I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

But I will bear true faith and allegiance to the sea, that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.

So help me God, so help me God.

So help me God.

Welcome to the oath. I'm Chuck Rosenberg, and I am honored to be your host for another thoughtful conversation with a fascinating guest.

Kathy Remler grew up in a small city in Washington state. After graduating from the University of Washington and Georgetown Law School, Kathy became a federal prosecutor, first as an assistant United States attorney in the District of Columbia, and later as one of the lead prosecutors in the massive Enron scandal.

In Houston, as part of the Enron task force, Kathy handled two of the biggest cases to emerge from that massive corporate fraud scheme, including the successful prosecution of Enron Chairman Kenley and Enron CEO Jeff Skilling.

The Enron cases were critically important for many reasons, including that it demonstrated the ability to hold senior corporate executives individually and criminally responsible for their fraud.

Kathy later served as White House Counsel to President Barack Obama, and shares with us some remarkable reflections from her tenure as one of the youngest people ever to hold that crucial job.

Kathy Remler, welcome to the oath.

Thanks Chuck, so great to be here.

Tell us about where you're from, where you grew up.

I grew up in a small town in South Eastern Washington state called Richland.

It's part of a community of three towns actually that people refer to as the tri cities.

I always say it's never a good sign when you have to put three cities together to create a community, but that's what they did there.

I was born and raised there. I was born in 1971. My parents moved there in 1969.

It's a very interesting place because the town of Richland was actually created by the federal government for purposes of supporting a nuclear production facility, very large one called Hanford, which a lot of people have heard of.

The army came in and they started building these houses that were all sort of government issue houses, and they had letters that were assigned to them. They called them alphabet houses.

So the very first house we lived in, the house in which I was born was referred to as an A house, and it was just a square duplex.

So we moved across the street to an H house, moved up in the world to a slightly bigger house. It was about I think 1100 square feet.

Was each successive letter a bigger or better house?

Not necessarily. They just had kind of different floor plans and some were slightly larger, but these were extremely modest homes, but it was a really great community of lots of scientists.

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