’s participation in the Medicaid program would actually make it harder for many women in these smaller and rural communities to access the health care that they need. Also make it harder for women who, because of a lack of resources, depend on Planned Parenthood for these health services. So that’s one aspect like, let’s stick it to Planned Parenthood, and in the process, stick it to women who just want a mammogram. There’s also a proposal to weaken the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance guarantees, and this proposal would allow employers to refuse to cover contraception if they have a religious or just a moral objection to doing so. And there is also a very ominous call for new rulemaking on women’s preventative care services, basically allowing the government to decide afresh whether the ACA’s coverage of women’s health care includes coverage of contraception. So, JD, what’s the plan here? What’s the goal like? You are very pro-family, you say, but you don’t want women to have pap smears and mammograms that might allow them to catch certain health problems in advance and address them so that they can go back to their families and raise their children. What’s the deal here?

 

Jon Lovett So two points. First of all, is it not pronounced pap smear?

 

Melissa Murray I actually believe it is pronounced pap smear smear, pap smear. A smear is a topping for your bagel. A pap smear is something that potentially discovers cervical cancer. Very different.

 

Jon Lovett This is why we need the the traditionalists. From Clarence Thomas to Republicans in Congress to people talking about the culture all to work together. Because you liberals, you liberals have built a society in which people think they should have access to basic health care like contraception, to the point that they think it would be ridiculous for the insurance they have to have through work, not cover it. This is what you’ve done. You spent 50 years making people want to have sex for fun. And now when people expect that to be covered through work, if I have a company, I have to kind of subsidize your your sex life by making contraception affordable and accessible to you. And that’s a violation of my basic Christian values. And so we’re coming after you to make sure that if you’re that you can’t get and you can’t get contraception through the government, that you can’t get contraception through work, that you’re going to have to pay for it out of pocket because we find what you do disgusting. Look, the the conservative position on Planned Parenthood is that even if they claim the resources from the federal government are not going towards abortion services, that money is fungible and they’re able to shift money around. And therefore, in one way or another, tax dollars are going towards abortion. The fact that, you know, a huge percentage of the care Planned Parenthood provides has nothing to do with abortion isn’t of such importance to them, because they don’t want to have any of this subsidized in any way regardless, right? I mean, they don’t want they want private employers to be able to deny insurance for these basic things. They also refuse. We fuck. I’m sorry. I keep forgetting that. Supposed to be yourself. Okay.

 

Melissa Murray Yeah.

 

Jon Lovett Like so, sorry, I.

 

Melissa Murray So these positions are so abhorrent that you can’t even advocate for faith.

 

Leah Litman He’s dissociated.

 

Jon Lovett Look, look, listen, I know that because you’re so strong women. I’m back in character. First of all, let me explain it to you in words that you women will understand. Because I know that you only got to where you are because of Dei policies that prevented, more qualified white men from being in those positions because of an ideology, that would allow, basically anyone to be a pilot and, and, now you may say to me, but wait, JD, because of the overturn of of Dobbs, there are Planned Parenthood’s that aren’t able to provide any abortion whatsoever. That would seem to suggest you would be okay with allowing those places to continue providing the basic health care that is a lifeline, for, millions upon millions of women. And you’d be wrong about that. And that’s because you haven’t thought it all the way through, and I’m not going to. I’m not here to explain everything to you. You know, because because, like, even though we’re all lawyers here, we all know that it was harder for me to get in, and then I am, but I am for sure smarter than both of you, because, you guys.

 

Melissa Murray Only got no GPA for veterans at Yale Law School.

 

Jon Lovett And obviously, this also applies to my wife, which, is not something I’m going to talk about with you because you won’t understand it. You just don’t got it.

 

Leah Litman That was very responsive and very helpful. I now very much understand why you would like to withdraw healthcare.

 

Jon Lovett Sofa king. Sofa king. Even just saying this, I can see in your eyes that you. You both couldn’t help but get mad at me. I like, like, even though I’m in character I feel like you’re furious, and that’s okay. That’s part of what? That’s. I’m in character. I’m going back in. I’m going back in.

 

Melissa Murray This is why you’re going to get an Oscar.

 

Jon Lovett We also believe that access to contraception, access to plan B, access to, IUDs that, what what you liberals call contraception in many cases are a form of abortion based on are deeply, deeply radical ideology. And you you all can try to backdoor your way to allowing, women to have access to reproductive care. But we’re not falling for it. Not falling for it anymore.

 

Leah Litman Yeah, because you’re just going to reclassify mammograms and pap smears also as a part of patients. Right. So one step removed or pornography.

 

Jon Lovett Listen this not it’s going to take some really smart white men to figure out how to classify mammograms as an abortion. But we’ll get there. We’ll get we’re gonna get the smartest white guys in a room to crack this thing. Not if we have even one die person in that room. We won’t be able to figure it out to spoil the whole goddamn bunch. But. But if we get enough of these white, smart guys together, I think we can do it. Well, I don’t I just don’t even think mammograms. Honestly, they make me uncomfortable. They make me uncomfortable.

 

Melissa Murray They make women uncomfortable too? I think it is actually the point.

 

Leah Litman So, maybe we can, cover more of the pro-family policies of project 2025. So while project 2025, maintains that it is pro-family, that doesn’t seem to extend to all families because this part of project 2025 contains repeated calls to redefine marriage and to marshal all the powers of the federal government to do so. So in its proposal to revamp the Department of Health and Human Services, project 2025 redefines the term family to apply only to quote families comprised of a married mother, father and their children and quote. The same section also talks about the importance of working fathers to families, so it’s seemingly envisioning working fathers married mother and their children, and it lays out some specific ways the federal government could redefine marriage along more traditional lines that seem to involve the bureaucratic and administrative erasure of queer people. One is using the Department of Justice, and specifically the Civil Rights Division, not to enforce civil rights laws, but to undo them specifically all anti-discrimination protections for queer people. Also, there was a plan to use the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice to limit the Supreme Court’s holding in Bostock, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, only to hiring and firing not to apply in schools, health care or other employment decisions. So, marriage equality happened and it’s been happening, you know, for more than ten years in some states, like why can’t you, in Justice Scalia’s words, like, just get over it.

 

Jon Lovett I’m so glad you asked. Well, you know, listen, yeah, I met a lot of, gay people, and I even consider some members of the LGBTQ community to be my friends and, and and took great care to support them when they were going through, their transition. That being said, you’re combining two things, because I don’t think you understand it because of how you got to where you are. You’re combining our discomfort with homosexuality and the gay lifestyle, with our frustration at the erasure of the difference between men and women. You know, 11. I’ve made is that I consider universal childcare to be a subsidy to a kind of lifestyle. That is, that is supported, by by people such as yourselves. What do I mean by that? Well, you all think it’s great to have two working equal parents, right? And so you want subsidies to create things like universal childcare. We support we support what God wants, which is a man who works and a woman who just like, you know, knows how to mill flour, you know, like those kind of basic skills that you all come to you naturally, that you’re fighting against, by doing things like reading books and understanding the law, and going and, you know, being on bicycles, which, again, makes me a little bit uncomfortable. And so we’re trying to get back to a place. And by the way, there’s another place in which your cosmopolitan, libertine debauch bacchanalia that you call.

 

Leah Litman A job.

 

Jon Lovett A job. You call reading legal briefs and and having, equality with your husbands, that that this is where your freedom is impinging on the rights of people to have a traditional home, because you created an economy where both spouses feel like they have to work. And we want an economy where women can stay home. And, you’re against that, and we’re for that. And that’s what we’re trying to do. And if we have to create, new laws to incentivize that behavior, that’s what we’re going to do. Okay.

 

Melissa Murray Wow. Judy, that was really illuminating and very frank and and bracing, like, a little shocking for me here at my job, to think about having to give all this up to go mill flour and churned butter. But, I’m going to put that on the back burner. You mentioned universal childcare, which is apparently just a sop to working women so they can leave their kids in the government’s care and then go off to the bacchanalia of their office jobs. Accordingly, project 2025 proposes to eliminate the Head Start program. This is enormous because Head Start is always mentioned as the template on which to build a federal program for universal daycare or childcare. So we don’t have universal daycare in this country right now. But if we were to get there, Head Start, which is a federal program that’s existed since the Jonson administration, would be a very natural place for us to start. But we can’t do that if there’s no Head Start program. To begin with. And interestingly, although it is bent on cutting, Head Start Project 2025 does want there to be childcare, so they have provided for increases in federal and state subsidies for religious and home based daycare. So this way, when you stay home to churn the butter and mill the flour, you could also get paid some kind of subsistence wage to care for other people’s children in your home while doing that. Is that the plan?

 

Jon Lovett I’m glad you asked that, because obviously, once again, you misunderstood. So so here’s what you’re missing. First of all, you should know that my conservative friends have built up a body of incredibly dubious research that says Head Start is bad, and we believe that wholeheartedly. And that dubious body of research is something that’s very, very important to us. And to insulted is basically, a slap in the face. You’re, you’re you’re hitting on the main point, but probably by accident. It’s not that we don’t want children to have access to pre-K or, or care when they’re young. It’s that we want it to be the right children, and we want it to be the right care. Our children need to have.

 

Melissa Murray Right being the operative word.

 

Jon Lovett Yes. And so we want to subsidize churches and we want to subsidize, homeschooling parents. What we do not want to do is basically create what amounts to another public education system that brings what we view as like something we need to destroy that the K-12 public school system that this country built, that transformed America and created a level of opportunity never before seen in any society on planet Earth. Yup. We want to prevent that public education system from either going younger through universal pre-K or older through access to free public college. We’re trying to shrink it, right. That’s why we have created a culture in which we try to make being on a school board or being a teacher on a school, in a school, an awful experience wherever we can. That’s why in places like Florida, we’re making teachers afraid to speak. That’s why we’re creating these bounty programs that mean a parent anywhere. It can create misery for a teacher if they say the wrong thing. And that’s why we’re trying to fight universal pre-K. Look, our children need these things because they’re going to be future leaders. They’re the boys. They’re going to the boys, certainly the boys doing well. And those leaders need wives. Listen, what are those boys going to eat when they get home at night? They’re going to have to eat dinner. And where’s that?

 

Melissa Murray Well, this is a good point. What are they going to eat?

 

Jon Lovett We need women, vibrating with frustration at being unable to use their intelligence, making delicious stews.

 

Leah Litman You won’t even need microwaves.

 

Jon Lovett Ideally.

 

Leah Litman Women’s brain vibrations will cook the food.

 

Melissa Murray JD, hold on a second. I want to get back to the food. Okay, so this is, an anti redistribution fever dream that you’ve conjured here. And a big part of it, as you have now alluded, goes right to the heart of food. Like, what are the kids eating? So in addition to gutting Head Start, Project 2025 also proposes shifting the federal food stamps program. So this is whack and Snap, which provides food and nutrition to under-resourced Americans from the auspices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to Health and Human Services, which is a little weird. But they also propose, in addition to that shift in where it’s going to be administered, they’re also planning to eliminate any means testing for these programs. So eligibility for these programs is going to be much more limited for needy families and children. So can I just ask a question? If you want people at home eating the delicious stews that their stay at home moms minds vibrated into being for them, why are you kicking all of these poor kids off the food stamps program, when this is a major way that some families support themselves and feed their children? Is this the party of life?

 

Jon Lovett I’m so glad you asked. And as always, you’ve missed the point. There is a culture of dependency, and we have people that are receiving a subsidy going to the store and buying food for their children so that their children can eat. If we take away that subsidy, those parents will have no choice but to go out, and find some other way to provide for their families. And if they’re unable to do that and those children have nothing to eat, I think we can all agree it’s the child’s fault for for the for the for the inability of their parent to provide. I think that I think it is important that we make sure we can we come that the problems of life are visited on children. Yes.

 

Melissa Murray Well in, in. Your biography, autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy. You do know that there were some hard times in your family where you did have to depend on government assistance. So is this snap for me, but not for the like? Why are you against it now, when you note that this was a major bridge in your upbringing and a major help for many of the people in your community?

 

Jon Lovett I think for once, that’s a good question. And, I think you’re getting to the heart of it, which is I have a ton of unprocessed trauma. And because I have not processed the trauma I experienced in my youth, I have not been able to transmute that experience into a kind of empathetic, consistent worldview that I could apply as a public figure. That absence, that absent that hard work, my bottomless ambition has is kind of flailing around like a fire hose, kind of loosely attached and sprays in any, any given direction. You would think that I would have developed a kind of sophisticated way to kind of imagine how we could help children in the situation I was in. So, you know, to answer your question, why have I gone from, in the book suggesting that, one kind of worldview around what my childhood was like to now as a political figure, embracing a view that all these problems flow from some malign group of of globalists and liberals, because I, need therapy.

 

Leah Litman So, it’s interesting you would think that if that was the kind of solution or need here, maybe product 2025 might propose to expand the ACA to cover therapy. But, well, I guess we’ll put that to the side for a second.

 

Melissa Murray Leah, we’ve talked about this a lot on the show. I mean, I think all of America is kind of living through a dystopia now because certain members of the Supreme Court just haven’t had the kind of therapy that they need, as indeed.

 

Leah Litman I have. We should for a like we should expand the ACA therapy to them as well. You know, I think up until this point, we have kind of noted how project 2025 is anti-family, enter rip of freedom, anti LGBTQ and just anti freedom. It’s also anti redistribution. You know the section on snap says it snaps. That’s money to quote low income people with low income in quotes. As if to suggest Snap is benefiting people who aren’t actually low income. But there are some people that project 2025 seems to be very pro. It seems to be very pro, finance pro and tech pro, and these parts of project 2025, I guess read to me JD, like an honest to goodness plan for a catastrophic explosion of the US economy. So I was hoping that you could use your big white man brand to explain economics to me. So, here’s what project 2025 lays out for the fed, the Federal Reserve Board. It says ideally that we should the United States should abolish the federal role in money altogether and move to a system of, quote, free banking. This would mean unregulated money. So giving the economy over to tech pros and finance pros and taking it away from Janet Yellen. So I guess GD like, do you think crypto is an unregulated currency that’s not backed by the federal government worked well and that we should just make all of the U.S. economy crypto?

 

Jon Lovett Yes I do. I believe that this is a great policy. I think unregulated private money is really good. As everyone who’s ever tried to use their Delta SkyMiles can tell you, it’s seamless and perfect, and and you never need to worry about it suddenly being debased or valued and, and an unregulated digital currency in which the government, cannot prevent against fraud, massive amounts of theft, international money laundering and a host of other, very serious issues, insider trading, bribery, the kind of people that do these sorts of things. They’re the good ones. They’re the good ones. And look, the law is meant to punish our enemies. The law is meant to protect us. That’s the purpose of law. And people don’t seem to I obviously, I understand why you don’t understand it, but even some men don’t understand it. That the law is meant to protect the people we like and punish the people that make us uncomfortable. And and that’s that’s why we do what we do. That’s why this section is, is here, you know, we need and we look, I think anybody who who has used Amazon or Google in the last couple of years. I can tell you, they’re perfect now. They’re perfect. This is how. This is what you want. You want a kind of unrestricted, monopolistic tech sector to slowly take over more and more facets of our life, including our ability to buy things. Including, the amount of currency in circulation in our society. Because that’s how you prevent any shenanigans.

 

Leah Litman So, just to be fair, to project 2025 as an alternative to eliminating the federal role in money, it also suggests, well, maybe Congress should just say the Federal Reserve Board, will no longer ensure macroeconomic stability, i.e., prevent a recession, that the fed would no longer address interest rates or eliminate full employment from the mandate of the Federal Reserve Board, i.e., that would no longer be their goal. So to my mind, like the plans basically ignore all lessons we’ve learned from the past 200 years of financial history. And it reads something like some tech bros dreamed up while high at Burning Man. So is this where you guys came up with it?

 

Jon Lovett Yes. It was actually, it wasn’t. It wasn’t Burning Man. It wasn’t? Yes, it wasn’t Burning Man. It was actually, it was this conference that only men can go to in the in the woods. I the name escapes me because I was on so much ayahuasca at the time, but, that’s where we come up with this idea that, you see, you know, when you’re when you’re as wealthy and disconnected as the group of people coming up with these plans. The stakes are much lower for you because you, you know, you’ll be fine either way. And the arrogance and narcissism of this of us is so great that we don’t have any respect for the incredible power of generations of people trying to build a stable, healthy, economic order, not just in the United States, but around the world. We don’t care about that, because we haven’t really thought that much about it. And and we basically take the grievances, directed at its very at its wanton imperfections and use that to build out until we get to an ideology that says we can destroy everything. And what’s cool about the horseshoe theory is it actually helps us gather, some disaffected people at the very, very, very far left to create a, a little coalition of people who want to destroy everything that they see. And, we’ll be fine, because I’ll be in Mark Zuckerberg’s, Hawaiian bunker with his cows. And then once the fire is put out by AI, by time or rain, will emerge and build the beautiful utopian, society. And that that I think you both won’t be a part of because, unfortunately, unfortunately, you don’t have bunkers. Because because your your your pea sized woman brain couldn’t see two moves ahead.

 

Melissa Murray I don’t even know what to say, JD. And again, you’re right. It’s all.

 

Jon Lovett King. Sophia. King. Sofa king. The the antipathy in your eyes. It’s, like unbelievable. Do you know how hard it is to point at my head and say.

 

Leah Litman Scientifically, I think the reason why I like the antipathy is radiating is, you know, again, breaking the fourth wall, like, these are actual proposals that these people put in writing. These are things that have basically been said to us, right? In so many words time and time again. And now they are running on this as a platform and it is fucking terrifying.

 

Jon Lovett Can I, can I just in my out of character. So fucking just does that. I think what is so terrifying about all of this is, you know, there’s always been this kind of burn it down fanatical fringe on the right. It has always been revanchist, has always been, hateful. It has always had a twinge of, or more than that of violence to it. But for decades, it was something that even Republicans, I think are abhorrent, held at bay. Right. And there was this understanding that the Republican Party was a conservative movement with a nationalist fringe. But over decades of right wing propaganda, of using those people to win elections, this became a, nationalist party with a conservative fringe and these ideas that used to live and were safely ensconced in stupid fucking conferences of like minded assholes, has now bled out of that and metastasized and taken over this party. And the kind of cowardice of people that let Trump take over became their way of operating. And it allowed this, all this stuff to flow in behind it. And now these people are in charge, and they have written this plan and they will be in the government. And so ideas that were laughable because they were so stupid and dangerous now have a real possibility of being implemented by people in charge. And so it’s this mix of people will not understand how stupid and dangerous this era was, how it was both at once, all the time.

 

Melissa Murray Do you know what would have stopped all of this from metastasizing, or at least would have caught it early?

 

Jon Lovett Ruth Bader Ginsburg retiring.

 

Melissa Murray A pap smear, a mammogram, all those things.

 

Jon Lovett Did you hear mine? I’m sorry.

 

Melissa Murray I wanted to relate it back. You’re right.

 

Jon Lovett You’re sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for mine.

 

Melissa Murray What did you say?

 

Leah Litman He said Peter Ginsburg retired thing. But like, I thought about that, and I was like, what? Bader Ginsburg, the retiring have prevented all of this. I’m not sure that it would be like it would have helped.

 

Jon Lovett Yeah, but it would have helped.

 

Melissa Murray Would have passed this probably on.

 

Jon Lovett No, listen, it couldn’t hurt.

 

Melissa Murray Just relayed it back. We have 90 days until this all comes down to the wire. Like, what do we do? Like, we got to do this, right? It’s go time.

 

Jon Lovett Yeah. I think the.

 

Melissa Murray Or Project 2025 is like our real lived reality.

 

Jon Lovett I mean, I look, I obviously can come on here and pretend to be a JD Vance, but what have been very heartening the last few weeks is that project 2025 has touched a nerve. And I and I think the reason it’s touched a nerve is because it allows the left to do something the right tends to be far better at, which is suggest to people that there some kind of conspiracy of people out to get them. In this case, there really is a group of of interconnected right wing groups and individuals building a plan for what they will do. They built it in secret. They launched it, not realizing how it would, how it would garner such attention. And now they’re trying to backtrack. But it is the plan. We know that despite whatever they say, because there’s no other group of people, there’s no other plan they’re working on. There’s no other transition strategy. This is it. It is off the shelf. And so it has it has, I think, ignited in people, for finally for good, a sense of like, wait, wait, these people are out to get us and we have to expose them. And it wasn’t something that the Biden campaign did. It wasn’t something that Democrats started talking about. It was something that people started talking about. It was saying that people don’t don’t pay attention to politics, start talking about. And so I think that now, plus the new enthusiasm in the positive direction for Kamala Harris together gives us a real fighting chance. And I think that that attention on project 2025 has been very, very good because people are nerd to Trump’s nonsense. They they have heard us call Trump radical for a decade on some level to believe it, I believe it. And on some other they go outside and the birds still chirp and the sun still shines. And so this has been, I think, a new way to really help people understand just how scary the future could be if we lose.

 

Leah Litman Alrighty. Well, thank you for joining us once again and for gamely, channeling for the most part.

 

Jon Lovett For the most part.

 

Leah Litman JD Vance.

 

Leah Litman [AD]

 

Melissa Murray That’s not all the Scotus news. So, Leah, what happened this week?

 

Leah Litman So we wanted to have a quick discussion about Supreme Court reform, since there are now more real proposals for court reform on the table. So President Biden officially announced his proposed Supreme Court reforms. And there are three. One is term limits for Supreme Court justices. Second is a binding code of conduct to bring some ethics to one first street. And a third is a constitutional amendment to overturn the court’s immunity, a decision that Biden says put precedents above the law. So we wanted to pause to note that this is kind of a big fucking deal, and I think it should be celebrated like four years ago, Joe Biden as a candidate was against Supreme Court reform. He is a long term institutionalist, you know, has had faith in institutions even as those institutions have fallen short of their ideals. You know, when he was a candidate, in order to kind of take the steam out of Supreme Court reform, he promised to appoint a Supreme Court commission that he then promptly defanged once he became president, by not allowing them to make recommendations and instead just issue some kind of book report. And that person. Right. Fast forward a few years. The leader of the Democratic Party is mainstreaming and endorsing Supreme Court reform like that is now the position of the leader of the Democratic Party. And Vice President Harris has endorsed it. So am I wrong to be kind of taking a moment to celebrate here?

 

Melissa Murray No, I don’t think you’re wrong at all. I mean, I actually said on Twitter X, whatever the fuck we’re calling it, that this was huge. And like all these people flooded my mention. It’s not you just never going to happen. I’m like, okay, well, I didn’t say it was going to happen, but I do think it is huge. Like, I think there are lots of institutional reasons why it’s unlikely to happen before an election, why it may be a hard slog to get it to happen even after an election. But the idea that Joe Biden, who was the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and knows all of these people very, very well, is now talking about reforming the Supreme Court, limiting terms to 18 years and counting, and looking for a constitutional amendment to overrule Trump versus United States shows you that even he is fucking over this court. I mean, like, that’s how bad it’s become. And so in that sense, I think it is huge. Like he is mirroring and reflecting what I think a lot of people who are by nature institutionalist are feeling like this court is totally off the rails and has aggregated broad swaths of power to itself, and this state of affairs is absolutely untenable. And so we can leave for another day whether any of this is actually going to happen. But just acknowledging that it is a massive problem, I think, is the first step and a big one and a huge thing for the Democrats to make court reform part of their platform going into an election. So, yeah, I think it is a big deal. And I think you’re right to celebrate it, even if we don’t get very far with this in the next six months or even in the next year.

 

Leah Litman Right. At a minimum, it changes the Overton window. You know, I did want to just take a note to say, you know, I don’t believe that even in the event these reforms, we could just snap our fingers and pass all of them would be sufficient to kind of address the problem. You know, that is the Supreme Court. There’s still a long way to go in getting these reforms across the finish line, and also in thinking about other, you know, ways to address the Supreme Court. And to that end, I just note that, you know, Senator Chuck Schumer, you know, the leader of the Democratic Party in the Senate introduced a bill, the no King’s act, that would seek to reverse the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling by statute and eliminate the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to hear, you know, immunity appeals from the lower courts. And so it does seem like the Democratic Party, the leadership of the Democratic Party, has kind of gotten the message and internalized it in a way that, at least for now, I’m just going to find promising.

 

Melissa Murray We should also note, like the reforms that Biden put forth are also, I think, relatively modest. Like, he doesn’t say anything about packing the court or recalibrating the number of justices on the court. These are, I think, the kinds of sort of modest measures that, you know, you can expect from someone like Joe Biden, but you probably couldn’t have expected it like a year ago. So term limits has massive support among Americans. It’s actually kind of the norm around the world for other constitutional courts. I mean, to me, the most sort of startling proposal is the constitutional amendment for overruling the immunity decision. And I mean, if that’s the biggest, he’s going to go great. But for people saying like, this is the Democrats trying to take control of the courts with court reform like this, ain’t it?

 

Leah Litman No, it absolutely wouldn’t do that. Yeah. Now we will have the next segment on another slate of possible reforms to the courts addressing workplace issues in the federal courts. But before we do that, some housekeeping.

 

Melissa Murray [AD]

 

Leah Litman So for this segment of the show, I am delighted to be joined by two of my absolute favorite people, Olivia “Liv” Warren and Deeva Shah. Liv is a criminal defense and civil rights attorney in North Carolina at Thomas Ferguson and Best Friend. She was previously at the center for Death Penalty Litigation. Liv testified to the House of Representatives about her efforts to report the misconduct and harassment she was subjected to when she was a law clerk on the Ninth Circuit. Deeva is a lawyer at kicker, Van Nest and Peters in California. She has spoken at conferences, advice courts and testified before Congress about the need for protections for judiciary staff, including law clerks. Welcome to the show Deeva and Liv.

 

Speaker 1 Thanks, Leah. Great to be here.

 

I’m so excited.

 

So, the occasion for this segment, is a rather non exciting piece of news. Which, of course, is the resignation of Judge Kindred on the District of Alaska. That resignation happened as a result of the judiciary’s investigation into Judge Kindred, which resulted in a now public report about how the judge created a hostile work environment, harassed as law clerks. And I have to phrase it this way because I am summarizing the report. Engaged in inappropriately sexualized relationships with the recent law clerk and prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office. But, reader, the allegations described in the report suggest far worse than that. The report describes how his former law clerk alleges the judge sexually assaulted her twice immediately after she finished her clerkship with him and began work at the U.S. Attorney’s office. But the judiciary’s report declined to decide whether that was in fact true, writing that whether or not the relationship. Was consensual. It was inappropriate. Okay, I am basically going to ask questions and turn it over to both of you since you are the experts here. So first, in the immediate aftermath of the report, I just very specifically summarized, you know, after that report became public, many in law Twitter expressed hope and optimism about how the fact that the court produced this report and made it public was a sign that things have gotten better, and maybe even just plain good after the earlier stories about misconduct and the judiciary’s response to it. So basically, all good, right?

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren Oh, absolutely. I am on an aircraft carrier in 2005, and there is a mission accomplished banner behind me. Ten out of ten. No nuts. In all seriousness, Leah, I am horrified that the first words out of everyone’s mouth were not direct quotes from the report. The law clerks suffered in silence. That should have been all caps, and something that everybody had at the front of their minds and was everyone’s focus. It doesn’t just say they suffered in silence, it says they suffered in silence for years.

 

Deeva Shah Liv, you’re so right. I think the first thing that some of us felt when we read this order was not excitement or some kind of hurrah that things had gotten better. It was horror and then pain about what it actually happened to these little quirks. They shouldn’t have had to experience the harassment that they experienced. But then what was a prolonged and I would say harmful investigation and the resulting fallout. And so things haven’t gotten better. I think the orders lack of focus on the clerks shows that, I don’t think that things are getting all that much better. And there are a lot of open questions that are highly concerning about whether, the this kind of misconduct is taken seriously. And I think the first instinct on hearing these kinds of things should be this is horrifying, but that’s not really what happened.

 

Leah Litman So could I ask you just to follow up on the specific responses we kind of got from Law Twitter or what seemed to be the consensus response.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren So, Leah, turning to the responses from what I would call the legal glitterati, I think that they reveal the insular and really harmful relationships between legal practitioners and the judiciary that make it incredibly hard for the American public to get accurate information about what’s going on in our third branch of government. And I think they’re disheartening for two reasons. First, people commended the Ninth Circuit and the chief judge in particular for releasing this report. Federal law required the release of this order. It was not bravery. It was not.

 

Leah Litman Good job following the law courts.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren Exactly.

 

Leah Litman Snaps.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren It was the United States Code that is in fact quoted in the order and cited to explicitly. So I’m not going to say that was knowingly misleading by members of the bar. I hope it was misleading, because otherwise I have to imagine that they just are incapable of conducting legal research. And I hope that’s not true either. But I think it’s also important to talk about why they have these commentary and why this relationship exists. It is incredibly financially beneficial to leading lawyers to have a good relationship with the judges on the federal courts, who are deciding their cases every day, and it’s especially important for them to be close and have a good relationship with Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit Mary Maguire, who is responsible for appointing case, appointing counsel in certain cases, including cases with indigent defendants or pro litigants, that might raise really significant issues that could go to the Supreme Court. So the flattery has a purpose and it’s just dollar signs. It’s always dollar signs. So as someone who was a sacrificial lamb for other people’s prestige trains, I’m not super thrilled.

 

Leah Litman Let’s start with the process that the report lays out for what happened when there was an initial allegation of wrongdoing.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren So it’s not clear that there ever was an allegation, which I think is important. It’s written very carefully in the passive voice to say that the chief judge received information. So we don’t know how or if it was simply overhearing staff or law clerks or what happened. But at some point, the chief judge received information which led her to initiate an investigation. And about a month after receiving that information, in November of 2022, there was a formal finding of probable cause of, an abusive workplace and sexual misconduct, which I think is really important. It took a couple of months to then put together a special committee, which then appeared to hire outside counsel to investigate this process. That took nearly a year from the time that the committee was assembled for them to produce a report. And I do want to say they conducted 21 interviews and have 1039 pages of discovery. And to some listeners, that might sound like a lot of information to any of us who litigate cases. This is such a basic investigation. They made a big deal about needing to go through 700 pages of text messages. I have an excellent college intern who can get through 700 pages of text messages in a morning, if that. This was not rocket science. It wasn’t a difficult investigation. It shouldn’t have been. We’re not looking into what’s happening in compliance at Boeing. This is like there’s a bad guy over there and he has a phone. Could someone go look at it?

 

Deeva Shah And I think a lot of litigators I’ve talked to and work with assume that, like discovering these kinds of cases is like the discovery we see in federal court. But the discovery mechanisms that are generally available to civil litigants in federal court are not the ones that are codified in the judiciary’s reporting procedures. So the fact that here the discovery is ad hoc, it’s not really even nearly as fulsome as we would see in any kind of federal court proceeding. Just makes this timeline really weird, for lack of a better word at this point. But also during the months it took this case to move forward, judged kindred was given significantly more grace and leeway than I’ve ever seen a litigant get in federal court. So this information is buried in a footnote. But Judge Kindred, quote, repeatedly missed internal deadlines, which required staff to follow up repeatedly to determine whether he would submit a response or whether his silence meant he did not wish to respond. And I’ll just pause there for a second, because from a civil litigation perspective, this is wild. If you miss deadlines in court, there are sanctions. There’s contempt. But then that’s not all. The order says that in all instances, Judge Kindred was granted an extension to submit a response. It just I mean, he’s refusing to provide answers. It’s not just sanctions or contempt, but at some point a judge here usually would say default judgment. Except that’s not the kind of case that we’re in.

 

Leah Litman So given that this process was now seemingly drawn out in part by the judge, I guess, like what happened in the interim as they are investigating this allegation on which they found probable cause or non allegation or information.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren So that’s a great question, Leah. And that’s a question that a number of reporters have asked the judiciary and the judiciary has not responded to. We have no idea if any interim measures at all were taken to protect staff, who I’m sure some of whom were involved in the investigation itself and must have had some knowledge. There’s no information at all about any protections, check ins, any basic interim measures that would be taken with anyone else in a private or public workplace in a situation like this.

 

Deeva Shah And to Liv’s point on that, it let’s just look at the timeline. November 2022 The Chief Judge receives information about misconduct December 2022. So the next month, the Chief Judge identifies the complaint and says probable cause existed, that Judge Kindred created a hostile work environment, engaged in unwanted physical sexual conduct, and told individuals with knowledge of his misconduct to remain silent. So we have probable cause a month later, and then the order makes it clear that employees continued to work for him for at least 19 months, despite a finding of probable cause. I mean, I am sitting here and I could hear the sort of minds exploding of every in-house counsel that I’ve ever worked with because, 19 months, while there’s a probable cause finding, is just bizarre. And it’s not just bizarre. I mean, this is the kind of thing where there are normally liability findings almost right off the bat.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren If this were a private employer, I mean, line up like the number of semi-trucks that Taylor Swift’s tour takes to move around for the cash settlement, that is what we’re talking about. And I just want to say this process, and this order was released with a self-congratulatory, press release from the Ninth Circuit talking about their commitment to self-governance and how good they are at it. This is not self-governance by the judiciary. This is not the level of governance that we submit ordinary citizens to in our civil disputes. We should want our judges to be held to at least as high a standard as, say, an Applebee’s manager.

 

Leah Litman I love Applebee’s.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren I do too. I.

 

Deeva Shah Yes, yeah.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren But I think that Applebee’s in-house counsel would be very proud of the interim measures that I’m sure they could send to a reporter upon request.

 

Leah Litman Indeed. What did the report say about why it was recommending Judge Kindred resign or be sanctioned?

 

Deeva Shah Well, I mean, they couldn’t ask him to really resign. They suggested that he resign. But the remedies here are significantly limited in terms of what actual things can be recommended or put into place. All they can do is make recommendations. They cannot force anyone to do anything here.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren I mean, they’re not judges they can’t do anything. I mean, they could pass judgment. Deeva.

 

Deeva Shah That would be really difficult. So to summarize what the recommendations were based on, Judge Kindred engaged in misconduct by creating a hostile work environment. He engaged in misconduct by having an inappropriately sexualized relationship with one of his law clerks, both during her clerkship while he was employing her, and then when she became an AUSA. And I think it was like days after she became it, you say. And then Judge and Kindred engage in misconduct by making multiple false and misleading statements throughout the proceedings. And, I mean, it almost feels like that’s what the order was most upset by not the other two workplace misconduct issues, but there are pages and pages about the sort of lies and false and misleading statements that Judge Kindred made during the proceedings.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren And I want to say that there’s a really disturbing number of similarities in this report with my own experience and Jane Hart’s chambers, and with what people have spoken publicly about in Judge Kosinski’s chambers. I’m thinking in particular about, the judge’s fixation. I’m directly quoting from the order and rating people based on ability, and his constant need to discuss the romantic relationships and sex lives of his clerks and himself and litigants with his staff. You know, I testified about Judge Rinehart’s fixation on ranking women’s physical appearance, and a lot of people dismissed it as him being an old man from a different generation. Judge kindred was in his 40s in 2020. He knew better. This is beyond one problem and one person. It’s not just bad apples. This is a systemic problem.

 

Leah Litman And like not to make light of what is like a very serious problem. But like if they have a desperate need to rate people based on their attractiveness, there are host of reality television shows, right, that are available to me to like scratch that itch.

 

Deeva Shah Yes. Might I recommend Love Island USA? But we’ll talk about that later.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren Yeah, this is the year 2024. If you can dream it, you can be it. You just can’t also be a federal judge.

 

Leah Litman Right? Yes. So that is at least some of what the report said. But I’d also like to talk about what the report didn’t say specifically on the claim that Judge Kindred may have retaliated against people who were uncomfortable in the workplace or who sought to do something about the, workplace, as well as on the claim of assault, which, as I noted, the report did not actually resolve.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren Yeah, I so I’m going to start with assault because I think we both have more to say on retaliation. As we not vigorously the assault claim found that the conduct occurred. And to be clear, for listeners, it was, oral sex. But Judge Kindred and the law clerk disagree about whether the oral sex was consensual. And the order found that the record was inconclusive. So this is a classic, he said. She said, and since we already found the judge had been lying in everything he said, we still couldn’t quite make the conclusion here.

 

Leah Litman Right.

 

Deeva Shah Yes. So even more classic, he said. She said, despite 20 pages of an order analyzing that to the contrary. And I do want to know again what Liv said. They do make a finding that the conduct occurred. It’s not. I keep hearing.

 

Leah Litman Well, eventually, the judge conceded it occurred. So it’s not even like they had to resolve anything.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren Yes. I mean, and he. I think this is something that’s really important. He initially lied about it occurring. I believe he lied at least twice and was only candid with the committee later. And then in part, it was to explain why he had to perform oral sex on the former law clerk and was unable to have vaginal penetrative sex. I’m sorry, I’m a criminal defense attorney. I’m very comfortable with these terms. And, you know, I think that. What was shocking to me in the order is that it did not include his reason that he provided that he could not have, you know, vaginal sex. And I’m sure we all think that it’s because he could not sustain an erection. But I believe the judges thought that would be embarrassing for him and chose to omit that key detail, which they seemed to find relevant to his credibility because they then accept his other positions regarding that account. Leah. So it’s really interesting that we are excluding critical details that the the committee found helped his credibility when he finally changed his story and told the truth. But we’re not excluding details about the horrific and really damaging lies that he told about this law clerk that are now in print.

 

Deeva Shah And I’ll just note, there are so many occasions that the report references where, you know, the other there are other text messages. There are, multiple things that the report says it does not get into further that seem to be pretty damaging. They only have sort of a, a choice array of what happened and what they choose to say about Judge Kindred differ significantly from the embarrassing details they choose to include about the law clerks that went through this process and actually experienced the misconduct.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren And I, I think we have to think about this order the way that we think about a judicial opinion. Right. And when judges write judicial opinions and when lawyers write briefs, we try to include all of the most helpful facts to make our case. You want to make sure you have the best facts from the record, and you want to make sure that you’re citing them. And yet, this order says there were far more explicit text messages that were not including, you know, we’re just going to include enough to barely support the limited information that we’re giving here, and we’re not going to include anything that would be more embarrassing than this process already must be for Judge Kindred. But we will include all of his obvious, damning, incredibly misogynistic tropes of lies that he continued to spin about this law clerk.

 

Leah Litman So just, I don’t want to repeat them, but like, you should imagine what the typical misogynist says about any accusation of, sexual misconduct. And then Judge Kindred said some of those things which are just like repeated in the report.

 

Deeva Shah And I’ll just note what purpose does this serve other than either scaring others from reporting? I mean, if you are a law clerk and you know that any public order may reference these basic accusations that someone makes against you in the process of lying and covering up their own misconduct, then why would you report. The report says law clerks specifically expressed significant reluctance or discomfort about being involved in the investigation, and several law clerks requested anonymity. Of course they did. They were reluctant. They should be reluctant because, I mean, look, look what’s in the order.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren And I think your point about the fear around this is so well-grounded. And before I go back to the retaliation in this order, I just want to tie this in to another order that came out this year from the second circuit. And that order, it made no finding because the judge agreed to some voluntary corrective measures, but there were allegations of an abusive workplace that were obviously significant enough to lead to a law clerk being transferred immediately upon the allegations being made, and to a judge agreeing to a number of corrective remedies. But the order didn’t stop there. Instead, it spanned almost three pages. I think it’s about a quarter of the order, kind of mocking this law clerk for making an ethical allegation against the judge, saying that the judge had accepted a jar of grape jam, and that the law clerk was concerned that that was an ethical violation. There’s like three pages on grape jam in this report, and how stupid the law clerk was for alleging this. So the order in that case really reads more as an attack on the law clerks judgment and the law clerk being, you know, a very, very fragile, flower and just not being able to withstand an ordinary workplace, even though it sure sounds like that wasn’t the actual case. And this order is doing the same by orders of magnitude. It is just mocking, people who come forward and saying, we will put any lies that a judge says about you in print, and you’ll live with them for the rest of your life.

 

Leah Litman So now I would like to go to the retaliation claim, which, in some ways, to me was one of the more striking aspects of this report. So what did the report say and do with respect to. The claim that Judge Kindred was retaliating against people either involved in the investigation or, you know, who were raising concerns about the workplace environment.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren Well, I think it’s important to, note what the report says, that Judge Kendra had told this law clerk shortly after the two alleged sexual assaults. Again, their alleged sexual assaults because only because the order did not make an explicit finding as to consent. But we know the conduct happened. And he then told her to and I’m quoting keep her head down and shut the fuck up or he would make her life miserable. He also told her friends, to do at least one friend to do the same, and to keep his head down and not say anything. So classic non retaliation. Not threatening.

 

Leah Litman It’s basically like I am threatening to retaliate against you, right? Like that’s like a paraphrase.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren Yes. And in fact, I will make your life miserable. It’s it’s not sort of what might happen. Oh, it sounded like it could be bad. So nevertheless, despite that, the order goes on to say, again, I have to quote it on review. No evidence. And again, no evidence lends corroboration to the allegation that Judge Kindred impeded any judicial misconduct reporting. I find that baffling for two reasons. The first is that they say there’s no evidence, despite the words that I just said. And the second is that there’s no evidence that he impeded any judicial misconduct reporting, as far as we can tell. And as far as we know from this order and from the judiciary’s repeated denial, and refusal to answer any more questions, there was no actual judicial misconduct reporting. So, in fact, there is evidence of threats of retaliation and no evidence at all of any misconduct reporting. And yet, our sage judges found that there was no evidence that any reporting was impeded.

 

Deeva Shah Let me just also note this is pages 26 and 27 of this order. The section that comes right before the retaliation section is finding misconduct based on Judge Kindred’s and repeated lies to the investigative committee. And then we go into no evidence lends corroboration because also Judge Kindred denies telling the clerk’s the clerk this and her friend this. But on top of that, what the order says is that there is no evidence that lends corroboration. There was no formal investigation or Jacob proceeding involving law clerks at that time. I mean, what happened is these comments happened in October 2022 and then in November and December is when we have an investigation. So I guess what this order says to me is it’s fine for someone to retaliate as long as there isn’t a formal investigation pending. Is the advice really make sure you get all your threats and retaliation out before a complaint is filed, and maybe you’ll be lucky because maybe no one will filed a complaint because you retaliated against them. I just don’t know what the standard is here. And I don’t think it’s an effective standard. It’s so narrow that it almost encourages retaliation. As long as it. It’s like laying out a plan of, like, retaliate at a certain time, and it’s fine.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren The committee has a few lines about resting on the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act’s narrow, definition of retaliation. But again, I think that is reading out almost any normal meaning of that language. That language includes the word witness, which generally doesn’t require a proceeding necessarily to have been started, in the way that we interpret this in other areas of the law. I’m with Deeva. I think what this says is judges, make sure you threaten them good and hard.

 

Leah Litman Well, zooming out from, that, bundle of joy, the geo Government Accountability Office recently released a report that is a more general climate survey of the federal courts as a workplace. Did anything stick out to you in that report?

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren I think what stood out to me in that report is that the judiciary did not cooperate. They claimed that it’s because they’re doing their own super great workplace conduct survey of approximately 28,000 of the more than I believe are now over 31,000 employees that they have. And so the Gao, the auditing office conducting the report said, oh, great. Why don’t you give us the questions that you’re asking, even if you’re not sharing the results, so that we could see if we think these questions will actually assess whether your workplace protections are working. And the judiciary stated that they were not in a position to do so. So, I don’t know what position they were in, but not that position. The Gao requested interviews with current employees, with employee working groups. Eventually, they were allowed to talk to exactly one current and one former employee of the judiciary. In addition to that, stonewalling, the report expresses a particular concern about the lack of protections and guardrails regarding retaliation that the only way that retaliation is checked at all in the judiciary is through self-reporting. And again, we have this order saying, judges, make sure you threaten retaliation enough so that there’s never any reporting.

 

Leah Litman So, I guess I would put to you like any final thoughts on kind of either where to go or what to make of this?

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren You know. I keep thinking about the piece that another Strict Scrutiny against Alexander Petry wrote after Doctor Ford’s testimony about how, the train of a man’s career will not stop, no matter how many women throw their pain and blood on the tracks. And I got a really devastating text as I was rage reading and shaking, processing this order from a friend who also clerked on the Ninth Circuit. Had a worse clerkship than I did and has never come forward. And she said, I feel really guilty. I feel like this is my fault, and I feel like if I had spoken up, you know, seven years ago when we were clerking or with you four years ago, maybe that would have changed what happened here. And I feel the same way. Like maybe I have not done enough in my unpaid time to advocate on this issue over the past seven years. It is. I feel so betrayed all over again, and I can’t imagine how betrayed the law clerks who were in this situation felt, knowing how long this investigation was going on, knowing that nobody was protecting them, knowing that people knew what was happening in those chambers.

 

Deeva Shah I think we all have a responsibility to speak up on these issues. Leah, you and I have talked about how this is a larger cultural change that needs to happen, but, it is disappointing. And I sit here, knowing that Liv spent years of her life dealing with this and that, it does feel a little bit like all of the seven years that we’ve spent working on these issues may not matter. I am a little bit hopeful in that hopefully, there are people who are paying more attention to this.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren Yeah. And I want to build on hope because I’m Midwestern, eternally hopeful. I want to be clear. I do have absolutely no confidence in the judiciary’s ability to appropriately manage workplaces and to protect its employees. None at all. But I am really heartened by two things. One is the bipartisan congressional efforts that have been ongoing since 2020, in introducing the Judiciary Accountability Act. I am looking forward, I hope, to a reintroduction of that bipartisan legislation. And I’m grateful to Senators Hirono and Durbin and Representatives Jonson, Torres and Naylor who have been working very hard and speaking out about these issues. I’m also heartened by the very thorough, nuanced and dogged reporting on this issue. I’m thinking about and Marymount and Toby Raji at The Washington Post and Carrie Jonson at NPR in particular.

 

Deeva Shah And I’ll just add here that in the last seven years of talking about these issues in a hopeful manner, the tone has shifted. I used to come. Into this and people didn’t want to question institutions. Reporters didn’t want to really question institutions. They would take the statements that institutions were giving and just move along without questioning. Sort of what do you even mean? What is the underlying, information that you’re actually providing here? That has changed, and I’m grateful that that has changed, because I think we should all be comfortable questioning our institutions.

 

Leah Litman Well on those kind of hopeful notes. Thank you so much, Liv and Deeva, for making time for this conversation. And also, of course, for your efforts over the last seven years, to try to make the workplace of the federal courts and courts more generally, a better place to be.

 

Olivia “Liv” Warren Thank you. Leah. We couldn’t do it without you.

 

Deeva Shah Thanks so much.

 

Leah Litman Strict Scrutiny is a Crooked Media production hosted and executive produced by me, Leah Litman, Melissa Murray, and Kate Shah. Produced and edited by Melody Rowell with help from Bill Pollack. Michael Goldsmith is our associate producer. Our interns this summer are Hannah Saraf and Tess O’Donohue. Audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landes. Music by Eddie Cooper. Production support from Madeline Herringer and Ari Schwartz. Matt DeGroot is our head of production and thanks to our digital team, Phoebe Bradford and Joe Matuski. Subscribe to Strict scrutiny on YouTube to catch full episodes, find us at youtube.com, slash at Strict Scrutiny podcast and if you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Strict Scrutiny in your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. And if you want to help other people find the show, please rate and review us. It really helps.