| | | | |  | | By Jesse Naranjo | With help from Brakkton Booker, Rishika Dugyala, Ella Creamer and Charlie Mahtesian
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POLITICO illustration/Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP | What’s good, Recasters! I usually produce this newsletter but today I’m filling in for Brakkton. The second expelled Black Tennessee lawmaker returns to the statehouse and the feds make an arrest in the Discord leak of classified military docs. But, first, a conversation with someone who worked behind the scenes on a major criminal justice reform under the Trump administration. Van Jones is not a Trump guy. The political commentator, activist and one-time Obama official knocked horns with the 45th president’s administration on myriad issues. But in 2018, he ended up working directly with that same administration. Behind the scenes, Jones was pushing for consensus on the First Step Act — an attempt to get criminal justice reform legislation across the finish line. His involvement in that effort and lobbying of Trump White House officials and members of Congress is detailed in a new documentary streaming on Prime Video. The film features intimate conversations between Jones and Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner — whose father served time in federal prison — along with members of Congress, incarcerated people and criminal justice activists, some of whom were not too happy that he was working with the Trump White House.
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Passed in the third year of Trump’s term, the legislation changed sentencing for some drug convictions, updated mandatory minimum guidance and expanded ways for federal inmates to earn time off their sentences, among other provisions. Thousands of people incarcerated in federal prison were released or saw their sentences reduced as a result of the legislation, and later, more were released to home confinement in light of the Covid pandemic. It’s not all roses. Jones tells The Recast he appreciated the film’s creators including “the voices of a lot of people who thought that not only was the First Step Act a terrible bill, but that I was a terrible advocate, a laughably terrible advocate for that bill.” We sat down to discuss the dynamics at play, the debate between ideological purists and pragmatists and the state of criminal justice reform in a divided Congress. ◆◆◆ This interview has been edited for length and clarity. THE RECAST: The Trump administration and the former president himself weren't particularly interested in criminal justice reform in the early years. What influenced your decision to pursue this issue under the conditions at the time? JONES: Well, timing is everything. In the last four years of the Obama administration, there had been growing momentum for bipartisan criminal justice reform at the state level. So you had Georgia and Texas and other red states that had passed or were in the process of implementing reform. It wasn't based on the progressive ideas of racial justice and social justice. The Republicans at the state level were being animated by the need for some fiscal restraint. They were being animated by some of the libertarian ideas in the Tea Party that you didn't want government to be so powerful it could lock up so many people for so many reasons. And there were also, frankly, some conservative religious values around redemption and second chances. And so, there was real momentum for bipartisan reform coming out of the red and purple states. No. 2, Jared Kushner's father … had gone to federal prison, so there was someone at the very, very top of the administration that had a personal experience with how dumb and destructive the federal prison system is. And lastly, I think that there was, at least at that time, some tug of war within the Republican Party about how big a tent should that party be. And that opened the door to serious consideration in those early Trump years of opportunity zones, support for Black colleges and criminal justice reform. So all those things meant there was a … dance partner on the right for progressives.
|  Courtesy of Meridian Hill Pictures and Magic Labs Media | Of course, on the progressive side, we also had been growing. Until 2016, the DNC didn't really have a strong criminal justice reform plank. If you look at 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012 criminal justice reform, criminal justice reform was not a big part of the Democratic Party platform at the top level. By the time you get to 2016 with Black Lives Matter and a lot of other agitation and advocacy, the Democratic Party is also fully on board with criminal justice reform. If you're at that point a 25-year veteran of these fights, you're seeing something in 2018 that you've never seen. You saw the economy going up most places, crime going down most places and strong support in parts of both parties for criminal justice reform. So I felt if we didn't go then, it might be 20 years before you had all three of those conditions back. And so that's why I was willing … that's why [Rep.] Hakeem Jeffries, [human rights attorney and advocate] Jessica Jackson and others were willing and ultimately, including [then-House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi, were willing to seize the moment. THE RECAST: As someone who has been advocating on criminal justice and other issues, what did you take away from your experience working on the First Step Act that you don't think you fully understood before this? JONES: Well for me, I was committed to these issues long before they were popular. I started working to close youth prisons in California and to sue police departments in California in the 1990s when California was building more prisons than Texas and when Democrats like say, the Clintons and Joe Biden, were really more on board with a tough-on-crime, pro-incarceration agenda. So I never had the luxury of seeing criminal justice reform as a partisan issue on either side. Both political parties were firmly committed to the mass incarceration agenda. My view was, it took both political parties to build this massive prison system, it's going to take both political parties to tear it down. And I think that the passions and the fear that Donald Trump [and the rest of his agenda] brought out in my progressive colleagues was almost existential. And so those of us who were willing to get this thing done found ourselves facing much more passionate and personal objections to cooperating with the Trump administration than I would have predicted.
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| People who were afraid that if we quote unquote, gave Trump a victory on this, it would help him get reelected. My view is: You're not giving Trump a victory, you're giving 200,000 people who were locked up in federal prison a victory. And if the only way you can defeat Donald Trump is to make sure that for the next four, eight or more years, Black and brown people in federal prison stay miserable, we need a better strategy for defeating Donald Trump. THE RECAST: What do you wish had gone differently? Do you wish it had gone further? JONES: Look, I think that we were able to get 87 votes in the U.S. Senate for criminal justice reform on a bipartisan basis in the middle of the Trump era. … That's a miracle. We were able to get, for a while, Pelosi and Trump and the rest of the Democrats competing as to who was better on criminal justice reform. That's a miracle. And there [were] apparently 25,000 people who were able to come home earlier than they would be from federal prison. I mean, that's a huge number out of the population, less than 200,000. So that's a miracle. | 
Van Jones, Kim Kardashian, Alice Johnson, Louis L. Reed and Alex Guditch watch President Donald Trump deliver a speech on the First Step Act in a scene from the film. | Courtesy of Meridian Hill Pictures and Magic Labs Media | | If I had to do it over again, if we had more time and resources, it might have been wise for those of us on the progressive side, both pro- and anti-First Step Act, to have just been in better human communication. It's fine to have an inside-outside strategy, that's quite common, where you have some people at the table and some people, you know, at the barricades for lack of a better term. But I think those strategies work better when there is goodwill and coordination. And I think that just given the passions of the Trump era, it was harder to keep the inside and the outside working well together and feeling good about each other. I hope that's healed in the almost five years since, but I think the documentary does a really good job of capturing just some of the interpersonal tensions and frustrations that were tearing apart the progressive community even as we were getting closer and closer to a historic victory. THE RECAST: We're now in a period of divided government. What lessons from this do you think criminal justice advocates and really anyone looking to drive big change could apply right now? JONES: Well, look in 2018, it wasn't divided government and the Republicans had the House, the Senate and the White House. So those first two years of Donald Trump, it was kind of one-party domination, similar to the first two years of the Biden administration. … From a technical point of view, there was united Republican control, but from a social point of view, it was almost Civil War levels of division in the country. I think what the documentary shows is that when you put the people who are directly impacted by the system at the center of your moral concern, remarkable things happen. People who are locked up in federal prison don't make massive PAC and lobbying contributions. They don't represent a massive voting bloc. This is a constituency that really should have zero support at the federal level. But for reasons of social justice and racial justice on the left and a passion about human dignity and individual liberty on the right, the best people in both parties tend to gravitate toward this issue. And when that happens, you have people who are not doing it primarily because of political contributions and political calculation. They're primarily doing it because of a moral calculation. Which is not to say the Republicans might not pick up a few Black votes here or Democrats may not burnish their progressive credentials there. But fundamentally, these kinds of causes operate outside of the normal laws of politics. And so I would say to anyone working on any issue, find the people who are really at the blunt force edge of the injustice and dysfunction of the system and put their concerns first. Whether that's underprivileged, whether that's kids from tough neighborhoods, whether that's people who are victims of disease, there's some power that is available, when it's just not crass politics.
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#cut50 national organizer Louis L. Reed visits people in the D.C. Central Detention Facility in a scene from "The First Step." | Courtesy of Meridian Hill Pictures and Magic Labs Media | | It is the case that love can win. Hope can win. Kindness can win. Human beings who vote against each other can still find a way to work with each other to help people who really need it. And I've seen it from Appalachia to housing projects to prisons, all the way to the Trump White House. And I wish more people, I wish more of us more of the time, would trust that approach. THE RECAST: The film features folks who were opposed to working with the Trump White House on this issue and were critical of how far the bill's provisions went. Do you see this conflict as counterproductive? JONES: No, I think that you need people with different points of view about politics to move things forward. And so we were pretty confident that if we could just get out of the House and into the Senate, that there was enough goodwill, frankly, on the Republican side … that we could take a small bill through the House and then grow it in the Senate and then bring it back to the House. But we tried to get a big bill through the House, so we weren't getting anywhere. And so I kept saying, we can't pull a camel through a keyhole here in the House. Let's get out of the House with something that's more narrow and then get over to the Senate and see what we can get done. But the fact that there were people who wanted the bill to be bigger and better was a good thing, because when we got to the Senate, then we had some leverage, and we had some passion, frankly, on both sides to make it better. But I think we shouldn't forget, [Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck] Grassley on the right, also wanted the bill to be bigger. It wasn't just that you had people on the left from grassroots communities and elected office, who wanted more. Grassley also wanted more and eventually we were able to get to more. |  Jones (back right) is seen during President Donald Trump's signing ceremony for the First Step Act in the Oval Office of the White House, Dec. 21, 2018. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo | So no, I think having maximalists in the mix to keep the process honest, I think having pragmatists in the mix to keep the process moving forward, are the two blades of the scissor that you need to cut through the status quo and get something done. At a personal level, it'd be nice if people were nice [laughs]. But people in politics aren't always nice. THE RECAST: Do you think there's appetite for further reform on issues like qualified immunity? JONES: Well, I think the Equal Act, which would finally eliminate the disparity between crack and powder cocaine on a both proactive and retroactive basis is important, and we came up short on that last year. So I think there's still some gas left in the engine for that. I think it would be amazing to get that historic wrong righted. Obviously, the African American community was just devastated by treating crack cocaine, which is pharmacologically the exact same as powder cocaine, so much differently. I think it is a shame that two years after, almost three years now after George Floyd, we still haven't had comprehensive police reform legislation in the United States and there are many, many things besides qualified immunity that could make a positive difference, and those things haven't happened, either. I think there's still a need for more reform, but these things tend to have a bit of a rhythm. You do something big and then there's a little bit of a pushback and then you do something once the opportunity opens up and then it's almost never just bill after bill after bill after bill for year after year after year, just pushing all in one direction. |  | THE RECAST: In light of the continued prominent incidents, most recently Tyre Nichols’ death at the hands of Memphis police officers, what do you make of the lack of concerted effort to introduce changes that would address such behavior? JONES: Well, whenever the economy is bad and crime is ticking up, it's harder to bring about smart changes to law enforcement and the prison system. And so I think we're just going through a period where … where some loud voices in law enforcement said that by focusing on the worst elements of the profession, you're hurting the feelings of people who aren't doing lawless depraved acts in uniform. And I think that pushback from law enforcement that says, "Hey, you're demoralizing us," landed in the ears of a lot of politicians who respect law enforcement and don't want to be seen as anti-cop. So I think law enforcement pushback has been effective. I do think that there was some unfortunate sloganeering on the part of some progressives that has backfired, I think at this point, inarguably. And that didn't help to consolidate a pro-reform agenda. Usually you want a slogan to unite everybody who can be united and to divide your opponents. Any slogan that divides the people who are in favor of a cause and unites everybody who's opposed to the cause is just like, textbook definition, not a great slogan. And I think that we had some slogans like that on the left that didn't serve us very well. ◆◆◆ OK, folks! Thanks for sticking with us. Before we send you off into the weekend, here are some reading, viewing and listening recs to round out your Friday.
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| ICYMI: Introducing POLITICO’s Mayors Club, a roundtable of 50 mayors, one from each state. As a first topic, our colleagues Liz Crampton and Erin Smith asked this group about crime and policing... and nearly half of the 50 mayors said public safety was the single most pressing issue in their communities. Second Tennessee Lawmaker Reinstated — County officials in Memphis, Tenn., voted to send state Rep. Justin Pearson back to the statehouse Wednesday, the week after he and another Black lawmaker were expelled by the Republican majority for a gun violence protest, POLITICO’s Liz Crampton reports. WATCH this interview with POLITICO’s Jackie Padilla: 'They want us to shrink': Rep. Summer Lee reacts to Tennessee expulsions
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