Targets of investigations, leaks to the press, civil rights, police practices, violent crime prevention, re-entry programs for ex-offenders…
By all accounts, Barbara McQuade the newly confirmed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, nominated by President Barack Obama, is not only a seasoned federal prosecutor, but also a rising star. After serving as assistant U.S. Attorney on 211 West Fort Street, downtown Detroit, for 12 years, where she was deputy chief of the National Security Unit, McQuade, is now at the helm of federal law enforcement. A wife and mother of four, McQuade, who served as a law professor, practiced with a Detroit law firm and once worked as a reporter, brings real life perspective to the application of the law.
In this one-on-one interview McQuade opens up to Bankole Thompson, Michigan Chronicle senior editor, in a rare, exclusive interview since accepting her new presidential appointment about her objectives for the office and the launching for the first time of civil rights and violent crime units.
MICHIGAN CHRONICLE: What is the role of the U.S. Attorney?
BARBARA MCQUADE: I think the U.S. Attorney has the ability to do tremendous good in the district. As an assistant U.S. Attorney for the last 12 years I had a chance to actually prosecute the cases. But I saw a chance to do even more as the U.S. Attorney, not just handling individual cases but you really set priorities for the district and kind of direct the kinds of cases that we are going to work on. And I see so many needs in this district. So its been a chance to make sure we are using all of the resources we have to attack the problems that this community faces right now. Beyond just handling cases, the U.S. Attorney has an even larger role in seeking justice, prevention and community trust. It’s a tremendous opportunity to serve the people of the district, my home.
MC: When you say needs can you expound on what you mean?
BM: I have set some new district priorities, which were things that this community really needs right now. And those priorities are terrorism — the Abdulmutallab case, Militia case — violent crime, public corruption. I’ve put more prosecutors on public corruption to move those cases more quickly, financial fraud which victimizes many of our citizens in terms of mortgage fraud, health care fraud and environmental cases. And civil rights, another priority area that I think has been underserved in the past. We created a new civil rights unit to address some of those needs.
MC: With you at the top, what is going to change as far as cases and investigations moving quickly?
BM: I understand that perspective and I share the frustration that sometimes our cases take such a long time to come to fruition. I think the reason they can take so long is that we want to make sure that when people’s liberty is at stake that we are being careful and thorough. To prove someone guilty beyond a reasonable doubt is a very high standard and it should be. But we want to make sure that we have a very strong likelihood of winning before we bring a case. I also understand that there is a need for some urgency and a need for people to move on. Targets of an investigation deserve the opportunity to either be charged or not be charged. And the city needs the opportunity to not always be under a cloud of suspicion.
At some point people need closure. So one of the things I’ve done in the public corruption arena is re-staff that group. We’ve got a core group of people who have been working very hard on cases for a long time. We’ve beefed up that group to 11 lawyers and we’ve also tried to move off their plates some additional kinds of cases they had so they can focus all of their attention on public corruption. We try to give them all the resources they need both within the office and through investigative agencies.
MC: How long will it take before the mounting investigation of corruption at city hall comes to an end?
BM: I can’t answer that but I tell you it’s going to be soon.
MC: You were very concerned about leaks to the press. Why?
BM: Leaks are very damaging whenever they come out of the office because we are sworn by grand jury secrecy rules to protect what goes on in grand juries. And there are some good reasons for that. One is to protect the integrity of the investigation. If people know what is happening they can be tipped off, destroy records, so it hurts our case. But I also think it does a disservice to the community because it suggests there’s been wrongdoing when there’s been no criminal charges yet.
There are variety of places a leak could come from. Sometimes it could come from a prosecutor’s office, it could come from investigative agencies or it could even come from witnesses who appear before the grand jury and report the questions they are asked. But I wanted to make sure that leaks weren’t coming out of my office. So we did do an internal investigation after some articles were written earlier this year to determine what the source of the information published was and we were satisfied that information did not come out of our office. But I have made it clear to everyone working in our office that we are bound by the rules of confidentiality in the grand jury and when we talk to the press it is only matters of public information. We want to have a transparent organization and let people know what we are doing. But with respect to the substance of our investigations that are pending and not yet charged, we would take very seriously anyone who discloses that and the consequences could lead to termination.
MC: Has the U.S. Attorney’s Office lost cases in the past as a result of leaks to the press?
BM: I don’t know that we’ve lost any cases as a result of leaks to the press. But I do think that it can compromise cases and I also think it unfairly smears people who may never be charged with a crime. Just because someone is a subject of investigation doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve done something wrong. It just means they are being investigated. Those are two very different things.
MC: Explain what it means to be a target of an investigation.
BM: Under our grand jury rules and policy, the public should never know that somebody is simply a target of a grand jury investigation. Now I suppose that gets out from time to time from whether its witnesses or agencies or someone. But to be a target of an investigation means that we’ve got sufficient evidence to suggest that someone may have committed a crime. But before we actually charge them we must establish at least probable cause that they’ve committed a crime. We really have a standard beyond that which is a reasonable expectation of conviction at trial and so we’re going to build enough evidence until we think that we’ve got enough evidence that this person, if brought to trial, will be convicted.
It’s the policy of the Department of Justice to neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation. So by that policy we are not entitled to say this person was the target of an investigation but they’ve been cleared and are no longer the target. I can understand why that might be helpful but we are not supposed to
say that they are target in the first place.
MC: Under the George Bush presidency there was the revelation of federal prosecutors on a hit list for refusing to be politically controlled which led to some firing of U.S. Attorneys across the country. Some defendants recently charged by your office fired back with accusations of political manipulation. What role, if any, does political expediency have in the U.S. Attorney’s Office?
BM: None whatsoever and it never should. I don’t believe that in this district politics ever played a part in any charging decision. But when you have a situation like you had in the last administration with some U.S. Attorneys being fired across the country, it calls into question everything we do right here at home. So it was very damaging because I think people speculate that decisions are politically motivated. Whenever you are going after someone who is a politician, public office holder they are going to be of one party or another. So I suppose you can be accused of attacking someone based on political grounds, but it has no place in what we do. We work very hard to base our cases on evidence and not on politics and we will seek to hold accountable any public official who misuses the public trust.
MC: What is going to make your tenure different?
BM: If I can achieve one thing it is to reduce violent crime. It is extremely important. We’ve seen the recent rash of killings and shootings but its nothing new. We’ve had violent crime in our community for a long time. What I want to do is take a comprehensive approach to it. It is not enough just to aggressively enforce the law and lock people up. We’ve been doing that for a long time and you can see that doesn’t work. Its part of the equation, but I think prevention and community trust also need to be part of that plan.
MC: But that’s very rare for a top law enforcement official like yourself to say that locking up people has not worked. It’s a shift of the pendulum.
BM: Maybe so but I don’t know. There are other people in this community who share that view. I have been meeting with community leaders, Chief Evans at the police department, Kym Worthy at the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office. We are all doing a lot of little things but let’s get ourselves all together to the table and make sure we are doing all we can do to not only aggressively enforce the laws against violent crime but in terms of prevention. Crime is just a symptom of underlying problems. Our economy has suffered and so when people have a lack of job opportunity, educational opportunity crime is a symptom of that. If we can have intervention in schools, re-entry programs for offenders who are coming out of prisons and give them some opportunities so they don’t just go back to their old associates and habits that would be a productive thing. That’s something that we are working on.
MC: On the question of Aiyana Jones, the 7-year-old killed by a police bullet, will the Justice Department do anything on that case?
BM: Right now we are still monitoring the situation. There is an internal process for reviewing a situation like that with the Michigan State Police and they are looking at it, and we are waiting to see what results come out of that. And if we reach a point where we are not satisfied with the result of that investigation then we would certainly intervene. That’s another example of why community trust is so important and why police relationships with the community is so important. We need to make sure it doesn’t happen again. We need to make sure our police practices are consistent.
MC: How would the police department do that within the context of being under a Justice Department monitor?
BM: Yes, we do have a consent degree in place with the Detroit Police Department. They have remedied some of the egregious practices that existed previously, like locking up witnesses. They solved some of the bigger problems but it moved slowly in terms of making real progress like in-car cameras. They help the police officer, they help prosecutors and they help citizens to hold police officers accountable for what really happens in a police situation. Having a database that will flag when an officer is involved in incidents that result from complaints from citizens. If we are successful we can improve the way policing is done in Detroit. But I think the current police department and the current mayor are very committed, the deputy mayor, Saul Green…I have confidence in their ability to get it done.
MC: Your critics say you lost the Carl Marlinga case, the Geoffrey Fieger case. How do you as the new U.S. Attorney rise in the face of that kind of criticism?
BM: You know we certainly deserved to be criticized. I will always take it, accept it and try to use it to do better. We can’t be afraid to take hard cases and from time to time we are going to lose. And that is what I want to tell our prosecutors because I don’t want them to be so gun-shy that they are afraid to bring a case that they think there is some risk of losing because sometimes you have to be brave and willing to take a hit. But the thing that we are doing differently to try to improve is we’re putting together teams of people to vet our cases before indictment and before trial. So we are trying to improve our success.
MC: Some of your critics claim race plays into federal prosecutions. You see, for example, Black officials going down but the White businessmen they did business with get a slap on the wrist and walk away. How do you respond?
BM: I think that has been a problem in the past — a problem in fact and a problem in perception. And so we want to make sure we are addressing people in a much more uniformed manner, that we are not giving a free pass to people. In any criminal enterprise it is common to make deals with lower level defendants in an effort to convict higher level defendants. And so sometimes that dynamic has gone on but I think having a better awareness of that perception is really important because the perception of justice is sometimes just as important as justice in fact. People need to feel the system is fair, and trust the system for us to be successful.
MC: I have heard through the grapevine that your biggest fish are Kwame Kilpatrick and Bernard Kilpatrick. Is that true?
BM: I can’t comment on that.
MC: (laughs) You can’t comment on that?
BM: (laughs) No, I declined comment respectfully.
MC: But the Federal Bureau of Investigations just subpoenaed WXYZ for a tape of Kwame Kilpatrick’s first debate relating to comments he made about the civic fund and IRS.
BM: I don’t want to comment on what may or may not be in the grand jury subpoena. I read that in the paper as well.
MC: Do you have any gubernatorial ambitions?
BM: (laughs) No, I’m really happy to have this job. As an assistant U.S. Attorney this was kind of the dream job and I am really focused on doing the best I can.
MC: So you walked into that office 12 years ago with the mindset that you will one day become the U.S. Attorney?
BM: Oh I didn’t start with that. I walked in the office 12 years ago with the mindset that I want to be a really good prosecutor and I worked very hard. But as years went by I started thinking about how I’ll do things differently if I ever had the chance and with the election of President Obama I thought maybe I had a shot.
MC: What was in the back of your mind when you applied?
BM: To some extent I was in the right place at the right time. I think as you mentioned there’s been the political fallout from the last time around. I think in the past this position has been maybe a little more political than it was this time around. I was a career prosecutor. But the process was Sen. Levin and Sen. Stabenow put together an advisory committee of 25 lawyers. They had a written application and an interview and I went through that process. As a result of that process the senators recommended me to President Obama, who nominated me in November and I was confirmed by the Senate on Christmas Eve. I was very happy and thought that was the greatest thing and the very next day Abdulmutallab flew in from Amsterdam and tried to blow up a plane over Detroit.
MC: What is the biggest challenge for your office right now?
BM: I think violent crime is the biggest challenge for us right now. When people are dying in the streets, from a 7-year-old girl to a 69-year-old grandmother by stray bullet, we need to do something about it. There is just too much gun violence on our streets and I would really like to improve the quality of life in our community.
MC: Why did you set up a Civil Rights Unit in your office?
BM: Because I think we want to address an unmet need — civil rights in our community. We also want to protect our citizens. We are here as the Department of Justice not the department of prosecution. We want to do justice in our community and so if someone has been a victim of a hate crime or housing discrimination, we want to remedy those wrongs. We want to live in a society where all citizens have all of their civil rights protected.
MC: Is this the first Civil Rights Unit in the U.S. Attorney’s Office?
BM: Yes.
MC: So it was overdue.
BM: Yes, I think so and I’m very excited about it because I think restoring public trust is a really important part of what we do.
MC: Do you think the public lacks confidence in your office?
BM: I think it lacks confidence in law enforcement in general. I think a citizen’s contact with law enforcement may be negative, they felt that they were racially profiled or may have been as a result of some conflict or incident in their home. So I think we want to get out and talk with people and let them know what we are here to serve them.
MC: Will you continue to be in this field after this assignment?
BM: I don’t know. I’d like to find somewhere to continue to serve.
MC: You don’t have any political ambitions?
BM: No, but I have to leave. I can’t be an assistant U.S. Attorney when I’m done with this job.
Watch senior editor Bankole Thompson’s weekly show, “Center Stage,” on WADL TV 38, Saturdays at 1 p.m. This Saturday, June 19, will feature a round-table on the Mackinac Policy Conference. E-mail bthompson@michronicle.com.