My good friend Joyce Vance has become a regular on my podcast. Recently, she sat down with me again to talk about her experience as a U.S. attorney, the lessons learned from November’s elections, and the great advice she gives to her law students. It’s always a pleasure to steal Joyce from her own podcasts for a bit, so I hope you enjoy our conversation.
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December 7, 2025
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My good friend Joyce Vance has become a regular on my podcast. Recently, she sat down with me again to talk about her experience as a U.S. attorney, the lessons learned from November’s elections, and the great advice she gives to her law students. It’s always a pleasure to steal Joyce from her own podcasts for a bit, so I hope you enjoy our conversation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Marc Elias: Joyce Vance, welcome back to Defending Democracy.
Joyce Vance: Thanks for having me.
Marc Elias: We got a lot to cover, including your amazing new book, which we're gonna get to in a moment. I hope everyone goes out and buys it. But before we get to that, I wanna cover what has been some very sort of breaking news. It's weird, it's like breaking news in slow motion. Like every day we get another story about the weaponization of government. So we have, obviously, we had the Tish James indictment, we had the James Comey indictment, we have had suggestions that Adam Schiff is under investigation for lord knows what, depending on your point of view the Bolton indictment maybe, maybe not falls into the same category.
And now there is this seeming sort of gathering in South Florida of, according to many news reports, an effort by Donald Trump to kind of take all of his grievances and put them in one US attorney's office to go after everyone from Jack Smith to John Brennan to Barack Obama. What do you know about this and how do you help us make sense of it?
Joyce Vance: Look, first thing, I don't think that we should even pretend for a second that there's legitimacy to this. There isn't. This is a revenge prosecution, a corruption of the Justice Department, a blatant effort, by the way, to impanel a grand jury in the division in the Southern District of Florida where Donald Trump's favorite judge, Aileen Cannon, who torpedoed the Mar-a-Lago case sits. So it's just crazy sauce from start to finish.
There's an interesting detail that I learned recently, Marc, which is that...
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- The fragility of American democracy in this moment
- How voter participation and voting power can restore democracy
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