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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, we are lucky enough to have Jane Mayer from The New Yorker with something that I think will be really interesting. Jane got to interview the United States Attorney General, Merrick Garland, he doesn't sit for many interviews, at The New Yorker Festival last week. We'll play a couple of clips from that.

We'll also touch on Jane's recent article in The New Yorker called, The Big Money Behind the Big Lie. "Donald Trump's attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs," is the subhead of that article. Jane, always great to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on with some thoughts after your time with Merrick Garland.

Jane Mayer: Thanks for having me.

Brian: Let's play one of the clips right away. You asked him about his lawsuit trying to stop the almost total Texas abortion ban. His answer was interesting to me in part because he went beyond the issue of abortion rights to also include broader consequences that he sees for the Constitution and for American democracy. Here's Merrick Garland.

Merrick Garland: Women are both unable to get services 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. It doesn't take long to think about what the consequences for American democracy are if states start deputizing private bounty hunters to prevent citizens from exercising their constitutional rights.

Brian: Private bounty hunters. Jane, you want to remind us of the bounty hunters provision Garland was referring to, and do you understand his concern for issues beyond abortion rights that he's getting at?

Jane: Yes, sure. What he's talking about is that Texas passed the legislature. They passed this law to get around the federal constitutional right of a woman to be able to obtain an abortion. What they did was they passed a state law and they said that any citizen could make, basically, a citizen's arrest and bring information about a Texas resident who broke that law.

Basically, they've done a runaround around the federal laws and around the Constitution in Texas this way. What Merrick Garland was saying, and it was interesting because he's a very soft-spoken man, but you could hear in that voice, this was something he was really passionate about. He's saying, "Watch out. This mechanism for going around the Constitution can abridge people's rights all over the country on all kinds of issues." It's dangerous is what he was saying.

Brian: I guess we could conjure in our minds, even though it's not happening yet, how somebody could be empowered with a bounty hunter law to report somebody for what they think is a free speech that what we might consider exercising their constitutional right to free speech or their constitutional right to vote.

The bounty hunters thing, that certainly crosses a line that I don't think we've seen before in modern times anyway with respect to the way people are arrested and rewarded. I'm thinking about your article, The Big Money Behind the Big Lie. That, of course, is about Donald Trump's stolen election lie, but do you also see the influence of conservative deep pockets in the abortion rights battle in places like Texas and Mississippi?

Jane: Oh, absolutely. There are national groups that are ginning up lots of these fights and they are-- it's interesting as someone-- I'm a reporter that takes a lot of time looking at the money. What I keep seeing are the same groups and, really, the same funders behind many of the most conservative and really radical concept challenges to democracy and to basic constitutional rights.

You see the same groups and the same money litigating on all of these issues all over the country. It has to do with challenging things like voting rights. It's certainly challenging abortion rights, challenging gay rights, challenging trans rights. All kinds of rights are being challenged by the same groups and they're funded by the same, really, not that many very, very wealthy families often, family foundations. There's a network out there.

Brian: Right, and interesting that one little phrase and that answer you just gave, "not that many." You're talking about a few very rich, very conservative people or families with an outsize influence?

Jane: Yes. What you've seen, I think, is how important money, how overwhelming money has become in politics so that a handful of very, very wealthy families with an inordinate amount of money can really overwhelm public opinion on many things. We think of ourselves as a democracy where every man has an equal right and equal vote.

You see public opinion on so many issues like, for instance, on gun safety and gun control. The public wants to see more controls on who can get guns and how they're used, but you see private money overwhelming that. Same thing with abortion rights. The public overwhelmingly favors a woman's right to choose and make those decisions herself. You see groups that are limiting it.

Brian: Jane Mayer from The New Yorker is with us with some clips of US Attorney General Merrick Garland, who she interviewed in a rare one-on-one interview for him at The New Yorker Festival last week. Before we play another clip, Garland made very clear to you that unlike with Trump and his attorneys general, he's back to the traditional role of attorney general as the people's lawyer, not the president's lawyer, and yet he told you he meets with Joe Biden often.

Suits like the one against the Texas abortion law that we were talking about clearly reflect a certain view of the Constitution that Republican attorneys general in many states would disagree with. Is it clear to him and is it clear to you where the line is between political views and being the attorney general for all the people?

Jane: That's a great question. To me, it's not all that clear. I think it's a hard line for Merrick Garland to walk. He's gone from being a judge where he really seriously wanted to be non-political. He's a very decent man with a lot of integrity into this job of being attorney general. He's appointed by a democratic president. How do you uphold the law in this country at this divided time without imposing some political judgment?

It's a conundrum. I think he's struggling with it a bit and he's getting a lot of criticism for it, particularly for his handling of the January 6th prosecutions, where the people who were anti-Trump really want to see him be more aggressive and crack down on what they see as corruption during the Trump era and the political assault on the Capitol that they feel that Trump really whipped up.

They want to see prosecutions that are not just of the foot soldiers. They want to see the field marshals being prosecuted for January 6, including Trump. They're frustrated that they haven't seen the Justice Department going for that yet. I'm not sure it means it won't happen, but Garland is being very careful to say, "We're not doing this for politics. We're just looking at the law."

Brian: Even as many Trump supporters say, the people who have been charged are political prisoners. Let me play one more clip from your interview with Attorney General Garland at The New Yorker Festival. It builds on what you were just saying because he had told you that it's kind of liberating to be an advocate who can issue advisory opinions, which he couldn't do as a judge. He continued like this.

Merrick: The other thing quite important is that in the previous job, I had to wait until an important case or even an interesting case came before me. Now, if I read something in The New Yorker online in the morning and it strikes me as the government is 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 day.

Brian: Jane, from that clip or anything else, did you get a sense of Merrick Garland's temperament and how it suited or how he has adjusted it to fit the job of attorney general as opposed to a judge?

Jane: Well, I'm delighted to hear that he's getting his ideas from reading The New Yorker in the morning. That's great, New Yorker online. I think he's a very deliberate, very cautious person, really. That is so much his character. He also said that what he misses about being a judge was he used to have immunity and he no longer has that. He's taking all the blame in the world that you get as being the top guy for the rule of law in America. I think he's a cautious person. Maybe that's a good thing at this time because we've got a lot of people who are at each other's throats.

Brian: Let's conclude with a part of that answer that you picked up on and that I certainly picked up on, referring to reading something in The New Yorker in the morning and being able to act on it sometimes by the end of the day. The attorney general doesn't have the resources to find every major abuse of people's rights or other issues that he might potentially deal with. It really reflected the importance of journalism to our democracy, didn't it?

Jane: Well, it did and he's actually been a great-- he's made a move to really defend journalism in a serious way, which is he has stopped the practice that Trump had, and earlier presidents have had also, of subpoenaing journalists' notes in order to do leak investigations. He's put out a new policy that says he thinks the free press needs to be defended, not dragged into court to figure out who the sources are.

He's actually doing quite a few things. He's cracking down on what he sees as abuse of voter rights. He's entered into this abortion case against Texas. They are prosecuting a lot of the low-level people on January 6. I think what many people are waiting for is to see if it goes up like a mafia prosecution. Are they going to go up the chain of command and get to the top people around Trump and maybe Trump himself in that? We just don't know yet. He, of course, wouldn't answer it when I tried.

Brian: Jane Mayer, New Yorker staff writer, author of the book Dark Money, and now interviewer of US Attorney General Merrick Garland. Jane, thanks so much for sharing some of it with us.

Jane: So great to be with you.

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