a Crazed Hit Man on the Run

 Her ‘Prince Charming’ Turned Out to Be a Crazed Hit Man on the Run

Blanche Wright was 20 when she met the love of her life. He was actually a contract killer who led her on a murder spree. And she took the fall.

 

By Michael Wilson NY Times

Even on a night of surprises for Blanche Wright, the man in the suit stood out. She had headed across the Bronx to visit her sick aunt, but when she entered the apartment she found a roomful of people waiting for her: “Happy Birthday!” Then she was introduced to a friend of her aunt’s, an impeccably dressed lawyer from Philadelphia. 

He seemed sophisticated, with a three-piece suit and a briefcase. His name was Willie Sanchez, and he wasn’t like any other man she knew. They talked and talked, and before he left he told her aunt, “I’d like to talk to her more.” 

She turned 20 years old that day in 1979, with little to celebrate. She was struggling to stay afloat with a toddler son in her own apartment nearby, hiding from the boy’s father, a heroin addict and a thief who would be out of jail soon and looking for her. 

But Willie Sanchez promised a new future. Blanche found herself pampered for the first time in her life, fitted for new clothes in nice stores, sampling expensive perfumes in beauty salons. She was swept up by it all. 

This captivation would lead, as the months passed, to literal captivity, ending in a 71-day blur of cocaine, guns, terror and, finally, an ambush assassination that put one of them in prison and the other in the ground. 

The police called them “Bonnie and Clyde,” a lazy tag that was easier than the truth. 

Blanche Wright went to prison a broken human so traumatized that she did not talk for months. She had heard of Bonnie and Clyde, but she didn’t feel like Bonnie. It seemed to her that Bonnie had been luckier. Bonnie died. 

What would unfold was a story that even veterans in law enforcement found remarkable, one of reckoning and rebuilding and redemption. Prison would be the first place in her life where Ms. Wright would feel needed, useful and — strange as it sounds — free. She was almost reluctant to leave when she was finally granted parole 10 years ago. 

Now 60, Ms. Wright agreed to talk about her past, looking back at a brutal childhood and the series of crimes from the winter of 40 years ago. This account is based on hours of recent interviews with her, as well as a case history written in 2009 for her parole application by a nationally recognized expert on women who kill, who herself drew on interviews and police reports. 

Ms. Wright now lives in a small apartment outside of New York City. The pain of rehashing those memories played across her face and stole her sense of security for days to follow, but she said she believes sharing her story is worth it if it might help others. 

‘He was my Prince Charming.’ 

Willie Sanchez made it clear he wanted to see more of Blanche after her birthday party, but initially she resisted. “I’m not ready,” she told her aunt. 

“This guy has it,” her aunt replied. “He has cars, I’ve seen him in different cars. He’s stable. He’ll take care of you and the baby.” 

Weeks later, her aunt and Mr. Sanchez showed up at her apartment unannounced. It was dark in the apartment because Ms. Wright had not been able to pay the most recent power bill. 

“This is where you live?” Mr. Sanchez asked. He left and went straight to pay her bill and returned with groceries. He asked her, “How about we make a date this weekend?” 

They went to a Japanese steakhouse, and Blanche brought along a cousin. “It was fancy for us, like nothing we’d ever seen,” she said. 

He visited often after that. He bought her clothes, perfume. She slowly, thoughtfully set aside her defenses. “He was my Prince Charming, and I worshiped him,” she said. “The first thing he did was to get me to get groomed. He took me to a beauty parlor and told the lady how to do my hair. For a long time we had a lot of nice dates. It was not a sexual thing. It was this awesome lawyer interested in me.” 

Sometimes, she said, when they were in restaurants, men would approach Mr. Sanchez, and he’d walk away with them to talk privately. They were clients, he told Ms. Wright. Other times they met him in parking lots. 

“Once, I saw a peek of a rifle in the trunk,” Ms. Wright said. “That’s when I began to get a little bit inquisitive about these friends.” 

Mostly she kept her questions to herself. Lawyers, she knew, sometimes represented shady clients. 

Then everything changed one day in November. 

He was driving her around the Bronx. Specifically, he was driving around the same block, circling over and over. Mr. Sanchez explained that he was looking for a friend he was supposed to meet. Then he pulled over and pointed to a man about to walk into a building. Maybe I’m early, he said to her. Go ask that man for the time. She obeyed. 

She approached the man and spoke, and he turned to her, and right then, behind her, she heard a “whisper of air.” The man fell. She turned and saw Mr. Sanchez holding a pistol with a silencer. 

“Willie’s come and shot this man,” she recalled. “I feel him grabbing me and snatching me back. His features were totally different, scary.” 

They got to the car. She asked him, Who are you? 

“I’m the same man who’s been looking out for you,” he said. 

A childhood lost 

A man looking out for her. Until then, the concept had been just that, an idea, as if from fiction. She never knew her father. Her mother, who was 16 when Blanche was conceived, had schizophrenia and sometimes locked Blanche in her bedroom while she wandered the streets. The girl was raised by a grandmother and violent uncles. 

Other times, neighbors would find Blanche outside, partly clothed, and return her to her grandmother’s home, where her uncles beat her and tied her to a radiator to keep her from leaving. Social workers eventually investigated and pulled her out of her grandmother’s home. She was placed in foster care with an older couple. 

Her foster father was in his 60s and owned a dry cleaners. Blanche was 8 when he began coming into her bedroom at night. She learned to wrap herself in her sheet, tight as a mummy, and kept quiet. He took her to the basement and abused her, explaining it was to “teach her what not to do with boys.” 

She told herself it was happening to someone else. “Picture a radio with knobs, take the dial, and turn it off,” she said later, describing her mind-set. “‘This is not going on with me. That’s her, it’s not me.’” 

Her foster mother discovered the abuse but blamed Blanche. When she was 13, her foster father entered her bedroom and climbed on her, and she resisted. He grunted and gasped for air, and collapsed. His wife drove him to a hospital, where he died. Blanche said she blamed herself for the man’s death and stopped speaking. The state sent her to a group home. 

The home’s mother, addressed by the girls as Miss Richardson, took Blanche on as a personal project. She spoke endlessly to the mute girl, offering encouragement and praise. There were no unsafe men in the home. Slowly, Blanche began to speak again. 

At 16, she went to a friend’s birthday party. The friend had a brother she had known for years. He invited her to a bedroom, where he raped her, she said. 

“I’m done,” she recalled thinking. “I felt dirty.” She gave up on the dreams Miss Richardson had helped her see, she said. She listened to the older women around her, who said men act that way “because they love too much,” and she started dating the boy who had raped her. 

A year later, she had a baby with him. They lived together in an apartment of their own for a time. She found needles in the bathroom and learned he was shooting up. She confronted him, and he beat her with an ironing board, knocking her out. 

He was later jailed after a fight with one of her uncles, and she sneaked away with the baby, leaving with just the clothes on her back, and moved in with a cousin. She heard her baby’s father would be out of jail soon and that he would come looking for her. She chewed her nails to nubs. 

She went to her aunt’s house: Surprise. Meet Willie Sanchez. 

‘The craziest killer I’ve ever seen.’ 

Two years earlier, Willie Sanchez wasn’t his name. At that time, he was known as Inmate No. 76-A-4463, and he was being held at the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane north of New York City. His legal name was Robert Young, and a year earlier, he had climbed into the Bronx window of a 23-year-old woman to rape her, the police said. She resisted, and he shot her dead before sodomizing her, the police said. 

Newspapers quoted a police psychologist calling him “the craziest killer I’ve ever seen.” He was 33. 

One night in 1977, 10 inmates managed to cut through three sets of bars at the hospital, escaping in the darkness. One of them was Mr. Young. Bloodhounds and police helicopters swept that patch of rural Dutchess County, quickly finding a few of the inmates, who had split up. Mr. Young remained at large. 

He was eventually arrested in St. Louis in 1978 — a hand grenade was reportedly found in his car — and transported back to Dutchess County to stand trial for the escape. In the courthouse, he was locked in a holding area on the fourth floor. Officers did not notice the jailhouse bedsheets he had hidden under his clothing. 

Mr. Young made a rope with the sheets and, while other prisoners in the cell watched, climbed out a fourth-floor window. He lowered himself to an open window on the third floor and stepped inside, finding himself in the offices of the district attorney who was prosecuting the escape case. The room was vacant. 

Mr. Young walked through a door and calmly asked a secretary for directions out of the building, as if he had become lost. She pointed the way out. Officers first noticed him missing after a head count an hour later. 

Six months after his bedsheet escape, he walked into Blanche Wright’s birthday party. 

Cocaine and crime 

“You did good,” he told her. “You didn’t make a sound. You can be trusted.”CreditBecky Cloonan 

After the shooting in the Bronx, Mr. Sanchez would not let Ms. Wright out of his sight. He made her leave her son at her grandmother’s and moved her out of her apartment. He moved her in with two of his friends, a couple named Rosie and Gene, because he didn’t want her alone. He said she wasn’t safe. 

He locked Ms. Wright in a bedroom and left for days at a time. He’d return with bricks of cocaine, which Rosie and Gene would cut to sell. 

Ms. Wright was always afraid. If she showed her fear around Mr. Sanchez, he’d explode in a rage, which made it worse. 

Rosie used cocaine, and told Ms. Wright, “This is what helps me.” They offered her a fancy spoon. 

“I tried it,” Ms. Wright said. “I just came up out of the completely trapped, gloomy feeling. ‘Oh, they do care about me.’ I felt strong. It took me out of this mousy feeling.” 

Once, Mr. Sanchez took her to a Holiday Inn and handcuffed her to a bathroom sink. He closed the bathroom door and left. Later, Ms. Wright heard women enter the hotel room and talk. She wanted to call out for help, but hesitated. The women left. 

The bathroom door opened — it was Mr. Sanchez. “You did good,” he said. “You didn’t make a sound. You can be trusted.” 

She saw one chance to get help. There was the woman who ran the group home where Ms. Wright had stayed as a teenager — Miss Richardson, whom she trusted deeply. They had stayed in touch. Ms. Wright asked Mr. Sanchez to take her to the home to say hello, and he agreed. 

Her plan was to get Miss Richardson alone and tell her what was going on. They arrived, greeted by Miss Richardson and a man who worked there, and she waited for her opportunity while the group made small talk. 

Then Mr. Sanchez looked around the walls and ceiling of the group home, seemingly surprised at the lack of cameras. “I don’t see any security,” he said. “Anybody could come in here and kill all 12 of these girls and you two.” 

Ms. Wright froze. He was onto her. “I knew then, I couldn’t allow anything to happen to this house,” she said. “I messed up.” 

Miss Richardson must have noticed her troubled expression, and asked, “Is everything O.K.?” She added, “You have this great guy in your life.” 

Ms. Wright and Mr. Sanchez returned to their car. “He said, ‘You know I’m God, right? I decide who lives and who dies.’ I knew then, I’m trapped. I can’t get out. I’m going to die with this guy.” 

‘If he moves, shoot him’ 

On Jan. 21, 1980, almost two months after the murder, Mr. Sanchez drove Ms. Wright to the home of a friend on Marion Avenue in the Bronx. The police would later describe this friend as a Colombian cocaine trafficker. The man was there with a woman. Ms. Wright sat and stared at their coffee table — an aquarium, with fish inside. 

Soon after they arrived, an argument broke out in Spanish between Mr. Sanchez and the friend, and Mr. Sanchez threw the man to the ground and handcuffed him. He held a pistol with a silencer. Everyone was screaming except Ms. Wright, who froze. 

Mr. Sanchez, very agitated, handed her a second pistol and ordered her to guard the handcuffed man. “If he moves, shoot him,” he ordered. Then he pushed the woman into a bedroom. 

She heard the “whoosh-whoosh” of the silencer. Mr. Sanchez returned alone and saw the man squirming on the floor. 

“Didn’t I tell you not to let him move?” he roared. He wrapped his hand around hers holding the pistol, and pulled the trigger. There were no other witnesses. There was a knock at the door, she said. Mr. Sanchez opened it, and immediately shot and killed the man who had knocked. 

Mr. Sanchez and Ms. Wright left. The man on the floor would live, but the woman in the bedroom and the man at the door were both killed. 

“He told me he knew I could do better,” Ms. Wright said. “If I wanted to live, I had to do better.” 

The Diplomat Towers 

The gunfire outside ended. A woman screamed. Blanche stayed in the closet until it got quiet.

She continued to use cocaine. He did, too. They slept little. Two weeks after the latest shootings, they were back in the car, bound for Mount Kisco in Westchester County, just north of the Bronx. It was Feb. 7, 1980. 

They arrived at the Diplomat Towers, two hulking apartment buildings off the Saw Mill River Parkway. Mr. Sanchez pressed a gun into her hand. “There’s people who want to kill us,” he said. 

There were two men, he explained. You kill one and I’ll do the other. She refused to get out of the car. He fumed all night, badgering her all the while about what she had to do. 

After 10 a.m. the next day, Mr. Sanchez saw the two men he was after emerge from one of the towers, and he and Ms. Wright got out of the car. 

Ms. Wright walked slightly ahead of Mr. Sanchez as the two men approached. One of the men, seeming to recognize Mr. Sanchez, abruptly pushed Ms. Wright down. He may have assumed she was an innocent passer-by, and he was protecting her from what was about to happen. 

Gunshots rang out. Ms. Wright crawled toward a maintenance closet. She said she got in, poked her gun outside the door and fired a single blind shot. 

The gunfire outside ended. A woman screamed. Ms. Wright said she stayed in the closet until it got quiet, then crawled out. She saw two men on the ground — Mr. Sanchez and one of the targets. Mr. Sanchez was bleeding and seemed unable to rise. He told her to put their guns back in the car. She picked them up and walked out in a daze. 

“I didn’t know what to do without him,” she said. 

Mute and resigned to her fate 

She headed down the street as the police arrived. A cab took her home to the Bronx. Four days later, the police knocked at her door. They questioned her overnight, and she signed a confession on Feb. 14, 1980, at 5:45 a.m. 

Mr. Sanchez was dead. So was his target that morning, Marshall Howell, a drug dealer with several guns and more than $200,000 in cash in his apartment when the police arrived later with a warrant. The two men might have shot each other, or perhaps Ms. Wright’s lone round struck Mr. Howell. The police reports do not elaborate. 

She learned the truth about Mr. Sanchez, starting with his real name: Robert Young. She learned about the murders he had committed and the jails he had escaped from. The police said he worked for an organized crime outfit called the Council, the name of a drug-dealing operation based in Harlem once run by the kingpin Leroy “Nicky” Barnes. Mr. Young was a contract killer for the Council, officers and prosecutors told Ms. Wright. The “clients” he met in restaurants and parking lots were hiring a hit man. The police accused her of being his partner. 

“They’re telling me I was this contract killer,” she said. 

She went to Rikers Island after her arrest. Another inmate said to her, “Ain’t no guns here now, hit woman.” 

“I had nothing to say,” she said. “I had tucked into myself.” 

Someone spoke for her: an attorney from a white-shoe firm that counted among its partners F. Lee Bailey, one of the country’s most famous criminal defense lawyers whose past clients included Patty Hearst and the Boston Strangler. That attorney mysteriously replaced the one appointed by the court, but Ms. Wright never paid him a cent. His fees were covered by two men she had met through Mr. Young — men who worked with the Council, Ms. Wright learned later. The new lawyer sped her through the legal process. 

And on top of everything else, she learned she was pregnant with Mr. Sanchez’s child. Five months after her arrest, she gave birth to a baby boy while shackled to her hospital bed, a precaution against her somehow escaping. The child was whisked out of the room and, for the most part, out of her life. 

She pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to 18 years to life and sent to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, the state’s largest all-women maximum-security prison, surrounded by woods in Westchester County. Soon after she arrived, she overheard an inmate say, “I can’t wait to meet her — I heard she’s a badass.” 

She slinked into the inmate population hoping no one noticed. Elaine A. Lord, the prison’s superintendent through most of the 1980s and 1990s, remembered the new prisoner. 

“She kind of shrank back into the wall,” she said in a recent interview. 

The jock strap rebellion 

She whispered her idea to a few inmates as if someone had whispered it to her, and the plan spread that way, its author unknown.

She followed the rules. Two years after her arrest, she entered the honor unit at the prison. She began attending group therapy. She listened to former prostitutes describe the gifts and affection their pimps offered, only to turn abusive later, and she felt a connection. 

“Starting to see I’m not alone,” she recalled. “I knew I needed help with all the crap in my mind. I needed to get well.” 

The inmates constantly complained about their clothing. The shirts, coats, pants and boots they were allowed to receive as gifts from family members all came from an approved list, and it was a list designed by and for men. So nothing fit quite right. 

Ms. Wright had an idea, a way for the inmates to quietly, and within the prison’s rules, showcase the flaws in the system. “I looked at that list — I wanted to come up with something that was a shocker,” she said. She found two items that were approved for inmates: a jock strap and a pipe. 

She would spread the word that inmates should request jock straps and pipes — smoking was still allowed — from their families. These were, to her, the two most visual symbols of the masculine footprint on the approved list. She whispered her idea to a few inmates as if someone had whispered it to her, and the plan spread that way, its author unknown. 

The packages arrived, and the women went around puffing on pipes with jock straps worn like bandannas. Ms. Wright remembered standing in a line one day and looking behind her, and seeing a long row of women with jock straps on their heads — “had to be at least 40 or 45,” she said. 

Corrections officers wondered what was going on, and a conversation began, one that ended with women’s pants being added to the approved list of clothing. 

She didn’t take credit for the change, but others knew. “I was becoming a quiet leader,” she said. 

‘I’m a monster. I deserve to be here.’ 

She was elected to represent the inmates in grievance interactions with prison officials. She helped start a micro business within the prison, selling cosmetics to inmates, with the proceeds going toward recreation programs. 

She became more and more involved in prison life, working with groups like the Family Violence Program and Puppies Behind Bars, which trained guide dogs to help the blind. 

“I got so much energy and joy out of helping the population,” she said of her time in prison. “I felt like somebody for the first time in my life.” 

She teared up as she recalled the work she was doing. “I began to see I could be a change for me and for others if I put my mind to it,” she said. “I was freer than I had ever been in my entire life.” 

That feeling went away when she was alone, or when she was asked to discuss her past or her crimes. “I shut down,” she said. Sharon Smolick, who ran the violence program, tried to get her to open up. “‘You deserve to care about you, too,’” Ms. Wright recalled her saying, and her response: “Move on to the next person. Forget about me.” 

She faced a parole board in 1997. Denied — not an unusual outcome for convicted murderers appearing for the first time. She returned before the board every two years, as scheduled, in 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2007 — all denied. She was not particularly disappointed, she said, because she never expected to be paroled. 

The truth was, she didn’t think she belonged outside. “I’m a monster,” she recalled thinking. “I deserve to be here.” 

A campaign for parole 

She had become close with Charlotte Watson, an advocate for battered women who had opened a shelter called My Sister’s Place in Yonkers, and who had later served under former Gov. George E. Pataki in the Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence. With Ms. Wright’s seventh parole hearing approaching in 2009, Ms. Watson sat her down for a talk. 

“I’ve come to see if you’re ready to go home,” Ms. Watson said. 

Ms. Watson wrote to dozens of friends and colleagues, most of whom had never heard of Blanche Wright. “I was struck by her honesty and her absolute feeling of responsibility and remorse for those crimes,” she wrote of Ms. Wright. “I won’t go into all the horrific details of her life or of her integrity, strength and courage, because I’m not sure that even cyberspace could hold it all.” 

Her audience responded with letters of their own to the parole board. One was from Ms. Lord, the former superintendent at the prison. “The Blanche Wright I met in 1982 has evolved from a withdrawn, silent individual into a serious, determined and capable adult who has taken advantage of every opportunity for self-growth,” she wrote. 

Another came from a retired lieutenant at the prison, who wrote, “Inmate Wright is a special case who deserves a chance at the brass ring.” A prosecutor said on her behalf, “I never once wrote a letter in support of release of an inmate.” Other letters came from different corners of New York — a state senator, a nun, a Zen master — and were handed over in a thick binder. 

Ms. Wright appeared before three parole commissioners on Oct. 20, 2009. She spoke of meeting Mr. Young. “I thought he was a lawyer, nice guy,” she said, according to a transcript. “My life was broken. Completely broken. I was emotionally unstable, mentally unstable, underdeveloped mentally.” 

She spoke of the killings. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t hurt and think about what I’ve done,” she said. She spent her first years in prison praying for a terminal illness. “Nothing came that I prayed for,” she said. “God did not want me to just go.” 

Her parole was granted. Ms. Wright walked out of prison. “Women were screaming out the windows,” she said. “Women taking out the garbage were cheering and clapping.” 

Epilogue 

At least one weekend a month, Ms. Wright makes a trip to the city. She hops on the subway and emerges from the station in Prospect Lefferts Gardens in Brooklyn and heads toward a tidy building on a residential block. She is a regular visitor at Providence House, a halfway house for female inmates who are completing their sentences. 

Ms. Wright has been out for almost 10 years. Her circle of friends consists mostly of people she knew from prison, but she doesn’t go out much, doesn’t socialize. No parties. 

She looks back on that insane span of 1979 and 1980, not with cool analysis and insight, but over her shoulder, as if in a panic. Speaking of her time with Mr. Sanchez and the terrible years leading up to it physically pain her and drain her. 

This story began when I rang her buzzer, unannounced, in November, and she considered my request that she sit for an interview. Days later, she agreed. She was deeply reluctant to draw attention to herself, but that was outweighed by the positive impact her story could have on battered women who might read it, she said. 

When she first left prison, she lived at Providence House. She works there with young women returning to society. She tells them things she wishes someone had told her. 

“Your boyfriend’s saying, ‘Oh, your hair looks better like this,’ a light bulb should go off — there’s more coming,” she said. “But you don’t see it that way. We’re flattered. We’re needy and desperate to be loved.”

The rot of corruption begins with Trump

The Plum Line Opinion

The rot of corruption begins with Trump. Mueller’s findings will only add to that story.

By Greg Sargent

Opinion writer Washington Post

If you boil it down to its essence, the two-year war we’ve been fighting over the Russia scandal has really been a fight over where the true rot of elite corruption in our political system can be found.

President Trump and his propagandists have spent those two years assailing the Russia probe in a manner designed to prop up the myth of his candidacy and presidency: that Trump represents the ultimate scourge of elite Washington corruption.

In this mythology, Trump was elected to drain the swamp of a corrupt elite conspiracy of globalists and plutocrats who rigged the economy against the “forgotten men and women" and gave away their jobs to undeserving immigrants; and who sent their children to die in faraway forever wars. Once in office, Trump determinedly set about draining that swamp; and that conspiracy of elites — the deep state, the media, the Democratic Party, and even some elements of the GOP — furiously responded by trying to overturn his election through illegitimate means.

When the redacted version of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report lands, Trump and his allies will immediately seize on it to further that narrative.

But that narrative of Trump’s ascension, and of the Mueller investigation, has always been a big lie. Whatever new information we glean from the redacted Mueller report, the enormous amount we’ve already learned about this story confirms the truth of the competing narrative: Though he is as much symptom as cause, the great rot of corruption emanates out from Trump himself.

The report — the general outlines of which the Justice Department has briefed the White House on — will reveal that Mueller decided he could not come to a conclusion on the question of obstruction because it was difficult to determine Trump’s intent and because some of his actions could be interpreted innocently, these people said. But it will offer a detailed blow-by-blow of the president’s alleged conduct — analyzing tweets, private threats and other episodes at the center of Mueller’s inquiry, they added.

As The Post notes, the report will offer “a granular look at the ways” in which Trump “was suspected of having obstructed justice." White House officials are particularly worried about what it might reveal on that score:

White House officials are concerned about damaging testimony from a number of senior aides, particularly former counsel Donald McGahn and former chief of staff Reince Priebus, according to current and former officials. Their testimony, according to people with knowledge of it, gave a clear, detailed breakdown of some of the administration’s most controversial incidents, from the firing of James B. Comey as FBI director to attempts to oust [then-Attorney General Jeff] Sessions. McGahn spoke with the special counsel for dozens of hours, according to two people familiar with the matter.

There has long been mass confusion about what, precisely, Trump’s efforts to obstruct the investigation have been designed to conceal. What keeps getting lost is that this investigation wasn’t just about potential Trump campaign conspiracy with the Russian effort to sabotage our democracy on his behalf.

This is what Trump’s efforts to derail the investigation have been designed in part to keep hidden from view.

This basic fact is a principal reason that Barr’s four-page letter summarizing Mueller’s findings was not even remotely exculpatory. While investigators were not able to prove a conspiracy, the letter confirmed two other points:

• Mueller documented an extensive criminal Russian plot to tip the election to Trump, one that included massive cybertheft directed at the Democratic Party and extensive disinformation warfare designed to “sow social discord."
• Mueller found that in trying to derail the investigation into that effort, Trump did in fact commit many acts that militated toward concluding criminal obstruction of justice occurred.

That’s what Barr’s letter confirmed by saying Mueller declined to reach a decision on obstruction while detailing evidence on “both sides” of whether it rose to criminality.

Thus, we know Trump engaged in multiple acts that skirted with criminality on their own terms, for the purpose of preventing a full accounting of the criminal foreign attack on our democracy that benefited him.

You can find this fundamental truth contained, as if suspended in amber, in a tension in Trump’s own tortured Russia rhetoric. Trump has relentlessly assailed the whole Russia story as a “hoax," by which Trump means both the conspiracy piece and the stand-alone fact of Russian interference. He has mostly denied the latter ever happened at all.

But Trump’s top campaign officials were, in fact, eager to conspire with the Russian effort, even if it didn’t amount to criminal conspiracy, something Trump himself lied to America about.

What’s more, the reporting has established that Trump doesn’t want the stand-alone story of Russian interference to be broadly understood, because he believes it detracts from the greatness of his victory. This has had consequences. It’s a key reason that Trump did not marshal a serious response to the prospect of more electoral sabotage in the future.

Thus, Trump prioritized protecting the mythos of his ascension from public awareness that his victory was partly enabled by a massive criminal scheme — over protecting our democracy.

At the same time, Trump has exploded the mythos of that ascension in other ways. He sold out on his vow to take on elite rigging of the economy, and his promised crackdown on immigration has produced nothing but mass cruelty, chaos and failure.

It is important to add here that thanks to the Mueller investigation and its spinoffs, we’ve also learned that Trump directed and reimbursed a criminal hush-money scheme to pay off women who alleged affairs to keep them quiet before the election, and that he kept up secret negotiations with Russia over a lucrative Moscow real estate deal throughout the primaries. Trump concealed both from the American people.

In all these ways, Trump’s ascension to the presidency was saturated in corruption and partly enabled by criminal schemes. And it is all of this that Trump’s efforts to derail the investigation were designed to keep from ever seeing the light of day.

Trumpworld’s attacks on the probe were all about preventing that whole story from coming to light, by repeatedly casting efforts to ferret it out as illegitimate. But every such claim — from the hyped FBI texts to the fake claims about the probe’s genesis to the lie that Democrats were the “real” colluders — has done nothing of the sort.

If The Post’s reporting is correct, the Mueller report will demonstrate why it was difficult to establish that Trump’s obstructive conduct was motivated by “corrupt intent.” This is notoriously difficult to establish, yet as Rick Hasen explains, the report might clarify that decision, but also place on the record new information that further illuminates Trump’s misconduct in this regard.

Bottom line: Even absent criminal charges against Trump, we already know just how corrupt this conduct has been throughout this whole affair. And Mueller’s findings cannot subtract from that story. They can only add to it.

From <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/18/rot-corruption-begins-with-trump-muellers-findings-will-only-add-that-story/?utm_term=.f0cbec3e6b67>

Pete Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg on How He Plans to Win the Democratic Nomination

Pete Buttigieg on How He Plans to Win the Democratic

Nomination and Defeat Trump

The surging Presidential hopeful explains a career that has included Navy service, two terms as a small-city mayor, and coming out as gay.

By The New Yorker

During an exit interview in November, 2016, just weeks after the election, David Remnick asked President Obama who the future leaders of the Democratic Party might be, and who could realistically challenge Trump in 2020. A surprising figure Obama named was Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who, at the time, was only thirty-four. In recent weeks, Buttigieg’s profile has risen dramatically, and he has collected campaign donations at a surprising clip, considering that he lacks the national profile of a senator or governor. The field of Democrats running for President is enormous, but Buttigieg stands out for a few reasons. He’s a Navy veteran, born and raised in the city he governs, so you could say that he has real heartland credibility. He’s also the first gay Presidential candidate with a real shot at the nomination. Buttigieg is a millennial who graduated high school in the year 2000 and, if elected, would be the youngest President by far. In a conversation with Remnick for The New Yorker Radio Hour, the Democratic hopeful discussed his experience as a small-city mayor, a Navy officer, and a gay man.

david remnick: Mr. Mayor, I have to begin with a kind of good-news, sort of bad-news question. One day after Barack Obama met, that one time, with Donald Trump, I had an interview with the outgoing President, in the Oval Office. It went for a couple of hours. The White House was like a funeral parlor. We talked a long time about the election just past. And, at one point, I said, “Mr. President, what do you have on the bench? What does the Democratic Party have on the bench?” And he did a long kind of Obamaian pause, and then he said, “Well, there’s Kamala Harris, in California.” And I think he kind of made a routine mention of Tim Kaine, and then he said, “And then there’s that guy in South Bend, Indiana. The mayor. I think he was a Rhodes Scholar,” he said, and then he couldn’t quite place the name, or maybe he didn’t dare try to pronounce it. What’s been your relationship with Barack Obama?

pete buttigieg: You know, I first spent a little time with him when he travelled to South Bend. He was on his way to Elkhart—Elkhart County, as you know, the R.V. capital of the country, and something of a bellwether economically, and went through horrible circumstances in the Great Recession. And so he was coming toward the end of his Presidency, to take a bit of a victory lap and remind everybody how successful the auto rescue had been, because Elkhart was doing great by the end of his term, and they had arranged for me to spend some time with him in the vehicle as he went from South Bend airport over to Elkhart—about a half-hour that we got to chat. It’s the only time in my life I wished that commute would be longer instead of shorter. And that was the first time, other than a handshake or a photo, that I’d really visited with him. But really, you know, obviously, I admire him, and really admired a lot of the people we brought in to work with him.

How do you think his Presidency fell short, if it did, and maybe led to a Trump Presidency, if it did?

Well, I think his Presidency was very constrained. In a tactical sense, of course, it was constrained by the partisan makeup of the Congress, and, I would also argue, by, in many cases, bad faith on the part of the Senate and House Republicans, who, it turned out, were not very interested in compromise or in working together. And that also created some constraints that I would say mattered not in the naïve sense of then making the wrong call but just literally how far you could go. I mean, for example, if you want to—if you wish, as I do, that there had been at least a public option as part of the A.C.A. You got to remember that it was only for a matter of months that he even had sixty votes in the Senate to work with. So, I think they they went as far as they could in the direction of progress, given a lot of institutional constraints. But I think there was an even bigger kind of global constraint that affected that Presidency, which was that it was still part of a forty-some-year era that you might call a Reagan consensus, when a conservative or neoliberal economic worldview really dictated how both Republicans and Democrats were supposed to behave. So for some of the same reasons that, you know, a Republican President like Nixon was doing a lot of pretty progressive things on domestic policy that would have still placed him a little bit on the right side of the spectrum, as it was in America at the time, the seventies. You know, Democratic Presidents in my lifetime, Clinton and Obama both, I think, have been operating in a fundamentally conservative framework, and it’s something we should remember when we think about the shortcomings of the things that didn’t happen that we wish would.

Well, you know, you said this very recently, to the Washington Post, I believe it was: Donald Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he pointed out the huge troubles in our economy and in our democracy. At least he didn’t go around saying that America was already great, like Hillary did. Now, I know you’ve backtracked a little bit about that latter bit, but you’re saying something pretty large there. What is it?

Yeah, so, I know that that quotation got circulated a lot. It’s something I said last year and I think appeared in the profile in January, and it got circulated, unfortunately, a little bit without context. But the point I’m making here is that a Presidency like this doesn’t just happen. A figure like Donald Trump doesn’t just become possible unless there’s a real sense of brokenness in our political and economic system that makes it possible, not only for racist and xenophobic appeals to get more traction but also for a lot of people who have been historically Democratic to vote a different way, almost as a vote to burn the house down. And, you know, you saw a lot of people—people aligned with labor, people who had been in the habit of voting Democratic—who were really angry at the system, or what they perceived the system to be, both economically and politically. And so, even though pretty much everything the President said wasn’t true, when he said, for example, you know, that elections were rigged, in the sense of, you know, busloads of immigrants coming to vote, obviously, that was false, but it’s not false that elections are rigged, in the sense that the districts are drawn to where most of their outcomes are decided in advance and politicians choose their voters, rather than the other way around. You know, when he said the economy was rigged, obviously, I think it’s clear to many of us that he’s among the class of people that helped to rig it. But there was also some truth to that. And so, to the extent that we, the Democratic Party, in 2016, were perceived as saying that the system was fine—so he was saying, I’m going to blow up the system, and we were saying, Trust the system. A lot of people, especially people in industrial Midwestern communities like mine, didn’t find our message to be convincing because the system really had let them down, in the sense that, you know, the rising tide rose, just as we were promised it would, but most of our boats didn’t budge.

As a senior in high school, you wrote an admiring and award-winning essay on Bernie Sanders, and I wonder if, in the campaign last time around, you were hoping that Bernie Sanders would edge out Hillary Clinton.

You know, I supported her at the end of the day in that process. I do think that a lot of the traction that he got was part of that same instinct, which was operative among us Democrats as it was in the nation at large, that there was something really wrong and really ripe for change in the system. So, in the end, I believe that she was the best prepared to be President. But I do think that that message got traction for some good reasons.

Do you think he would have won? Do you think he would have beaten Trump?

I don’t know. I’m certainly struck by the number of people who seem to think that those were the only two people they would have voted for. That kind of shows you how kind of a simple nineties account of how ideology works doesn’t really explain what was going on in the 2016 election.

Now, I’ve got to ask you. You’re two years older than the minimum to run for President. In the Presidential race, there are at least three leading candidates who are over seventy, or close to it: Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders. Are they too old to be President?

It’s not my place to say, well, why or whether anybody else should run or not. I do think that there’s a lot of energy and interest in a new generation putting forward leaders. You know, the consequences for my generation, of the decisions being made right now, are enormous. I mean, almost by definition, the longer you’re planning to be here, the more you have at stake. And when you add to that some of these questions that I think are questions of intergenerational justice, like, how can you pass a completely unaffordable trillion-dollar tax cut for the wealthiest? Or, how can you go any longer without doing anything meaningful about climate change? I think those have a strong generational angle, and I think, you know, we’ve been a party that generally has an appetite for new leadership and new faces. One interesting thing that is not intuitive, because they entered our consciousness at different ages, but it is true, if you go look it up, is that three of our last four Presidents—Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Trump—are all almost precisely the same age. They were all born in the same summer, of, I believe, ’46. And so it does feel like maybe we’re ripe for a watershed moment. But, at the end of the day, any candidate needs to be able to explain why they should be supported, not just on the basis of their profile but on the basis of their message.

Now, I don’t mean to be a wise guy by saying this, but that sounds like a polite version of a yes to my question, that they are too old, in a sense, in a substantive way.

You know, I don’t know that I can embrace that. Look, one very interesting thing, for example, that we saw with the Sanders phenomenon, is that a lot of younger voters were gravitating toward an older candidate. By the way, conversely, one thing I’ve learned in my career, beginning when I ran for mayor, is that a lot of older voters are among the most excited about a younger candidate. So, you know, I think somebody of any age can deliver a compelling message. I do think we’re in a generational moment that makes it perhaps more appealing, or more meaningful, than usual to have somebody stepping forward from a generation that’s not been represented at the highest levels just yet in America but is demonstrating leadership across the world. I mean, we’ve, most recently now, you saw the Prime Minister of New Zealand, who—I believe she is younger than I would be when I would take office—who’s one of a number of leaders, Macron is another example, in France, who is exactly the age, or took office at exactly the age that I would. And some of these leaders may be better than others. But the world is beginning to put forward leaders from this new generation, and it’s almost uncharacteristic that America has been slow to do the same.

The question you’re going to get at every campaign stop, and at every pain-in-the-neck interviewer like me, is, your experience so far, in political terms, has been to be the mayor of a modest-size city, South Bend, Indiana, which is just over a hundred thousand people. Is that adequate experience to be Commander-in-Chief, President of the United States?

So I get the audacity of somebody in my position talking about the highest office in the land. Although I think it is no less audacious, and a little bit obscene, for any mortal to look at that office and think that they belong there and that they could just walk in.

Obama used to say you have to be a little bit crazy to think that you can run for that office.

Of course, or to think that you could do it. And yet every one of the forty-five people we’ve put in there has been a human being with a certain set of experiences. I would argue that the set of experiences I have is about as relevant as it can get without having already been President—you know, to have the experience of managing everything from infrastructure to economic development to know, in a very literal sense, what it is to get a 3 a.m. phone call and how to make decisions. To be managing everything from, you know, a Parks and Recreation puzzle to the urgent question of how to hold a community together when there is a racially sensitive officer-involved shooting. From hour to hour, and sometimes minute to minute, you experience the full range of what’s expected and required in government leadership. Not to mention the fact that I have more military experience than I think anybody to go into that office since George H. W. Bush. You know, it’s a nontraditional model, I get that, for a mayor to go in this direction. We’re roughly the three hundredth city in rankings by size. But, I think, if I were the three-hundredth-most senior member of Congress I’m not sure I’d be getting the same question. Which is odd, because you can be a very senior member of Congress and have never, in your life, managed more than a hundred people.

And, in fairness, Barack Obama was a U.S. senator for about ten minutes before he got the question, Are you going to run for President of the United States? You referred to a 3 a.m. phone call. What was that?

Well, sometimes it can be about a violent incident, or a swat team callout. We’ve also had natural disasters that activate the emergency-operations center of the city twice over the course of two years, for historic flooding—which, by the way, is one reason why I view climate change as an issue that’s happening not only in the Arctic but in the Midwest. And that’s why I view it as a security issue. I mean, to have had a five-hundred-year flood and a thousand-year flood take place within eighteen months of each other on my watch, it brings home to me just how pressing an issue like that is, but also teaches you about everything from incident command to big-picture policy.

Now, you talk a lot about the concept of intergenerational justice. What exactly does that mean, in practice and on a policy level?

Well, again, climate is a very pressing example of this. I mean, there will be a reckoning for the costs that have been run up by essentially discounting the future to the point where you just view it as somebody else’s problem.

And, unfortunately, the somebody else is us. The somebody else, a generation that’s alive today, and we’ll be paying the price. So, if we were properly accounting for the consequences for my generation and those coming next when it comes to climate, we wouldn’t be having a debate over whether we could afford to do a carbon tax. We’d be having a debate over how we could possibly afford to do anything but a major mobilization around this issue. I also think it’s a lens that maybe could help us navigate the challenging questions around reparations, which are very much a question, I think, of what one generation owes to another, and how injustices or choices or inequities made in one moment in time can be visited upon the heads not just of others living in that time but of others not yet born.

But what would be your specific policy suggestion on reparations, an idea that was popularized by Ta-Nehisi Coates not long ago, and now we’re hearing this as a campaign discussion quite a lot, maybe to the surprise of many people, but not a lot of specifics about it—same with the Green New Deal. There are principles being, an energy being thrust into the debate, which is fantastic, but a lot of specifics seem to be missing. So start with reparations.

Well, I think that that’s partly because nobody has it fully figured out. But we do, I think, increasingly have a consensus that it deserves to be looked at and taken seriously. It’s one of the reasons why there’s a lot of traction for a proposal to set up a commission that would try to have a mature conversation about what this means. One way to look at it—and this is a framework, not a fully articulated plan—but what I would want to do would be to look at every inequity in our society that we know is at least partly the result of intentional, harmful race-based policy.

You don’t have to look that far. For example, there’s a really important book that came out, I think last year, called “The Color of Law.” It explains how a lot of the racial segregation taking place in our neighborhoods that we maybe treat today as de facto actually happened as the result of very specific and very racist policy choices, going back at least to the F.D.R. Administration. You would think it would make sense if resources went into creating that racial inequity that resources would go into reversing it. Perhaps targeting housing aid in certain ways, by neighborhood, perhaps, making sure that grant funding available to schools is allocated in a way that takes into account which school districts are in areas that were deliberately harmed by intentional, race-based racist policy, or maybe other dimensions that haven’t really been fully analyzed or mapped out.

But the point is we need to begin to build the capacity to do this, and, when we do it right, we can also get out of the current framework that the issue is being talked about, the very reason why, you know, the right, I think, in a cynical way, is kind of salivating for this to be more of a campaign issue, which is everybody thinking of it as a check in the mail, which makes it very hard to come up with a fair explanation for who’s supposed to get the check and who it’s supposed to come out of.

And what about the Green New Deal? Where are you on that?

So here are the things I think the Green New Deal gets right. First of all, it correctly positions climate as a major challenge, a national-security challenge, whose destructive power is on par with that of a depression or a war. And, therefore, it follows that we need to have a national-level mobilization to do something about it. The second thing that it gets right is, in the same way that World War Two is part of what ended the Great Depression, we can create economic opportunity through that mobilization. Now, I don’t know that all of these sort of kitchen-sink qualities of the way it’s sometimes talked about make sense. I’m not sure this is the place to house some of the policy things I’d like to see us do around health care, or some of the ideas around a jobs guarantee, for example. But it is the case, and I think the Green New Deal is correct in this regard, that we need to act incredibly quickly, at a scale that we’ve not seen in the country, other than other major mobilizations, to put somebody on the moon or beat the Nazis, for example. And, if we do it right, there’s a lot of opportunity in having that national project. Yes, it’s more a set of goals than it is a fully laid-out plan. But, you know, the rocket trajectories had not been calculated when President Kennedy said we needed to go to the moon. He united the country around a goal.

Mr. Mayor, the right has very successfully painted the Democratic Party as the party of the coastal élites. Now, you are the mayor of a Midwestern city, so you certainly escape that, and you’ve served in the military, which distinguishes you from just about everybody in the race. But, at the same time, you have Harvard University, Oxford University, and, an area where you’ll probably get hit from the left, you worked at McKinsey for a few years. Why did you work at McKinsey, and what do you make of the reporting on McKinsey’s work advising Purdue Pharma on how to turbo-charge—their word—OxyContin sales, and how they counselled dictators worldwide on how to build more efficient autocracies? Is your work for McKinsey something that you’re proud of in the rearview mirror?

I’m proud of the work that I did for our clients. I worked on everything from grocery pricing to renewable energy, and I would not have worked on a client engagement that I didn’t believe was ethical, as well as helpful, or at least not problematic in that way. I went to work at McKinsey because I wanted to understand how the world worked, how people, goods, and money move around the world, and I wanted that kind of private-sector experience, and they were willing to take a chance on me even though I didn’t have an M.B.A., and teach me what I needed to know about business. It was a phenomenal learning opportunity.

But are you angry at McKinsey for their work on Purdue Pharma, and with various dictators around the world?

Of course. I mean, my community has been harmed by irresponsible behavior of corporations of the opioid industry. And I think it shocks the conscience anytime that a murderous dictator can rely on the legitimacy of a Western consulting company, especially the most prestigious company out there, in order to further their goals. And I think that, you know, this firm needs to be a lot more selective and a lot more thoughtful in the work that it does. I mean, client-service firms always have a bit of a tradition of being amoral, and I think that that flows from the legal industry, where, you know, you don’t as often, I think, hold it against a firm if, for example, a criminal-defense attorney at that firm represents a nefarious criminal. But, you know, it is a little different, and should be, when it comes to consulting. There should be a higher standard because, while everybody recognizes there is a right to legal counsel, I’m not convinced that there is any kind of right to management-consulting services.

When you look at Amazon, Facebook, and Google, do you see them as monopolies? And if so, should they be broken up?

In some respects, they behave monopolistically, and whenever they’re using dominance of one market to try to get dominance in another, then I think that that means they might need to be broken up, or there might need to be a prevention of a further deal or acquisition. I think the F.T.C. should be empowered to do that. I also think, though, that we’re having a conflated conversation that should probably be two different conversations. One is about how big these companies should become, and some of the harm that comes from that. And it’s particularly true when you see some of the problems that come with just the emptying out of small communities that can’t deal with big retailers. That was just, you know, it’s something we’ve learned to talk about when we’re dealing with Walmart when it was still brick and mortar, becoming even more of a challenge when you have someone like Amazon kind of gobbling up the market share.

But that’s only half of the reason I think we’re concerned about tech. The other half has to do with data security, and data privacy, and dealing with the monopoly problem, is neither necessary nor enough to deal with their conduct when it comes to data. It’s why we need a national framework for data law that establishes the rights we have over the data we create and the responsibilities that go along with collecting that data. Europe has a robust, if imperfect, regulatory setup. We have basically fifty regulatory schemes for fifty states, and we need a national policy on this because, over time, data will continue to become one of the most valuable things any one of us generates. Yet, right now, we have very few rights over it.

Your part of the generation for whom the Internet is absolutely intrinsic. You’re born into it. How has the Web changed our culture for the good, and how for the ill? How can it be made less toxic?

Well, I think, you know, it’s changed our relationship to knowledge, the fact that, increasingly, knowledge is simply at our fingertips is unbelievably important and empowering. It’s also brought us together in many ways and created different ways for us to engage. I met my husband through an app that talks to social-networking sites, and that’s how we were sort of suggested to each other, and it turned out to be a great match. There’s a lot of tremendous good that can come, obviously, from the way our relationship, the information in my lifetime has been transformed. And, of course, a lot of harm. You know, I remember when Mark Zuckerberg visited South Bend, one of the things I—

A friend of yours from college, right?

I hadn’t known him in college, but I met him after that, and he was trying to, he wanted to go to every state in the country, and so I made sure that I encouraged him to visit South Bend, hoping he would take a look at our tech sector. But he was interested in criminal-justice reform, and so I took him to the juvenile-justice facility here. More than one of the kids—inmates—that we met there told him that they wished that social media didn’t exist, because it was through a fight or something that started on social media that their lives had taken a bad turn.

Do you agree? Do you wish that social media didn’t exist?

Well, I can’t wish that, because I wouldn’t be married to my husband. Look, again, you know, it’s like saying, is text a good or a bad idea? You know, should we or should we not have images? This is a thing that is so suffused in everything that we do that of course it can do good and bad. The question is, what are we going to do about it? And, you know, these solutions can’t come from the tech companies themselves. I mean, right now, we’re in a world where anytime a large company, a Facebook or a Google, makes a corporate-policy decision, they’re actually making a public-policy decision, because of the power they have and the influence they have. But more than anything, because the policy world has failed to create the left and right boundaries they’re supposed to work in—and I’m not sure they want to be dealing with these things, either. So, this is something that needs to be said by democratic means, not by corporate means. And, you know, the spectacle of tech executives being quizzed by legislators who make it abundantly clear they don’t even understand the thing they’re supposed to be regulating basically sets us up for failure, in terms of how this is supposed to work in our society.

You mentioned your husband. There was recently an article in Slate that I found actually quite confounding. But let me quote it for you: “Buttigieg, for instance, would register on only the most finely tuned gaydar . . . That doesn’t mean he’s not gay enough—there’s really no such measure. It just means that he might not be up against quite the same hurdles that a gay candidate without such sturdy ties to straight culture would be.” Now, you’re going to get written about every which way till Sunday in all different directions, and, when you read something like that, what do you make of it?

Well, I don’t love it. It’s a, um . . . I get it. I remember some of the same kind of strange conversations happening around the historic quality of President Obama’s candidacy and the Presidency.

Meaning the critique that he wasn’t really black. That kind of thing.

Yeah, you remember all that kind of stuff about whether his black experience counted the same as other people’s black experience. I can only speak to my own experience, and ours, and I’m not interested in getting into a kind of oppression Olympics over, you know, who has suffered in which ways for being gay, or any other kind of minority. I am interested in tapping into the experience that Chasten and I have had as a happy, married couple but also as people who know what it’s like to be othered, and to hopefully use that as some basis for solidarity, not only with other members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community but anybody who, for whatever reason, has experienced exclusion, or wondered whether they belong. And I think there’s a lot of potential for our experience to help. I know there is because I talk to people who have been impacted in some way just by the fact of me getting into the field. And, you know, people are going to write what they’re going to write. You can’t get too absorbed in it, or else you lose your mind.

Now, you were not out, at least publicly, until a very few years ago. As an ambitious person in public service, how did that decision work? Why the reluctance, if that’s what it was?

Well, I first had to overcome a lot of personal reluctance to just admitting this simple fact about myself, although I got over that somewhere in my twenties. Then, once I did, as a friend pointed out the first time, I came out to anyone, you reminded me that I had really made it easy on myself professionally, because there were two parts to my career then. One of them was public service in Indiana, and the other one was military service, as an officer in the Navy Reserve. And so, both of those were—one of them by law, one of them just de facto—both of those were professional choices that were strictly incompatible with being an out gay person. It was a matter of law that I could not serve in the military and be out. And it was at least conventional wisdom that I could either be an elected official in Indiana or I could be out, but I could not be both. And so that helped motivate me to drag my feet on coming out.

What changed all that? Well, two things. One, as I grew older, I realized that I couldn’t go on like that forever. Then the thing that really put me over the top was the military deployment, where I took a leave from serving as mayor to go serve overseas. And it just, something about that really clarified my awareness of the extent to which you only get to live one life and be one person.

Well, tell me about that deployment. What happened?

Well, part of it was just the exposure to danger, even the fact of writing the letter that I wrote to my family before I left, just in case.

What did the letter say?

Well, a lot of it was about why I felt that my life, how I felt my life fit together, and why I didn’t want them to think that I’d been cheated if I didn’t come back, because I had such a full life up till then, I was thirty-two, thirty-three. But, at the same time, I realized that there was something really important that was missing, and I began to feel a little bit humiliated about the idea that I could, my life could come to an end, and I could be a visible public official and a grown man and a homeowner and have no idea what it was like to be in love.

And did you come out to your parents in that letter, to your family?

No. I did that after I came back. Pretty soon after I came back.

So, you were deployed to Afghanistan, which is the longest war in American history. How does that conflict finally end? How should it end? And how would you assess it?

Well, I think it’s ending. I mean, this is maybe where the debate needs to go, is not whether it should end but will it end well or badly. And what does that actually mean? Because one thing that the American left—it seems now that the American right, the Afghan government, and the Taliban all seem to want is for us to leave. To me, what success looks like is not to believe that Afghanistan can become a unified, Western-style democracy with a developed-country economy just yet. I think success in the American interest is some level of assurance that it’s not going to be a place that again leads to an attack on the American homeland. I think the international community has an interest also in human rights in Afghanistan, and especially the rights of women. And we should participate in support for that. But in terms of what would motivate U.S. military . . . continued U.S. military involvement? We’ve got to be more careful and more serious about the thresholds for us to commit troops abroad. And, you know, this is a conflict that you can be old enough to enlist now and have not even been alive on 9/11. When I was leaving, in 2014, I thought I was one of the last troops there. I was helping to shut down the unit that I had been part of, or, at least, its presence in my part of the country.

So, you know, to believe that I was part of the tail end of it five years ago and it’s still going on tells us that we have not succeeded in figuring out how to get out, and the time has come more than once.

Mr. Mayor, President Trump has consistently labelled China as our biggest geopolitical foe, particularly on trade. And you represent a town, South Bend, Indiana, which has suffered major deindustrialization. That was probably your chief mission, to figure out what to do about that. How do you feel about the President’s use of tariffs? Surely that’s hit South Bend.

It has, and it’s not been terribly helpful, because we have, in the South Bend metro area, more companies that use and purchase steel than we have companies that make it. And various businesses were anxiously watching the rules come out to figure out whether their product did or didn’t qualify for the different tariffs that are being created. Even our conservative and normally Trump Alliance member of Congress for this district broke with the President about tariffs, because it was not good for our economy. It also speaks, though, to the broader issue, which is that, you know, most of what accounts for the changes that have happened to our part of the industrial Midwest is technological. Some of it has to do with trade, but, look, it’s just easier to blame another country, or to blame immigrants, than it is to confront some of the faceless but profound changes that have come our way—to do with, for example, technology and automation. But that’s simply smoke, and mirrors compared to—if it becomes an excuse to not face the deeper and tougher issue.

I’ll tell you something else about China. You know, I do believe that China is emerging as a competitor, not just a competitor but, in many ways, an adversary. And, you know, the Chinese model is also being held up globally as an alternative power model, and I very much believe in our model versus theirs. But I will say this. You know, there’s an assembly line that was part of AM General, which makes Hummers, where they got a contract deal for three years on what used to be an old commercial line to manufacture Mercedes R-class vehicles. Now, this is an S.U.V. that is only sold in Asian markets. And so what you had was American autoworkers—union autoworkers, by the way—making German cars going to Chinese customers. And when that contract ran its course, the line was sold to another company, which is Chinese-owned. It’s a startup based in Silicon Valley, and they make electric vehicles, again, employing, by the hundreds, American union autoworkers.

Now, you can’t do everything first as a President. What would be your signature first-priority policy as the holder of that office? What would you really look at to spend your political capital on right away?

Democratic reform. The condition of our democracy is diminished, and the worse it gets, the harder it will become for us to fix anything else. Any of the top issues we care about, of which I think climate is the most pressing. So, you know, for the rest of my life, our system of government will be probably inadequate to the moments we face unless we fix it.

And so we’re talking voter suppression, redistricting, finance . . .

Yeah, I mean, certainly the contents of H.R. 1 would be a good place to start. We also need to be, I think, considering structural reform. So, in addition to redistricting and money in politics and voter suppression, I think we need to look at whether we’re going to continue to allow D.C. not to be a state. We should look at whether the Supreme Court could be reformed so that it is less political. And the Senate’s going to have to figure out whether the filibuster is appropriate to the modern environment. I suspect it is not. You know, we really need to look at the big questions. And it is entirely possible that the House of Representatives has the wrong number of representatives, that the U.S. Supreme Court has the wrong number of Justices, and that the United States has the wrong number of states.

I think you’re looking at a constitutional convention, aren’t you?

Maybe a convention, maybe a series of amendments, like we had in the late nineteen-seventies, many of them spearheaded by Indiana senator Birch Bayh. I mean, this stuff is not crazy out of left field; this is something that the United States has routinely done in every era except the one that I’m living in.

But the memories of the court-packing debacle under Franklin Roosevelt are, at least for historians, fresh. How do you propose rationalizing increasing the size of the Supreme Court?

Well, it’s not simply about adding to it in order to take it toward the left because it’s too conservative, even though I do think it is too conservative. It’s about a structural reform that will make that body less political. We can’t go on like this, where every vacancy turns into an apocalyptic ideological battle. So there are many options for reform. I’m not wedded to one of them, although the one I think is the most attractive—which I think will be discussed in a forthcoming Yale Law Journal article—would be to have fifteen members, but only ten of them selected by the traditional political process, and the other five selected in a process which requires the other ten to agree unanimously. There are other, perhaps less structurally complex ideas, like having it become a rotation off the appellate bench. But my point is, whatever mechanism we choose, we need to make sure that this body—which, by the way, I think has been restructured something like six times, or at least had its size changed six times in U.S. history—we need to make sure that we have a structure that stops this trajectory toward coming to be viewed as a nakedly political entity.

So, this collection of reforms and changes is what you would put your political capital on far before, say, a green initiative, an environmental initiative?

The way I would put it is you need to set these democratic reforms in motion right away. And then I think the top individual policy issue to take up is climate. But we can’t, I think we’ve for a long time known that some of these structural problems—you know, the Electoral College is another one—have diminished our democracy, but we’ve tolerated it because it always felt like something else was more urgent. What we’re realizing is we are totally sclerotic in our ability to manage even the most urgent issues. We have eighty or ninety per cent of Americans believing that we should at least do universal background checks, but Congress can’t make it happen. When immigration reform, the most divisive issue of our moment, is actually the subject of an American consensus, if you look at the popularity of comprehensive immigration reform along the lines of what once passed in the Senate but couldn’t get through the House. When you think of our total inability to have a debate over who’s got the best plan for climate change because folks in Washington are still arguing over whether there even ought to be a plan. What you see is that the center of gravity of the American political system is no longer within shooting distance of the center of gravity of the American people. The longer that goes, the more twisted and dangerous outcomes you get. I’m worried that this could eventually lead to the instability that could even cause political violence. And I believe it’s absolutely helped lead to the Presidency we’re living with now.

It’s extremely early in the race. But you’ve got a lot of energy on your side, even though it’s a very crowded field. Let’s think ahead to post-nomination. Let’s say that you are nominated, and you are pitted against one of the most unpredictable minds, let’s put it this way, and debaters in the history of American politics. How do you propose to defeat Donald Trump on a debate stage, and in general? What’s the wrong way to go about it, and what’s the right way to go about it?

Well, the wrong way to go about it is to be focussed on him and how to defeat him, to concoct in your mind the masterful zinger that is going to lay flat on the debate stage, because it just doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t matter, in some regards, what you say. Any energy or attention, including critical energy or attention, that comes his way is something that he absorbs and feeds off of, it becomes bigger Trump. So, if you really want to defeat him, you have to create an environment where it’s not all about him. If you’re just thinking up the green line to get him at the debate, you’re setting up a framework where it’s almost as though he’s the one you’re trying to impress. What we need to do is quickly, effectively, and flatly correct any lies that he tells, and confront any bad policies he puts forward, and then move on.

But the press—look, wait a minute—the press has been correcting these lies at a rate of thousands every few months, to very little effect, it would seem sometimes.

Exactly. Because that’s just table stakes. That doesn’t get the job done. You have to do it because you can’t fail to do it. But that’s not how you’re going to win. How you are going to win is to put forward something better, and to remind people that this Presidency is going to come and go, that it’s not all about him. It’s one of the reasons I talk a lot about my concern for what the world will look like in 2054, when I come to be the age he is now. We need to treat this Presidency as a symptom, not a cause. And, you know, even though it can be mesmerizing, as many grotesque things are, at the end of the day, pointing out all the ways in which he is terrible does not amount to a message. A message is something that would make as much sense ten years from now, or in 2054, as it does today, which means it can’t revolve around the personality or the deficiencies of the President.

In that context, and not in the spirit of insult but in the context of learning something, what was the biggest mistake that Hillary Clinton made in her campaign, or the top three, anyway?

Well, again, I think the biggest problem that we had—and this wasn’t just tactics on the part of the campaigns, this was also partly a consequence of the media environment—but the biggest problem was the extent to which we were regarded as defenders of the system. And so, even though we had better policies, our policies were perceived as sort of what might be called a framework-reproducing activity that was going to roughly keep things the same. And people were so disgusted with the way things had worked out for them that they wanted to burn the house down. I mean, one way to think about it is, how do you get a so-called economic-anxiety election when you’re under conditions of statistical full employment? And why do those appeals, naked appeals, sometimes, to xenophobia and racism, work on the very same voters who made the difference for Barack Obama? And all of this adds up to an environment where anything that looked insider, or anything that looked, frankly, overly familiar, and certainly anything that looked committed to the way things currently work in our democracy or our economy was not going to be convincing. And, look, it’s easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to point to these problems. I don’t pretend to have been sitting there at the time waving my arms saying that we needed to do all these things differently. But the whole point of hindsight, now that we have it, is that we recognize that we can do some things differently in 2020. And while there are a number of reasons, many of them nefarious, why this President won, we also absolutely must recognize that our strategy in 2016 was not flawless—and, more than that, that it should never have been close. That, you know, a President like this should never have come within cheating distance of winning. And yet here we are.

How do you appeal to those millions of voters who voted for Barack Obama and then voted for Donald Trump? Why did they do that? And how do you appeal to them?

Around here, some of those same people also voted for Mike Pence and voted for me. I think it is about making sure that it is not about him or about us but, rather, about them. In other words, if your message is all about candidates, whether it’s the candidate you’re for or the candidate you’re opposing, a lot of voters will say, Nobody’s talking to me. And we need to make sure that everything we care about is expressed not only in terms of our highest values but also in terms of everyday outcomes. This is why, in my opinion, the Affordable Care Act, for example, went from being a toxic issue for Democrats in 2010 to being the winning issue for Democrats in 2018. What changed? What actually happened is people could see how it worked for them. And you saw ordinary Americans at town halls getting in the faces of members of Congress, describing their own lives and the impact that this policy had had on them. Because, it turns out, it’s just a lot harder to lie to somebody about their own life than it is to lie about some mysterious group or theoretical future. So, we need to be more grounded. We need to keep it closer to the everyday impact—which, by the way, also philosophically ought to be the way we can justify everything we do. Otherwise, we shouldn’t be doing it.

Mr. Mayor, you had a political decision to make, and it was a complicated one, whether to run for President, whether to run for governor in the same year, 2020, or maybe the Senate down the line, in 2022. Why did you decide to go for the whole ball of wax?

Well, I’m as surprised as anybody. Especially if you were to ask me two or three years ago to find myself in this situation now. I never believed in running for an office so that you can run for some other office. I think the discernment process of running for office has to do with mapping out two things: one, what the office calls for, and two, what you bring to the table. I ran for mayor, for example, at a time when there was a crisis of confidence in the city; it seemed to be bleeding its youth, and there was a lot of controversy over whether the city was even open for business. And I thought, I’m a young person who believes in this a city with a business background. I could do some good here. The process, I think, by the way, has also led me to not run for office more than once, including some opportunities to run for Congress. I think the process, ultimately, is about figuring out what’s needed. And I think what’s needed right now is something completely different. But still, also having some regard for experience in government, recognizing that, maybe today, experience in Washington is not the best or only proxy for meaningful experience in government. Coming from a region that my party seemed to have lost touch with a little bit. Representing a generation whose time has come, and offering a message that I think is a little more willing to consider the structural and profound questions at stake in the tectonic shift in our country. We’re not just facing another election; we’re facing a period between two eras in American politics. What I was describing earlier is a sort of Reagan consensus that explained the behavior of Presidents of both parties for the last forty years, and whatever is next—and whatever is next could be really enlightened, and it could be really ugly. But that’s going to be decided in these years and these decisions. And I find, as much as I admire so many of the others, I find that I am not like the others. And one of the things that’s different about my approach is a willingness to consider these bigger structural questions. Even at risk of sounding a little too bold to be part of a tradition-laden discussion like that, about the American Presidency. So, I didn’t see an opportunity to make the same kind of profound difference running for governor or running for Senate. And so, instead, I will either continue down the path to the Presidency or find some other way to make my myself useful if voters have a different idea for me.