Quinta Jurecic
speaker
199 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Quinta Jurecic’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
were just going to take on the opposite role than the one that they had actually signed up for. So the person in charge currently is an agent named Brian Driscoll, who has a great mustache and facial hair. He does not look like what you imagine when you think FBI agent. I encourage everyone to Google him.
Yeah, I was going to say, it looks like he plays in a ska band, maybe. People call him the Driz, apparently. That is actually what people call him. And the Driz has risen up as a hero. Yeah. Within the Bureau, because he reportedly has really resisted these efforts to push out these agents and has been standing up for them.
And as of the time that we're recording, I think the Bureau is kind of locked in this struggle with the Justice Department where... The department has not made any of these mass dismissals, and we're kind of waiting to see what happens next because of the way that FBI leadership has really put its foot down and said no. I think there is a real question about how long they can hold out.
But it is really striking to me to see what is happening there, given the extent of the carnage of other organizations like USAID, that the Bureau has been able to hold its own. I think there are a lot of complicated reasons for that. One of them might just be that, you know, you kind of need the security forces if you're going to run a functioning government.
I had thought that the Trump people didn't care. Maybe they care more than I realized about having a actually skilled, functioning federal law enforcement agency in a way that they did not care about having a functional USAID.
The problem is that you actually have to bring the lawsuit after you've been fired. And that takes time. And then the lawsuit has to be litigated. And it takes time to put that together. It takes time to move it through the court. And so what has held back other presidents is really the fact that, you know, you try to fire this person, you're going to be...
grinding it out in court for a really long time, this is going to take up a lot of resources for the administration in litigating out these cases. They may be doing it because they don't care. They may be doing it because they want to argue. that these legal restrictions are actually unconstitutional in some way. That would not surprise me at all if they made that argument.
I think they are absolutely trying to set up some of those cases. And so it's really a question of previous administrations having been agreeing to be bound by the existing framework, if that makes sense. Whereas the Trump people have decided that they simply don't care and are going to smash through it. And the problem, as we've been discussing, is that that has a lot of follow-on effects.
I believe that they can receive their job back. So it is a question of, on the part of those people, do you actually really want to fight it out? All of these people are people who have... They have kids in school, kids in college. They have, you know, they have to worry about having insurance, right? Maybe they're having a baby. They have obligations. They have lives.
And so the question of how you should respond, I think, is necessarily for everyone going to be this balance of how do I weigh this? I mean, there were reports with USAID of the agency calling back people who have been stationed overseas within days. They have kids in school. They have families. They have lives.
And now everyone is just, their lives have been completely upended and they're struggling to figure out what is next. And it may well be that a significant number of these people say, you know, I'm just going to move on with my life. I don't want to spend, you know, the next five years of my life litigating my firing. Is it worth it as a matter of principle to fight this out?
I suspect for some people it will be. But again, you're going to have a lot of time that is elapsed in the interim.
This is actually, when you talk about the separation of powers, one of the big, if not the big advantage that the executive branch has. It's the branch that executes. It's the branch that does stuff. And so it has the ability to kind of create facts on the ground in a way that makes it very difficult to push back or if the judiciary pushes back, it takes time.
Now, I mentioned the sort of separation of powers issue because I think it's important that we've been talking about the courts here. And there's a good reason for that. There have been a lot of lawsuits. The courts are sort of the obvious venue where people are going to fight this out, and the courts are the branch that has pushed back. There's another branch here. And that's Congress. Is there?
If you read the Constitution, Article 1 is the legislative branch. But did we ever form it? Right. So look, this is the big problem. I would argue that currently we are in a constitutional crisis in the sense that there is one branch of government, the executive, that is not obeying the Constitution. And the question is, how do the other branches push back? The judiciary, it takes a lot of time.
That is the advantage of courts and it is the disadvantage of courts. Congress has the ability, theoretically, let's say, let's sort of set aside the actual people in this actual Congress and talk about Congress as an abstract entity. The theory of the separation of powers is that Congress should be able to step in here as one of the political branches and say, you are usurping our power.
You have violated your oath, I would argue, certainly, to take care, to enforce the laws, and to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. We actually saw this work in the first Ukraine impeachment. Obviously, the removal did not succeed, and I'll get to that in a minute.
But I think what a lot of people forget is that the House of Representatives was extraordinarily successful in uncovering what it was that Donald Trump was doing in attempting to illegally withhold aid to Ukraine. By the way, which in the same way as the government is now attempting to illegally withhold money to any range of states, organizations, individuals.
And that kind of fact-finding and putting that out in the public record can be very successful. Congress could make this stop. if it wanted to. The problem is that it doesn't want to. And this gets to the phrase that has been tossed around a lot, at least in my neck of the woods, is this idea of the separation of parties rather than the separation of powers.
Democrats are less likely to push back against executive overreach when a Democrat is in the White House. The same is true for Republicans. I will say not to let anyone off the hook, We saw this dynamic in the beginning of the Biden administration.
Showing 101–120 of 199 · page 6 of 10
← Previous
Next →