In a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO, the Home’s former prime lawyer described his tenure battling a former president who examined the bounds of govt energy at each flip, resisting efforts at accountability in ways in which earlier chief executives had not. However he has religion that his work helped to stem future presidential makes an attempt to push constitutional boundaries, lending extra energy to lawmakers.
“I simply really feel just like the Biden administration and future administrations aren’t going to behave just like the Trump administration,” Letter stated. “They’re not going to indicate such ignorance of our system and assume that the manager department can ignore the legislative department. That’s not the best way it really works.”
Till the Capitol assault, Letter was satisfied that his function in Trump’s first impeachment would’ve been the top of a job already marked by extraordinary authorized confrontations. That modified on Jan. 6.
Letter was returning to the Home flooring from some basement merchandising machines when he bumped into Speaker Nancy Pelosi being whisked from the Capitol beneath heavy guard. Don’t return up there, one official instructed him. An offended mob had breached the constructing.
However Letter, in a panic, stated he needed to retrieve a number of large binders that have been filled with delicate technique and scripts for the day’s proceedings. He opted to forgo evacuating with Pelosi and as an alternative raced again to the chamber.
“I used to be the final individual in earlier than they locked the doorways,” Letter recalled.
The assault on the Capitol led to the Jan. 6 choose committee, the place the Home’s then-top lawyer charted a authorized technique that Letter now describes as one of many hallmarks of his tenure.
By means of his work on that panel, Letter secured a minimum of two streams of knowledge that grew to become a core factor of the committee’s voluminous findings: Trump’s confidential White Home information and the Chapman College emails of lawyer John Eastman, an architect of the then-president’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.
Letter additionally received courtroom fights to acquire phone information from Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward, who took half in Trump world’s plan to ship false electors to Congress. And he helped direct the Home’s technique to carry sure Trump advisers in contempt of Congress, which resulted in prosecutions of Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon.
“We had a complete monumental variety of those that, as we now know, have been placing collectively this huge, not only a conspiracy, however a complete bunch of conspiracies, to assault our democracy,” Letter stated.
Moreover, Letter performed a job within the choose committee’s determination to subpoena 5 sitting Republican members of Congress to testify earlier than the Jan. 6 choose committee, together with now-Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
He has moved on now that Republicans have gained the Home majority, taking a brand new job as chief authorized officer for Brady: United In opposition to Gun Violence. That function bears a extra important connection to his Jan. 6 committee work than it could seem, in his view. Brady, he famous, had beforehand written a report that credited D.C.’s strict gun legal guidelines with limiting the harm rioters precipitated; if that they had been capable of stockpile firearms nearer to the Capitol, it might’ve been a lot worse, the report stated.
And he nonetheless remembers the Capitol assault vividly. Letter stated he was one of many final to depart the Home chamber on Jan. 6, recalling the scene through which Capitol Law enforcement officials aimed their firearms at a rear door that the pro-Trump mob had tried to breach. He lastly evacuated at across the identical second one rioter, Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer.
Letter doesn’t keep in mind listening to the shot. However that very same night, as he was processing his personal trauma, he was nonetheless performing as an lawyer — representing a sergeant-at-arms official who had tried to manage medical assist to Babbitt and confronted questions concerning the incident from Washington-area legislation enforcement.
He’d saved doing his job proper after being evacuated from the chamber, too. Letter joined lawmakers at a protected location within the Capitol advanced, the place he continued to draft scripts to rebut potential challenges, ought to the Home reconvene and proceed the session (because it did later that evening). However he seen one thing else that bothered him — a bunch of Home Republicans have been crowded 10 toes away and refusing to put on masks, regardless of the raging pandemic and the restricted availability of vaccines on the time.
“I’m not going to get killed by insurrectionists,” he remembers considering. “I’m going to die of Covid.”
One of the attention-grabbing challenges for the Home counsel, Letter stated, is having to technically be the lawyer for each member of the chamber — even those that would later battle the Jan. 6 choose committee.
Although the place is crammed by the speaker, the Home normal counsel is usually referred to as upon to characterize particular person members in authorized disputes. Letter remembers efficiently representing Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) in a First Modification case, although she had additionally been thought-about one in every of Trump’s enablers within the election gambit.
However when lawmakers intention authorized disputes at one another — as when McCarthy sued to dam Pelosi from implementing a system of “proxy voting” amid the pandemic, or when Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) sued to overturn Home fines for refusing to put on masks on the ground — Letter defaulted to representing the speaker and the establishment as a complete.
Total, Letter says he believes his efforts helped empower the establishment of the Home by placing tooth behind its subpoenas and incomes courtroom rulings that strengthened Congress’ energy to acquire info to help potential laws.
Republicans, who now maintain the gavels of highly effective investigative committees that Letter had beforehand aided, have fretted that a number of the rulings throughout Letter’s tenure might lower towards the Home’s authority. One instance the GOP notes is Democrats’ pursuit of Trump’s monetary info via his accounting agency, which resulted in a Supreme Courtroom ruling that established a take a look at for the kind of non-public info Congress might request from a sitting president.
Whereas Letter acknowledged the criticism, he stated he thought-about that case a “main victory” for Congress. The Supreme Courtroom endorsed lawmakers’ sweeping energy to demand info, he argued, and agreed they may get hold of a president’s non-public info beneath particular circumstances, which the Home finally met in that occasion.
Largely, he stated, the rulings he pursued all the best way to the Supreme Courtroom have been a operate of Trump’s willingness to battle Congress extra aggressively than any of his predecessors. However Letter hopes that marked a novel second in historical past.
“I might hope that we’ll return to a system the place there are nowhere close to as many fights in courtroom,” he stated.