Big Voice Wednesday

With Stacey Young

This week I had the privilege of welcoming Stacey Young, the Executive Director and Founder of Justice Connection, which is a network of DOJ alumni standing up for the rule of law and protecting and supporting current and former DOJ employees targeted by the Trump administration. Stacey herself is a veteran DOJ attorney, having served for 18 years across multiple administrations and within two components of the DOJ: the Civil Division and the Civil Rights Division.

We discussed the damage being done by the current DOJ and why it matters, along with the work that Justice Connection is doing. Among the many valuable services it provides, Justice Connection also issues a monthly tracker summarizing the harmful actions taken by the DOJ for that month. You can find the monthly tracker, as well as important and informative essays submitted by former DOJ employees, on Justice Connection’s Substack newsletter.

Finally, we discussed why Stacey chose to use her voice in the way that she is and ways that YOU can use your voice in this crucial time. It’s imperative that we all do.

The video transcript is below, edited for clarity, length, and flow.

One step at a time,

Ronda

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[Transcript]

Ronda Cress: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Big Voice Wednesday. As you know, Big Voice Wednesday aims to break up the unrelenting news cycles we experience every week by injecting some inspiration and hope to help get you through the rest of the week and into the weekend. Big Voice Wednesday showcases ordinary individuals who are using their voices in extraordinary, or sometimes unexpected, ways. And I hope it inspires you to use your voice too.

This week, I have the great privilege of welcoming a fellow former DOJ colleague. She’s the executive director and founder of Justice Connection, which is a network of DOJ alumni who are standing up for the rule of law and protecting former DOJ employees who have been targeted by this administration. I want to welcome Stacey Young.

Stacey Young: Hey, it’s great to be here.

Ronda Cress: I’m so happy you could join us. I know you are very busy these days and in very high demand, so I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. I’ve been looking forward to this. I knew when I decided I was going to do Big Voice Wednesdays that you were on the guest list very early on as somebody I knew I wanted to have come talk. And I have a feeling you may be making multiple appearances as we go on.

Oh gosh, there’s so much we can talk about regarding the DOJ and its abdication of its responsibilities to the American people, the Constitution, and the rule of law in order to serve Donald Trump and his administration. We’re going to get into some of that, but I think the best thing to do right off the bat is to have you talk a little bit about your career at DOJ, what you did when you were there, and then we’ll switch into Justice Connection a little bit.

Stacey Young: Sure. I was a lawyer at DOJ for 18 years. I spent 13 years in the Civil Division, where I did mostly immigration litigation. Then I spent five years in the Civil Rights Division, where I enforced a statute that prohibits discrimination based on citizenship status and national origin.

The second office where I worked has been decimated. It’s down to, I believe, about four lawyers from about 30, and its work has been radically scaled back. The first office where I worked has been decimated as well. The lawyers who remain have basically been traumatized by this administration’s actions, including by terminating a lawyer there named Erez Reuveni, who was fired for refusing to lie to a court about the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case.

So it’s really devastating to know what’s happened to the offices where I worked and to know what’s happened to offices across the department. We’ve spent the last 13 months supporting our former colleagues who remain there.

Ronda Cress: I think it’s important to point out, as is clear from what you’ve said, that you were there 18 years across two components, the Civil Division and the Civil Rights Division. But I think it’s important to point out that you served across administrations, Republican and Democrat, as so many civil servants do. Career attorneys and career civil servants, their loyalty and commitment are to the mission of serving America.

I think that is what is so important for people to understand, and why this is so different. It’s not just that there’s always a change in priorities when there’s a change in administration. This is quite different. Like you said, offices have been decimated, employees have been traumatized, and deliberately so. We know that was a goal.

If you could talk a little bit now about what you’re doing, you’ve just alluded to it, what Justice Connection is and what it does.

Stacey Young: Justice Connection is really an alumni network. Most of us who are on staff worked at DOJ. We have an alumni network of thousands of former DOJ employees, and we’re all working to provide support to our former colleagues in a number of ways.

We have a pro bono legal network where we connect DOJ employees who are fired, under investigation, or in need of ethics advice with lawyers who represent them pro bono. Those lawyers, and we have hundreds of them, are all DOJ alumni.

We have a mental health support network where we have dozens and dozens of mental health professionals who have volunteered to provide free counseling to DOJ employees who are experiencing the mental health effects of this administration’s project of traumatizing them. The administration said outright that its plan was to put federal employees in trauma, and it has absolutely carried out that goal at DOJ.

We have a job-seeking network where DOJ alumni are helping current and recent DOJ employees find new jobs because so many are being pushed out. Many have been fired. Others have left voluntarily, but only because they were really shown the door.

We have a media support network where, when alumni want to start speaking out, we provide them with free media training, help them place op-eds, and connect them to reporters, many of whom really want to talk to former DOJ career employees with subject-matter expertise in a number of areas.

At the same time, because we built credibility with the DOJ workforce and others, we started getting invited to speak out ourselves. So we really built up our efforts to educate the public about what DOJ does. So many people really don’t know what the department does. We also try to make sure people understand what the destruction of the Justice Department means for all Americans in terms of American safety, fundamental rights, national security, the climate, and our prosperity.

DOJ really has a hand in just about every aspect of American life. We are trying to educate the public about what it means when you erode the principal agency that enforces federal law, and what that means for our lives, the rule of law, and our democracy.

That’s mainly what we do. In terms of educating the public, we have become kind of the go-to source for perspectives on DOJ. We also make videos, we have a Substack, and we’re really getting DOJ voices out there so they can share their knowledge and speak out about what’s happening at the department right now.

Ronda Cress: That’s a great description. One of the things I really like about Justice Connection is that it takes such a comprehensive approach. It’s not just helping people who left, or were pushed out, or were fired, find new jobs. It really is this holistic approach to the individual and to educating the public.

Something you said that I’m finding as well is that people don’t really understand the breadth of the work DOJ does. I think a lot of people, when they think of DOJ, think only of the criminal enforcement side, or they think of the Solicitor General arguing before the Supreme Court. I don’t think people really realize just how much it touches our lives.

I think that’s also the case for many federal agencies. People have become so accustomed to the services provided through our federal agencies, and I think a lot of people, frankly, became complacent because they didn’t need to understand how things worked, because things were working. It’s easy to stop paying attention to some of those things. But unfortunately, as people are finding out more and more, all of those agencies and all of the work civil servants do have such an impact on people’s day-to-day lives.

The other thing you mentioned that I just wanted to draw a little more attention to is that Justice Connection also has a Substack. I hope the viewers will go and check it out if they haven’t already. It has a lot of really good information and posts written by former DOJ employees talking about the work they did and why it matters. It really shows the wide-ranging scope of the work that’s being done. So if that interests you and you want to go check it out, I encourage people to do that.

I think part of that, and I don’t know if it’s just on your Substack or if you post it on the Justice Connection website as well, is that you do a monthly tracker. I was hoping you could tell our viewers a little bit about that, if they want to check that out too.

Stacey Young: At the hundred-day mark of this administration, we thought it would be helpful for reporters to list all of the attacks that had happened on DOJ, because one of the things this administration does really well is flood the zone, and it makes it really hard to keep up with everything that happens.

We knew that even for reporters whose job is just to cover the Justice Department, they had a hard time keeping up with everything that had happened in a hundred days. There were attacks on DOJ almost every day, and many days there were multiple attacks.

So we thought it would be a service to put this together. We issued a press release, and we got a really great reception. Then we decided, let’s just make this a permanent tracker. Let’s keep doing this.

Every day we collect the news that we think should be included in the tracker. We update the tracker online every week. You can find it on our website, which is thejusticeconnection.org. It’s the only tracker of its kind. It’s the only tracker that really follows everything that’s happening at the Justice Department.

Once a month, we put out a Substack piece that goes through some of the highlights of what happened at DOJ and provides more texture so our readers can learn more about what happened that month. We’re going to start supplementing that with a video once a month as well, where our communications director, Peter Carr, is going to talk about certain stories from the past month to try to highlight what the attacks on DOJ really mean for all of us.

Ronda Cress: That’s great to hear. I look forward to that. I think that tracker is so useful and so important in documenting what is happening and keeping a record, especially because there is so much and because it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. It’s great to have entities like Justice Connection that are methodically keeping track of everything so that whenever we get through this, we will have all of this information that will be really helpful.

Stacey Young: That’s definitely one of the reasons we do it. One reason is to make sure that reporters and Congress, and Congress does rely on it as well, many offices tell us they keep up with it regularly, can use it in the here and now. But like you said, it’s also creating a historical record of what is happening because hopefully, when we get out of this, we’ll have opportunities to look back and learn from these years. We hope that this tracker will help in that project.

Ronda Cress: I’m sure it will.

I tend to focus a lot on civil rights because that was my career before DOJ, and then when I went to DOJ, I was in the Civil Rights Division. So I really hone in on what’s going on there. I know that 75% of the Civil Rights Division left. My understanding is that they’ve hired very few replacements, maybe 20 to 24 across the whole division, which is incredibly low given the hundreds who left.

I was curious what the statistics were, and whether you know them, for DOJ as a whole. I think the Civil Rights Division was one of the most decimated, but I know people have left other components as well.

Stacey Young: The Civil Rights Division certainly is one of the components that was hit the hardest. There are other components that have been hit about as hard, including the Federal Programs Branch, which defends administration policies and statutes. The enforcement section of the Environmental Division lost about the same number of lawyers. This administration is simply not enforcing environmental laws that are on the books.

There are also a couple of offices where they RIFed the entire offices, where they fired everybody who worked there. Those are incredibly important offices, including one called Access to Justice. What they did is right in the name: they provided access to the justice system, usually for marginalized Americans.

They eliminated a component called CRS, the Community Relations Service, which worked in communities experiencing tensions to reduce those tensions and eliminate violence. They went into Minneapolis after the George Floyd murder and really helped reduce tensions there and prevent violence. They would have done the same thing in Minneapolis after the surge of ICE and CBP.

They eliminated an office called OCDETF, which is the primary office that cracks down on drug cartels, which is rich given this administration’s claim that it wants to reduce the illegal drug trade in our country.

Many parts of the department really have been decimated. We’re seeing floods of prosecutors and civil lawyers leaving U.S. attorneys’ offices. I think about half of the immigration judges have been fired or driven out. These are extremely important components of the department that have been depleted of talent, institutional knowledge, and expertise.

It’s already having a devastating effect on public safety, national security, our health, and our rights. We knew this was going to happen. We knew we were going to start feeling the effects of this, and we are now. There are plenty of documented cases of this.

What’s especially terrifying right now, since we decided to go to war in Iran, is that the administration purged many, many national security experts, both at the National Security Division and the FBI, seasoned experts who kept our country safe, seasoned experts who many believe were instrumental in preventing another 9/11. We purged them at a time when we decided to go to war with what many believe to be the top state sponsor of terrorism.

These are unforced errors this administration is making. The cuts and purges at DOJ are being felt, and they will continue to be felt. I don’t know how long it’s going to take to repair this. It could take generations.

Ronda Cress: Right. That actually was going to be one of my questions, because we know that this is happening. Again, I tend to focus a lot on civil rights because that was my career before DOJ, and then I was in the Civil Rights Division.

Last week for Big Voice Wednesday, I posted The Daily’s interview and description of the case of Kristie Metcalf, which was one of the cases they withdrew. It was about as much of a slam-dunk race discrimination case as you could ever see. This week [I’ll have] a post following up on that about other areas in civil rights, because sadly hers is not the only example. They have withdrawn 55 cases, plus consent decrees, plus stopped investigations.

But it’s really all across the board. It’s in the other areas you were mentioning, plus then we see examples of DOJ approving the Nexstar Media and other media mergers and takeovers outside of normal antitrust processes, and the numerous court decisions where judges are starting to chastise DOJ attorneys for misrepresentations or failures to comply with court orders, the Epstein cover-up, what I call the cluster over the triumvirate U.S. Attorney’s Office appointment in New Jersey, and who’s really in charge of that office.

When you look at all of these things, it’s clear this is going to have long-term impacts. One of the things I was going to ask you is what you thought some of those long-term ramifications will be. I know it’s difficult to say exactly what those are. I think the most obvious ones are that it’s creating distrust in DOJ and the federal system, distrust by the public and obviously distrust by the courts. So that’s one obvious ramification, but I’m curious about your thoughts on other things.

Stacey Young: In terms of the institution itself, you’re right. What’s happened there has absolutely eroded the public’s trust in DOJ. One example is Minneapolis, where after the shooting of Renee Good and Alex Pretty, DOJ refused to send civil rights prosecutors to the city. They also refused to work with state and local prosecutors and law enforcement on responding to what happened, which is unprecedented. Actions like that absolutely erode public trust in DOJ.

When you don’t have the public’s trust, you’re not going to have the public’s cooperation in investigations and prosecutions. You’re not going to be able to serve the American people if they don’t trust you at the outset.

Institutionally, we’ve seen what is called the presumption of regularity become eviscerated. That was a longstanding doctrine where federal courts really gave federal lawyers the presumption of regularity. They trusted that federal lawyers were not going to lie in court, that they were going to convey the facts and the law truthfully. They’re not doing that anymore with DOJ lawyers. They’ve made that clear. Frankly, they shouldn’t be right now because many of the lawyers going into court are political appointees who are not interested in upholding the rule of law and telling the truth. They are interested only in executing this president’s political agenda. Courts have taken notice. So rebuilding that trust is going to take a long, long time.

One thing that I think is really important to focus on is that thousands of DOJ employees have left. It’s going to be really hard both to get them to come back if we recover from this and to recruit generally.

DOJ jobs, as you know and as I know, historically were very hard to get. They were very competitive. You had to be an excellent lawyer, law enforcement agent, or intelligence analyst, whatever your field, to get a job in DOJ. They were extremely desirable jobs because the work was so interesting and important. Working on behalf of the American people is a real honor.

People knew they were never going to get rich in these jobs, but they also knew they would have satisfying careers. Another thing people always knew was that there was job security, that even though you were never going to get rich, you also pretty much knew you were never going to get fired. That is no longer the case.

What I fear is that a lot of people are going to worry that this could happen again in four years. That is something that’s going to have longstanding repercussions on DOJ’s strength, its expertise, and its ability to do its job as well as it had for so many decades.

Ronda Cress: It’s definitely going to take a big effort to rebuild it when this is over, or reform it. But I know there are a lot of people committed to doing just that, and that’s one thing that does give me hope.

Stacey Young: There’s an article out [Monday] in Politico that talked about DOJ rebuilding that I was quoted in, and others were quoted in. There are a number of efforts already to rebuild the Justice Department. At Justice Connection, we think it is paramount to have former career DOJ employees as part of that effort.

We know DOJ the best. We worked there across administrations. We saw how the department operated under Republican administrations and Democratic administrations. We saw what worked and what didn’t work. We are the ones who, I think, are best positioned to make the department a more durable place, to improve operations, and to make sure that the department can’t be torn down as easily as it has been, to make sure that the institutional norms are both strengthened and codified.

We are going to be talking about this over the next few years, and we’re going to be involved in the process.

Ronda Cress: Exactly. I know it’s going to take a lot of work and time, but I am confident, just based on the people I know who are working on it and the organizations like Justice Connection doing vitally important work right now, that we will get there.

I think that’s a good place to segue into some more personal details. As you know, the goal of my Substack newsletter, The Little Girl with the Big Voice, is to encourage and help people find and use their voices, especially right now. It’s incredibly important. I think that is what it means to do and be democracy, what you can do in your everyday life and in your interactions with your fellow human beings.

So I want to talk a little more about your personal journey. The very first question I know I have, and maybe others have, is what made you decide, when you left DOJ, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you left right around the inauguration—

Stacey Young: I left four days after it.

Ronda Cress: Okay, I knew it was right around then. When you did that, what made you decide that you wanted to start Justice Connection versus going to a law firm, a civil society organization, or something like that?

Stacey Young: When I was at DOJ, in addition to my day job, I founded an organization there called the DOJ Gender Equality Network. I founded that after President Trump was elected the first time because I had long realized that DOJ was never a perfect place, even in the best of times. I knew there were systemic problems with DOJ, including sexual misconduct, a lack of pay-equity policies, no paid parental leave, and health-care policies that needed to be improved. I also thought there was a serious sexual misconduct problem, and it was a serious problem in the office where I used to work.

Given the fact that we had just elected a president whose commitment to addressing sexual misconduct seemed tenuous at best, it seemed like a good time to launch an organization that addressed some of these problems locally. For me, that was at DOJ.

So I thought maybe I could do this. I rounded up everybody I knew. We had a meeting in a basement at DOJ, and a whole lot of people found out about it and showed up. I launched this organization and it worked. The organization grew over eight years to many, many members. We advocated around a number of policy issues and made some real headway. We got a new sexual misconduct policy and unit created at DOJ. We were able to get a salary-history ban implemented government-wide. We lobbied on behalf of a paid parental leave bill, which passed. We advocated around COVID measures, flexible work options, and a whole lot of issues.

In addition to being a policy advocacy group, we ended up becoming kind of a direct-services organization. People would come to us all the time and tell us, “I’m being sexually harassed by my manager and I don’t know who to go to because you’re supposed to go up the chain of command,” or “I’m not getting my paid parental leave approved by my manager,” or “I would really like DOJ to pay for breast milk shipping because I’m being forced to go on trial for a month at a time.” These were issues that we would help individual employees manage.

I knew they were going to destroy the organization. They tried to do that at the end of the first Trump administration, and I knew they were going to try to do it again, and I knew they’d be successful this time around.

So I thought, what can I do to provide some kind of support system for people who are going to be at DOJ and under attack? This administration made it clear during the transition that they were going to target federal employees, and I knew that employees at DOJ were going to be particularly vulnerable because there was only one agency that had investigated and prosecuted this president, and he had made his retributive intentions clear.

So I thought: I did it at DOJ. Maybe I could try to do it outside DOJ, because I knew it wouldn’t work inside the department. I was right. They did basically shut down the organization. I figured out how to launch a nonprofit on the outside. It took a ton of work. I started from scratch. I learned later that most organizations start out with seed money. We started out with none.

But we were kind of lucky in that I wrote this op-ed in The New York Times that was published a couple of days before the inauguration. It was kind of a call to action. It said federal employees are going to be under attack, and all Americans should be helping to support the civil service because our democracy depends on it. I viewed Justice Connection as an answer to that call to action.

On the day I launched it, which was a week after I resigned, The New York Times covered our launch. That got the word out. Then reporters started calling around the clock, some money started coming in, and we just built the group and built and built and built. Thirteen months later, we have a number of support systems in place, and we have an infrastructure for raising awareness.

Ronda Cress: That’s fantastic. Based on what you were doing at DOJ with DOJGen, it seemed like a natural fit, although I’m sure it was still anxiety-inducing and probably a little scary to launch something like that. But the fact that, despite whatever feelings you were having about it, you knew you had to do something and did it anyway, and took the plunge, I think that’s great. And I think that’s what all of us need to be doing in some way.

Every single one of us has a role to play in what is happening and in what our future is going to look like. We just have to figure out what that role is and step into it.

I think I’d like to leave it with any advice you have for people who are maybe struggling to find their voices right now, or who feel like there isn’t really anything they can do that will make a difference. What advice might you have for them?

Stacey Young: I guess I’d answer this both broadly and narrowly.

Broadly, I would say: always try to think creatively. After the election, I looked around and realized what the problem was. I knew DOJ employees were going to be under attack and would need support from the outside. I went around to different organizations and tried to find out if there was already an organization doing this, planning for what I knew was going to come. There wasn’t. I thought, I can’t do this within any existing framework, so I’m just going to try to build a framework.

I think people often get stuck because they think, I want to do something, so I need to find an organization or institution that already exists and plug into that. Sometimes that just doesn’t exist. Oftentimes it doesn’t exist. Sometimes you just have to think creatively and ask: what does this moment demand? What skills do I have? What access to people do I have? What communities am I positioned to serve?

It often involves creativity and allowing yourself to think outside the box and figure out: what can I build? What can I do that doesn’t require me to rely on other people or on what already exists? I think that’s a really important way to approach problems sometimes.

But as for things everybody can do right now, if you’re really stuck and you’re thinking, I want to do something relatively easy, what can I do right now, what can I do today? Everybody can call their members of Congress or their senators and demand that they start taking their jobs seriously.

I speak about DOJ specifically, obviously, but I’m constantly encouraging people to call their representatives and demand that they start exercising their oversight responsibilities over the Department of Justice. We have three branches of government, and one of those branches has decided to just take orders from another branch. That’s preposterous. Everybody should be demanding that Congress take its role in our democracy seriously right now, regardless of what state you’re in or what party your representatives belong to.

Everybody can participate in the notice-and-comment period. There are lots of regulations being promulgated right now that are really harmful. Everybody can make public comments before regulations are finalized. We issued a piece about this recently by Rebecca Bond, who used to be chief of the Civil Rights Division. That’s another thing that’s pretty easy that everybody can do.

And everybody can really just speak out in their own communities. You can speak out on social media. You can speak out when you’re having brunch with your relatives. You can shut down your obnoxious uncle who says that civil servants are part of the deep state. Just speak up.

Obviously, it’s not always as safe as it was before this administration, but our democracy is something worth fighting for and worth taking risks for. Everybody can be doing things right now.

Ronda Cress: I agree. That’s very well said and great advice.

So, Stacey, thank you so much for being here. Again, I know you’re spread thin right now. You’re everywhere talking about these issues that are so important, so I appreciate you stopping by here for Big Voice Wednesday and for sharing a little bit about your story and what motivated you to start Justice Connection.

To all of the viewers out there, thank you so much for watching. I hope you got some great information. I’m sure that you did. Just remember that even the smallest act can have a big impact. Take care, everybody, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks.

Stacey Young: Thanks, Ronda.

Ronda Cress: Thank you.

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