An Interview with Merrick Garland, and Susan Orlean on Animals

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2021

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At The New Yorker Festival, the renowned investigative journalist Jane Mayer asked Attorney General Merrick Garland about the prosecution of January 6th insurrectionists, the threat of domestic terrorism, and what the Justice Department can do to protect abortion rights. Plus, the staff writer Susan Orlean talks with David Remnick about her obsession with animal stories, and her new book, “On Animals.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.9	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. No Attorney General of the United States has ever had what you'd call an easy job.
0:19.2	But Merrick Garland's brief is maybe something else. Donald Trump tried
0:23.8	his hardest to make the Justice Department into his personal legal team. So Garland now has to
0:29.1	reestablish independence at the agency, but he can't exactly avoid politics. He has to decide,
0:35.3	for example, how to prosecute the January 6 rioters who try to
0:38.6	overturn the election results. He also has to figure out how prosecutors should handle
0:43.2	Trump officials who may have broken the law. He can hardly avoid the current legal battle over
0:48.8	abortion that's engulfed the country. Merrick Garland spoke with the New Yorkers Jane
0:53.4	Mayer last week as part of the
0:55.1	New Yorker Festival. So you've been in this job now for more than six months. After having spent
1:03.6	25 years at your previous job, how do you like it? How does it compare? Well, you're right. I seem to
1:10.5	spend a long time in my jobs. I think we can
1:13.6	be assured I will not be spending 25 years in this one. One of the things I gave up was life
1:19.6	tenure. I loved being a judge. I really did. But I love this job as well. There are definitely
1:26.7	differences. Some of the advantages of this job as well. There are definitely differences.
1:35.2	Some of the advantages of this job are I no longer am barred from issuing advisory opinions,
1:40.9	which I could not do as a judge, and now I could do six advisory opinions before breakfast.
1:41.8	Nobody stops me.
1:45.2	The other thing and quite important is that in the previous job, I had to wait until an important case or even an interesting case came before me.
1:51.4	And now, if I read something in the New Yorker online in the morning, and it strikes me as
1:56.3	the government's doing something wrong or the country is doing something wrong, somebody
	...

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