-Our next guest is an award-winning
investigative journalist
and staff writer for "The New Yorker."
Please welcome to the show Jane Mayer, everyone.
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
-Jane, thank you so much for being here.
-Thank you. Good to be with you.
-You are an investigative journalist.
You cover dark money.
You cover corruption in politics.
Do people panic when they get a phone call from you?
-I have read that people have said
that when they hear a message from me,
they call their solicitor and get their,
you know, affairs in order.
It's not the most flattering thing to read about yourself,
but I have read that.
-But then what do you do?
So I would assume a lot of people
initially don't want to talk to you.
I would assume you don't give up at that point.
Who do you reach out to next
when the sort of, I don't know, subject of a story won't talk?
-Yeah, so rule one is never give up, okay?
And what do you do?
You have to report around them sometime.
And, you know, you get desperate.
Some of the times -- One of the things that's worked for me
is I found a lot of great information
from calling people's families.
-Oh, yeah.
-Especially people's mothers.
[ Laughter ]
-If I wouldn't talk to you
but then I heard you were calling my mother,
I would immediately call you back.
-It usually works like that.
But sometimes you can get to the mother
before the person calls you back,
and then you get just, like, a mother lode.
-Yeah, there you go.
That's how they originally came up with the name.
-It must be, yeah.
-So you've reported a lot about the fight for abortion rights.
You have a big piece coming up.
Obviously I think a lot of people maybe weren't expecting
the Kansas voters to reject
this rollback of reproductive rights last night.
Were you surprised, and what do you see moving forward?
-Well, so I've been watching it really closely.
I actually have been talking to Democratic operatives,
including James Carville, who said a few weeks ago,
"This is the one. You got to watch it.
Because if the pro-choice people win in Kansas,
it's just gonna rock the Republicans back on their heels
and it's gonna energize the Democrats."
And he wasn't entirely sure what was going to happen,
but he said he felt good about it.
So I had a little bit of advance notice on the thing.
It is amazing because Kansas is obviously a very red state.
I mean, and I think --
I mean, to me, what it means is we're sort of getting --
we're in the consequences phase of politics
where you're beginning to see the consequences
of right-wing rule that's more extreme
than most people in the country.
-Well, it was a surprising result,
but it wasn't surprising in that all the polling you ever see
shows that most people wanted Roe to stand.
-Well, this is true.
But it's just -- I mean, and that's so -- it's a great point.
Because most of these states, if you look at the general public,
they support things like access to abortion within reason,
you know, legal abortion.
And they support restrictions on guns.
They actually support higher taxes on the super rich.
I mean, all these things that never get passed.
But what's interesting is the state legislatures
are far more extreme than the people themselves.
-You have written a lot about dark money in politics,
corruption in politics,
and recently have been doing some writing
about the Supreme Court.
And obviously the Supreme Court
as an idea is held, you know, with this very great esteem
and yet not immune to dark money
and influence from outside forces.
Do you think people are surprised
when they read pieces of yours
insofar as they didn't think that this was possible
of happening to the Supreme Court?
-I think so.
I mean, I think all of us grew up revering it
and thinking it's above politics.
But if you look at polls now, it's at a low ebb
for popular trust in the Supreme Court,
and I think it's because people are beginning to see it
as so political and taking such extreme stances.
I think it's that, and then you're right.
There is money that people don't realize
is going into confirming these justices.
Millions of dollars have gone into dark money groups
that have pushed for these very far right justices.
And most of us reporters, including myself,
still don't know where those millions are coming from.
It's almost impossible to figure out.
But I'm going to try.
-So you -- Well, we're glad you're trying.
[ Cheers and applause ]
You wrote a -- You wrote a fascinating piece
about Clarence Thomas's wife, Ginni Thomas,
and went out of your way, which I think everyone does,
saying, like, "Look, obviously, you know, everyone's spouse
has a right to, you know, have their own pursuits.
And you don't judge one for the other."
With that said, she is very deep in advocacy
and she is deep in issues and organizations
that are bringing cases in front of the Supreme Court,
funding -- what are they called?
Amicus? -Amicus briefs.
-Amicus briefs. -Right.
-And sort of friend of the court briefs
that are supporting their position, and --
and yet Clarence Thomas is not recusing himself in these cases.
Doesn't seem like he has any intention of doing that.
Where does this all end?
Is it basically that the Supreme Court is just allowed
to police themselves in a way
that other judges aren't at lower levels?
-Well, that's the thing that's sort of amazing.
It's the highest court in the country,
and it has the lowest ethics bar.
It just polices itself.
The rest of the judges in the country
are bound by a judicial code,
but they decided that the Supreme Court is the highest
and nobody can tell them what to do.
So they self-police.
I mean, any other judge would have recused themselves
if they were faced with the situation
that Clarence Thomas was.
There's actually a law about recusal
which says that every judge,
including justices on the Supreme Court,
are supposed to recuse from any case
in which a spouse has a material interest in the outcome.
We're waiting to see Ginni's whole role in this,
but it certainly seems that she was up to her eyeballs in it
and would be very uncomfortable for Clarence Thomas
to be impartial in a case like that.
-And I think we've all --
Certainly with the super majority, right,
we're getting used to 6-3 cases
in the same way we got used to 5-4 cases.
But there was actually an 8-1 case
where Clarence Thomas was the only justice to, you know --
that stood alone.
And this was the one --
If there was any one to recuse himself, from this one,
because this was turning over text messages from January 6th,
and we obviously know that Ginni Thomas
was texting with Mark Meadows at the time.
-She was, and the texts are doozies,
if anyone's had a chance to see them.
-To use the legal term, they are doozies.
-So, yeah, it's an incredibly --
It's not just a sticky situation.
It's really a serious situation,
because if you, the American public,
lose faith in the Supreme Court
in a country where the rule of law is everything,
things can really deteriorate fast.
We need to revere the Supreme Court
and we need to have transparency
so that we know who's taking money
and who's got conflicts of interest up there.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-The other thing that's fascinating to me
is, you know, justices like Clarence Thomas now,
it seems like when they give speeches,
they blame the rest of us for politicizing the Supreme Court.
And this was even before, you know, we knew the full thrust
of Ginni's involvement in January 6th.
Do you find -- Is that level of hypocrisy stunning to you,
or is it what you've come to expect?
-Well, I think sometimes it's almost like projection.
You hear from these people an accusation
that the press is politicizing the Supreme Court,
and, you know, it makes you want to take a second look
'cause it's clear it's a little closer to home in his case.
The politics is intense in his breakfast table, I would think.
-Yeah, you -- Another thing that I would imagine
makes you take a closer look at things
is names of a lot of these organizations
are, like, the Honest Elections Project or FreedomWorks.
When they seem to have, like, those sort of mundane names,
is that when you're like,
"Oh, there's some real dirty business here?"
-[ Laughs ] It's true.
Like, the more virtuous the title,
the more sort of mucky stuff
is usually going on under the surface.
But it's helpful, 'cause it's like a red flag.
It's like, "Oh, I better take a second look at this one."
-Now, is it true that before you were investigative journalist,
your dream job at "The New Yorker"
at a time was to be a cartoonist?
-It actually was.
That's what I really wanted to be.
And the first thing I ever submitted
to "The New Yorker" was a cartoon.
-And did you hear back? -I did.
I got sort of a polite form note saying, "Thanks, try again."
[ Laughter ]
-Did you feel like you had a skill with a pen?
Were you a good artist? -I loved cartooning.
-I did it all through college, yeah, and it was a lot of fun.
-You weren't just, like, jumping into it.
You had some background in it. -Yeah.
I just couldn't figure out how you make a living at it.
And the thing that happens at "The New Yorker"
is they pay you by the word. -Yeah.
Oh, so it's way better to do long investigative journalism
than, like, some real pithy caption.
-The more complicated, the better.
-So I want to ask -- end by asking,
obviously investigative journalists
are portrayed in television and film a great deal,
oftentimes makes it look thrilling,
like a thrilling job that you have.
How accurate would you say those portrayals are?
-Wishful thinking.
You know, sometimes you feel like you're from that movie
"A Beautiful Mind."
You know, I have a whiteboard
with all these things scribbled on it.
And if anyone walked in, they'd bring in, like, you know,
one of those butterfly nets to take you away, I think.
It's har-- It's --
But it truly is exciting when you get a breakthrough,
and you do get them, and it's like --
they are real Eureka moments, and it's kind of incredible.
-Goose bumps?
When you realize you have a breakthrough,
are you like, "Oh, my God"?
-No, you're like, "Thank you!"
-Well, we're the beneficiaries of your breakthroughs, as well.
Thank you so much for being here.
Looking forward to your next article.
Jane Mayer, everybody!