Kathryn Ruemmler | Full Q&A | Oxford Union

It's great to be here.

Well, the very first White House Counsel... this is now law or whether it's true, but reportedly he was asked at the time, 'Well, what is his name? Is Judge Rosenman? What is Judge Rosenman going to do?' And FDR said, 'Legal stuff.' And I love that vignette because it's such a great description of what the job of the White House Counsel is. It really is a legal position that sits at the intersection of law and politics and policy and communications, more and more in today's fast-moving media environment. And so you are both... the formal title for the position is actually Counsel to the President of the United States, and that's an individual relationship with the president in his capacity as the president—not as in my case Barack Obama in his personal capacity, but in his capacity as president. You advise him on what his authorities are, what are the constraints on his authorities, those types of things. And then the other title, the White House Counsel, is you are the general counsel, the sort of chief legal officer of this complex organization that is the White House. And ultimately, because the White House sits at the top of the federal government in the U.S. in the executive branch, you're really helping to coordinate the legal advice across the government.

Particularly in the earlier part of the administration, with an early meeting at 7:30 in the chief of staff's office. When I first started at the White House, the chief of staff was Rahm Emanuel—he's now the mayor of Chicago—who's a famously very colorful individual, shall we say. And he's a great person; I actually loved working with him. And so he would have this morning meeting where the senior staff... this was kind of in the realm of White House politics, internal White House politics. This is like the most important meeting of the day, so people want to be in this meeting. Other than meetings with the president, there was the most focus on the economy, of course, because we were coming out of—we were still in the throes of the financial crisis really in the early part of 2009—and then working on passing the Affordable Care Act. So as the counsel, you would be doing a whole bunch of different things. You would be trying to select and recommend to the president federal judges, and in the case of President Obama in 2009, he had a Supreme Court justice, so that would fall under the responsibility of my office, the White House Counsel. You would be working on national security matters, you would be dealing with congressional inquiries that would come in, investigations, those types of things. A whole wide variety of things. And then just fundamentally being kind of the troubleshooter: if something went wrong, inevitably the White House Counsel, almost always along with the White House chief of staff, would be dealing with it.

Yes. I always viewed myself as really being nonpartisan and apolitical. I've never really acted in politics other than as a lawyer advising people in politics or being kind of around a political environment, but not sort of being an active participant myself. I'd never worked on a campaign, for example. So that was quite unusual for my job to not have had that background. I was a federal prosecutor; that's not a typical background to have for the White House Counsel. So I tried to approach the job as much as possible in a non-partisan way. But it's going to be a pretty depressing place to be. And one thing that I think—there have been stories that even the Trump transition team didn't fully recognize—is that when there is a transition between one president to the other, everybody on the staff leaves. So it's not like there's carryover from president to president. A new president comes in and it's just a whole new team. So you have to feel committed to what that president's trying to accomplish, given the just demands on your time and everything else. It would be hard to do that if you didn't feel that way. And policy views inform his thinking. He was elected, I wasn't. So no one really cared what I thought about policy matters, whether certain aspects of the Affordable Care Act should be one way or another. And that has just been my kind of approach: more of a clinical approach as a lawyer, and that served me well in that particular job.

Yes. In a Democratic administration, when President Obama came into office, he had sort of abolished the enhanced interrogation techniques that had been used during the early days of the Bush administration. And so we did some executive orders very early on in the first week of his presidency to review the existing detention policy for military detainees and to review interrogation policy. And this was a big part of the campaign in 2008—whether or not we would change the way that things had been done in the past. And while I mentioned that at the White House there's this complete turnover in terms of staff, in the rest of the government agencies there's almost no turnover. So you're asking folks who have been very committed, patriotic folks who believe that they were at all times acting in the country's best interests and in the national security interests, and then a new president comes in and says, 'I don't like the way that you are doing that, and we're now going to change it.' And that's a hard process to do. There's a lot of conflict and strife when you're trying to change something that somehow was inconsistent with our values. So we had pressure from a number of Democratic members on the Hill to say, 'You need to be doing more and more to change, to really look back and see how things were done before and investigate how things were done before.' And then there were other members of Congress who were saying, 'You shouldn't be looking back; you should be looking forward. Why would you attack the good men and women of our intelligence community?' So I had to get engaged in those debates. And one thing that I remember quite distinctly: there was an attempt on Christmas Day of 2009 to—and I think some people in the room will probably remember this—there was an airplane that was... people refer to him as the 'underwear bomber.' I'm blanking on his name, but it's because he had this sophisticated bomb in his underwear. And luckily, he tried to detonate it when he was on the plane; it didn't go off. But anyway, he was taken off the plane and taken to... essentially, the biggest one—I mean, there are a lot. You have a right to remain silent, you've all seen on Law & Order and those kinds of shows, right? You have the right to remain silent, you have a right to counsel. And there was this huge political controversy about why it is that the Obama administration was reading this guy his Miranda rights when he was a terrorist and he was trying to commit a terrorist act, and why were we treating him like a bank robber and giving him all the rights and privileges of someone who would be arrested in the U.S.? And it was four months—we had this big controversy about it. Through that period, at the time there was just enormous pressure to essentially rewrite our Constitution to address that type of situation. And we worked closely—the reason why I raised that example is because we worked closely with some Republican members of Congress who I think had genuine beliefs that dealing with those types of offenses, terrorist offenses where no one would disagree that it was a terrorist offense, in a way similar to a regular criminal offense was just the right thing to do. And we were able to work constructively with them.

Well, with respect to President Obama, but never with respect to anybody outside. So I would never—I was his representative, I was his counsel. So my independent views were not relevant. If he had a view and I disagreed, I would tell him. And if he disagreed and said, 'No, I think you're wrong,' which he did a lot, sometimes he would agree or he would move. But ultimately, he's the decision-maker, and then my job was to go and advance his view.

You would think that would be an easy decision, right? That if I have information, I should share it with the president. And the reality is that it's a much more complicated analysis than that because the president has such limited time during the day that you can't just go and say, 'Oh, Mr. President, guess what? There's a great big mess here. What do you think?' Or 'Here's a big mess, what do you think?' That's just not how you should approach it. You should think about potential solutions, and then I can go to him and say, 'Here's the problem, here are three potential solutions. I recommend option one because of X, Y, Z. Option two is okay but here's this following downside. And option three, I think you could do it, but I think that's really not a terrific idea because here's what I think could happen if you do that.' So that's one scenario. So that's really more a question of timing. And in the question of this Internal Revenue Service incident, I made a very deliberate decision not to share the information with him because there was nothing he could do. There was nothing he could do without actually trying to manipulate the outcome. So one of the frustrating things about working at the White House—and President Trump said this in a not very artful way recently, but he was making this point—is that the country believes you're the president of the United States and you run this government, so everything that's happening in the government ultimately it's on you. And that's the logical representative, but we have these very strong institutional norms in the U.S. that certain types of activities are largely independent, and the president is just hands-off because otherwise the perception is that the president could use one of those agencies to go after his political opponent, to quash an investigation that was looking at a political ally. And that's just not permissible in our system. So in that circumstance, this was the IRS and the allegation—we didn't have any facts—was that they were improperly targeting conservative groups for tax-exempt status. And there was nothing that the president could do at that time. And I knew that at some point it would become public, and the first question that would be asked is, 'When did you know?' And I didn't want the answer to be, 'I knew three weeks ago,' because if the answer had been, 'Oh, I knew about this three weeks ago,' then the question from the press and everybody and the Congress would be, 'Well, then what did you do?' So you knew about it, and then he's sort of damned if he did and damned if he didn't. Because if he did nothing, then he seems feckless. If he did something, then he would be accused of potentially interfering in an independent investigation. So it was better for me to protect him from all of that, which again is a no-win situation.

Well, one thing I would say is, 'Quit saying mean things about Mitch McConnell, who's the Senate Majority Leader, and quit saying mean things about Paul Ryan, he's the Speaker of the House.' So you want to—of course, when you're advising a president, he would want to avoid impeachment. There have only been a few occasions in which articles of impeachment have been returned. So in the most recent iteration of this, which was with President Clinton, the House, which was controlled by the Republican Party, did return articles of impeachment, and then the Senate, which was controlled by the Democratic Party, acquitted. And what happened in Watergate, of course, is that I think everyone believed, including President Nixon, that it was an inevitability that he would be not only impeached but also convicted on those charges, and so he resigned in advance of that—but not far in advance, really kind of right on the eve of it. What matters is whether or not articles of impeachment actually get returned. So it would be, I think, a really extraordinary thing for a Republican-controlled Congress to vote to impeach a Republican president. And the kinds of things that President Trump has done or is doing that are causing a lot of people great consternation is certainly not anything that would rise to the level of there being so much pressure put on the House Republicans that they would move to impeach someone of their own party. So something very dramatic would have to happen, and in my view, it would have to change their own political calculus.

In our White House, I didn't feel that it was difficult to be a woman because it was very much a meritocracy and a tone from the top with President Obama. I think it was absolutely irrelevant whether you were a man or a woman. When we got outside of the White House and worked with the Congress, I definitely felt I was much more aware of the fact that I was a woman. Many members of Congress weren't used to dealing with a woman in my position. And I often described it as sort of an age-gender axis that comes into play. When I became White House Counsel, I had just turned 40, which is actually young by the standards of Washington, and particularly by the standards of the Senate. So I had to work hard to make sure that people recognized that I knew what I was doing and I was good at my job, and not to be dismissive that I was a younger woman. But I've always viewed the fact of being underestimated as a great advantage because the only place you can go is up from there. I remember one member of Congress, a Republican member of Congress from Florida, and he only served one term, so if there's karma in the world, I think it's this. I went up to have a meeting with him, and he was a committee chairman, and there was another... so there are definitely experiences like that that shape you and thicken your skin, shall we say.

Well, there's nothing like public service. I think because you wake up every morning and you think to yourself that you're just trying to do what's right. And even if people disagree with your policies, if you have a president who shares those values, then it's very much an inspiring, motivating thing. In the private sector, obviously, you're advocating on behalf of clients; you have a particular business interest, and so that's a different dynamic. But one thing I will say that I guess in some ways is surprising in a positive sense is what I've found is that most clients want to understand the rules and they want to play by the rules. They're not trying to get by or slide by. Oftentimes, people who used to be working with now you're on the opposite side of them, and you say, 'You're seeing this one wrong, you don't have this one right.' And that's also a very satisfying thing. So to me, it wasn't a big letdown; it was just a different set of legal problems that I'm dealing with now. I still have a lot of political-type issues that I work on, so I get to keep my hand in kind of the fun stuff. So it's great. And my shoe wardrobe is bigger as I have more money to spend on shoes.

Thank you. It's a great question. And I think it's something that... you have these policies and programs and operations that have been in existence and were in existence prior to him coming into office. And you have national security professionals who will come and advise the president, whether they're at the NSA, the National Security Agency, or the CIA, or elsewhere, and they're saying, 'Mr. President, in order to keep the country safe, we need to do this. We have to do drone strikes.' It's a perfect example. And it's a way that we do it with very little collateral. It doesn't put our personnel in the region or in the homeland at risk. So if you're a president and your professional staff is advising you that way, and you have the fundamental obligation to keep the citizens of the U.S., whether they're at home or abroad, safe, it is very, very difficult. And some—and I would be one of them—would say it's not a program that should be continued. But that is one that he really struggled with. So one of the things that we did was he said, 'I know that these are important and necessary and actually crucial to national security, but I want to set up a system so that my authority as president is actually constrained.' Presidents don't historically do that; their instinct is to expand power, not to constrain it. So he sent us on a project of setting up a system that would put even tighter controls around those strikes. Many people on the left and very progressive liberals will say, 'That's not enough, that's not good enough.' But again, he always struggled with that. And on surveillance, after 9/11, the 9/11 Commission was stood up to look at why 9/11 happened and why it wasn't prevented. There were recommendations that came out of that learning that suggested there were flaws and holes in our surveillance. So programs were developed and went on under court approval, legislative approval, with all the checks and balances of our constitutional system. And then Edward Snowden decided to take it upon himself to reveal them to the world in his very mature wisdom. Not that I'm a fan of Edward Snowden, but it did cause us to say, 'Okay, let's take a look at what we're doing from a surveillance perspective and say, have we struck this balance right? Are we too intrusive in terms of people's civil liberties? Are we getting enough protection? Are we really enhancing our national security with these programs, or are we just intruding in law-abiding citizens' lives?' So it did cause this evaluation, introspection, which was a positive thing. But that's a long-winded answer to say that those are the kinds of issues that I think a president should be struggling with. If my current president isn't struggling with these kinds of issues—which all appearances are that perhaps that struggle isn't going on today—that's not confidence-inspiring to me. Even if I don't ultimately agree with where he lands on the ultimate question, I want to know that he's really struggling with how to get that balance as close to right as it can be.

I'll see if I can tell the story in a little bit of a shorter way. We had a law in the U.S. that was called the Defense of Marriage Act. It was signed into law by President Clinton in 1996 and passed overwhelmingly in Congress. Basically, what it said is for purposes of every federal law, every federal benefit—Social Security, Medicare, all of these benefits—the word 'marriage' means marriage between a man and a woman. This law had been defended by the Justice Department as constitutional from 1996 until 2009. President Obama came into office, and the question was, 'Well, that's not consistent with his policy, right? But it's the law of the land, and the Justice Department has defended it, and it's been upheld by five or six courts at that point.' So as a policy matter, I think the president would have liked to tell the Justice Department, tell the Attorney General, 'This is something I don't agree with; don't defend this law anymore.' But there is a long-standing tradition in the U.S. that the Justice Department defends laws that are on the books. And I advised him that we should not deviate from that long-standing tradition of defending laws because otherwise you would start to see an erosion of the general rule of law. And then every time a new administration would come in, if a president could just pick and choose, 'Oh, I don't like that law, I don't like this one,' it's just not the way our structures work. And there was a real divide between advisors about that question because many people thought, 'This is just—the people who voted for us think, how can you defend this horrible law?' So he made the decision to continue to defend it until a later point. That was something that was inconsistent with what some of us thought was the right thing to do for good government institutions, and he went that way and got really criticized by many of his supporters for doing it. But ultimately, of course, the long game was that by doing it in an incremental way and not looking like he was just by fiat throwing the rule of law out the window, the Supreme Court upheld the right to same-sex marriage. So it was a short-term disappointment for supporters, but long term it ended up being the right decision.

You delegate. You hire really smart people and you delegate. That's the truth. I had the office set up in teams. I had a national security team that's all they did. I had what I called my 'defense lawyer team'; they just did government investigations and defending the White House. I had a team that just did vetting for the administration. We had very rigorous standards, so it would be a big failure if someone turned out to have not filed their tax returns appropriately, or something like that, or a big issue with household help and people not paying taxes on a nanny or a housekeeper or landscaping people. That was unbelievably arcane and technical, and I had a whole team that just focused on that. And so we would have these meetings where we would go through every single person who was going to be nominated for a position. And the message was that if you're going to serve in the federal government, you have to be comfortable with the White House Counsel knowing where every one of your skeletons is in the closet, because those meetings would surface all of these issues and background that could come up in the confirmation process. And I had deputies on each of those teams, and I really did have to delegate and constantly be working with the deputies who were managing the other lawyers and the team. Because President Obama was such a popular president, I had this embarrassment of riches in terms of people who wanted to come and work in the office. So the most brilliant, talented lawyers were available to come and work there.

That's a great question. I think I've definitely become more partisan in the last year or so, just because I'm really disheartened by what I see happening. I've really felt a personal responsibility to protect the sort of sacrosanctness of the office—not in a religious sense, but just in the sense that it's such an important office, the dignity and the decency of it. So from that perspective, I've become more partisan in my own thinking about it. Maybe that's not correct; maybe it's not partisan so much because it's not about policy disagreements. At least I used to think about it that way. I think the nature of political rhetoric now has become, 'Whose team are you on?' I'm not interested in running for anything—never in a million years—but I certainly try to find opportunities to help folks who are either litigating important cases that are challenging current policies that I think are not consistent with the rule of law or otherwise just not good for the country. So as a lawyer, there's actually a lot you can do in lending your expertise to briefs or that kind of thing. So I do that, but I don't see myself ever getting into the ring.

Oh my gosh, wow. Should have been prepared for that. What Trump? I thought. But that's cool. Exactly. Why do I do what I do? I think I do what I do because I want to feel that I want to sort of leave the world with a sense of having people feel important just through day-to-day life and day-to-day engagement with people, to leave them feeling that way, as opposed to kind of grand philanthropic gestures. Maybe as I get older, I'll change my perspective on that. But for now, that drives me. That you can still be engaged in public life, that you can forge consensus across the aisle, that you can have friendships across the aisle, that you can gain the respect of people across the aisle—that's something that I think is a very important personal motivator for me.