Transcript: "Inside Justice: How the System Really Works, with Hallie Hoffman"

The text below is a transcript of the audio from Episode 51 of Onward, "Inside Justice: How the System Really Works, with Hallie Hoffman"

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Ben Miller: Hey, Hallie Hoffman. Welcome to Onward.

Hallie Hoffman: Thanks. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Ben Miller: Before we dive into my questions, can you just give a little outline of your background? 'cause it's really a fun mix of two different worlds.

Hallie Hoffman: I have been a career prosecutor. I started after law school, clerked on the ninth circuit. Came straight to the DOJ where I was a federal prosecutor for about seven and a half years. And then left the DOJ to start a biotech company and moved out to the Bay Area, started the company once they got up and running and was in a good position.

Went back to doing my first love and went back to the US attorney's office and was a federal prosecutor. Ultimately became criminal chief of the US Attorney's Office and the Northern District. Then came out to the DC area to be the general counsel at DEA where I was general counsel for over three years.

Ben Miller: You make it sound so easy. So you were general counsel of the Drug Enforcement Administration. You were chief of, uh, division in the [00:01:00] Northern District. So you saw all sorts of stuff. I was doing some research and I think there was something like a thousand cases with their name on it. Too many for me to get through.

And then you built and sold a tech company. Which you were very understated about, which will come to in a minute, tech and law and government, which by the way sounds very apropos these days.

Hallie Hoffman: I love that. I was very lucky, Ben. The tech company was the unique circumstance where my brother came to me. He had developed a technology and asked if I would run with it and build a company out of it. Of course. No big task. And I was like, are you kidding me? I prosecute organized crime. That's the thing about brothers, they believe you can do anything.

Ben Miller: And you did it.

Hallie Hoffman: Yeah.

Ben Miller: was right. Do you wanna tell your founding story and then I can ask follow up questions?

Hallie Hoffman: Absolutely. The technology was a non-invasive prenatal diagnostic test. My sister-in-law was put in a very [00:02:00] high risk category, was having a child later in life and was like, this test is just not reliable. It was a protein-based test, and she remembered she's a geneticist. And remember that you can separate fetal DNA from maternal DNA.

The problem was no one had quite figured out how to do it. 'cause they were trying to do a whole cell separation and she was like, well, what if I focused on the fragments? So she spent her pregnancy figuring out how to do it. Came up with this technology with my brother, and then they came to me in New York and asked me to start a company.

I had done a lot of really incredible cases, have been fortunate enough to try cases in all different areas of the law, and I thought I should try and do this. I really wanna get this out there to the world. I was lucky enough to. Dive in. Spent about a month and a half in their lab making sure I understood what was going on with the actual biology of it all, and then got the licenses away from universities and got some funding for the company and was able to get it to market, which was fantastic.

And then we ultimately sold it to [00:03:00] Roche.

Ben Miller: So you raise your Series A from Venrock. How did that happen?

Hallie Hoffman: As it works out, it turns out a lot of people were like, oh, what does Ally know about starting a company? Not a lot of people, but one of my dear friends, so she was like, I'm gonna introduce her to this entrepreneur. It's actually how I met my husband. He knew someone, a venture capitalist in the biotech space, and when I met with her and discussed the technology, she actually connected me to someone at Venrock.

She's like, they're looking up for something exactly in this space. So it was fantastic. It just was right place, right time.

Ben Miller: And that's.

Hallie Hoffman: Ken Song was the ultimate person who I was introduced to, the intermediary, I'm blanking on her name right now, but very grateful for the handoff in between.

Ben Miller: You leapt from law to startup, and not only did you have a successful startup and satisfy your brother, but you met your husband.

Hallie Hoffman: That's right. When I moved out from New York to San Francisco, [00:04:00] it's funny, I said to my brother, well, if I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna start it in the Bay Area. I'd love to tell you, Ben, that was because I was smart enough to know that there was venture money in the Bay Area that I might eventually need.

That wasn't it at all. It was my best friend from law school was living in San Francisco, and I thought, if I'm gonna live on. A couch and eat peanut butter and jelly and try and start this company. It was gonna be with her and I was gonna enjoy it. So it was really a win-win for me.

Ben Miller: I always think of lawyers as being very risk averse. How did this make sense to you psychologically?

Hallie Hoffman: I'm a very mission-driven person, and I would say that is what counteracts in some ways that risk adverse. Women passed a certain age. If you prioritize your career before having kids, you're immediately put in certain risk categories. Being put in a certain risk category does require you to have additional testing.

The fact that there was a protein-based test instead of a blood test. For these chromosomal abnormalities made it less reliable and actually more risky for the pregnancy. [00:05:00] So it seemed like something that I really believed in, that I wanted to get out there, and I thought, if I don't try it now, this isn't gonna happen.

This is what we have to do to get things out there.

Ben Miller: I feel like the punchline is you sold it for 625 million bucks in like 36 months or something.

Hallie Hoffman: It was a very short amount of time. I was very fortunate 'cause then I got to go back to being a prosecutor, and that's something that I really do feel strongly about. A lot of times you see that government careers are really hard. I made many degrees more in that 36 months than I made in my 22 years as a public servant and the Department of Justice.

Ben Miller: I like the way you framed that because it is public service. It doesn't really get the credit that is public service at this point. It feels like going to work for the government. And has a low brand status at the moment. Why do you think that is? And how do you think you change people's mind about that?

Hallie Hoffman: I do think the disconnect between public trust and some of these [00:06:00] law enforcement careers is one of the. Biggest concerns that law enforcement faces. There have been some things in law enforcement that have broken that trust, but generally speaking, it is so necessary to have and to encourage people to go into these careers.

It is so necessary because there are limited resources, and in order to maximize the impact you need to be able to communicate what you are doing. I think we're starting to turn a corner a little bit about that. It used to be the fact that people would shy away from working with the government because working with the government had a negative connotation.

What I've seen in the past year, I mean maybe it's just 'cause I'm optimistic, is that more and more people are prioritizing public safety, are prioritizing that public private partnership, and it's not just viewed as an evil thing to work with the government. And we need that. We need that in order to maximize what can be done in law enforcement.

Ben Miller: Maybe this podcast [00:07:00] helps shed some light. Before we were on the podcast, you were saying that a lot of your peers who do public service don't usually talk to. Press or any public forum, and even you had some reluctance.

Hallie Hoffman: The instinct is it's a little self-promoting. There is a quicksand. You could step in something where you're talking about something in a particular case or for a particular client and you don't wanna do that. To extrapolate a little bit further in the prosecution world, I think it can break down to two types cases.

You have the cases where you're gonna have a high volume of cases. These are more like the hand to hand deals or the gun cases or something like that. And then you have the very high impact cases, the huge fraud cases, or. Something that are, are gonna take years and years to prosecute. Broadly speaking, that's a huge generalization, but even the most discreet high volume cases take a lot of time because the system is so individualized and needs to be [00:08:00] based on the way justice works.

You have individualized facts, you have the individual defendant, you have individualized victims, and. It is necessary to rely on all of that individualization that slows down the system. There really does need to be the ability to announce what's happening, to make public what you're doing in order to have a deter effect.

Not saying every criminal sits there and thinks what are the consequences, but there needs to be a publication of. We're looking at this sort of crime. The crime that's easiest to think about that is something like bankruptcy fraud. The entire system is based on trust that you're gonna perform these honest filings.

There's no way that we have the amount of resources to look at every bankruptcy filing. So that means when you actually catch a bankruptcy fraud. You need to be very public about the prosecution of it, 'cause that will deter others. There's a consequence if you lie on these forms. We'd all love to say that no one's gonna lie on the forms anyway, but sometimes there needs to be a check.

Ben Miller: Is this [00:09:00] personal or corporate bankruptcy?

Hallie Hoffman: I would say either. For instance, in the tax context, another great one, we don't look at that many tax lines. I'm not encouraging your listeners to commit tax fraud, but there are prosecutions of tax fraud and maybe people want to do the right thing and pay their taxes and pay for the services of living in the country.

Or maybe they're concerned about actually being prosecuted for tax violations. If the latter has anything to do with it, they need to know that there actually are tax fraud cases going on, and when there's such a delay between charging and actual conviction, it becomes a sort of, so what? It's so much of a delay.

So this crime happened five years ago and you're getting a conviction now. In the past, there had been a hesitancy to talk about case charges for the fair reason that everyone appreciates. It's just an allegation. It's not proven. There's a hesitancy there. Discuss what the nature of the charges. There has been a change [00:10:00] in that realm for the last five years maybe, where you see it more and more and talking about it as they are just charges.

But then there is this concept that people are looking at this. They're looking at the fact that whether or not a crime is being committed, and then you're gonna get a deterrent effect even though you're not prosecuting the high volume of crimes theoretically.

Ben Miller: So there seems to be this big disconnect between what people think happens in criminal justice or justice and broadly, and then. What actually happens? What do people most misunderstand about the justice system today in America?

Hallie Hoffman: Part of it is what I was already talking about. Truly great cases and operations and different programs really rely on the fundamental drive and grit of an individual agent and individual attorney. And I'm not saying they do it on their own. They build the team and they amass it all together. [00:11:00] It's like when you bet on a founder, you have these drivers of these cases, I'm not so sure if that's really understood.

And the interesting thing about it is because it's part of a big system, the key is often when you're leading in those areas, you gotta make room for those drivers to really push forward on those cases. That's how you're really gonna get to the next level of making the big cases or making a big difference in the justice system.

Ben Miller: You're not just talking about you as someone who's led these cases, but also you as a manager who's led a system. You have a team of people, different founders essentially, or entrepreneurs. Who were pursuing different lines. So you sort of have both stories to tell. So I'm interested in examples. So when I think of the government, don't think of as massive monolithic organization, but there's these individuals who are trying to make things happen.

How does that actually work?

Hallie Hoffman: Early on in my career, I had the chance to work on a [00:12:00] prosecution of a foreign prime minister of Ukraine. He had been treating his country like his personal piggy bank and developing programs and siphon enough some money off to the side. You might ask why he's prostitute in the United States. Well, he was laundering the money through banks in San Francisco, living in Eddie Murphy's old mansion, and under money laundering statutes there are something called suas. The substantive underlying activity and his was this fraud activity, so it was a very lengthy case, required depositions to be taken overseas, which unusual to take. Criminal depositions, it's more normal and a civil case. We had to get coordination of 48 countries to be able to take these depositions.

Ben Miller: What year is this?

Hallie Hoffman: This was back in 2003 a while ago. This was right at the beginning of my career. I think of that and think of this FBI agent that was so determined. He challenged every norm. He did not sleep. He put his [00:13:00] public safety at risk just because there was this criminal conduct that he was just not gonna give up on.

That's just one example. We literally had to prove some violations of Ukrainian law in the US courtroom. I mean, it was crazy. It was like nothing that had ever been done before, but the dedication of those public servants who just went for it and wanted to hold this person accountable, and obviously that's just one example.

I mean, I could go on and on.

Ben Miller: That's so wild though. What happened

Hallie Hoffman: got a conviction, went to jail for 10 years

Ben Miller: in the United States?

Hallie Hoffman: in the United States.

Ben Miller: Did you have to do an extradition?

Hallie Hoffman: We did not because the agent got him coming off the plane during the investigation at one point came to the United States. It's something I've thought about a lot, whether or not it's an oxymoron to say a humble criminal, because the criminals that I can encounter with have a lot of hubris, or at least the ones we catch.

But there's this concept that you know [00:14:00] what's best, that usually is the way law enforcement gets criminals.

Ben Miller: This is so interesting. There's like a cycle. Logical profile that you typically have seen in criminals where they are arrogant or overconfident.

Hallie Hoffman: Fundamentally. I don't know if I'm qualified to make these designations, but I do generally think that the typical fraud start convinces themselves that they are doing what's best for everyone so that they know what is right and there's a certain hubris in that, and then they'll spend the money freely or think they're not gonna get caught.

And that's usually then what brings it to light.

Ben Miller: So this is how you find them. And then does it often lead to the kind of errors in their defense because they lie.

Hallie Hoffman: Obstruct justice. Yes. Low hanging fruit is oftentimes, it shows a state of mind when we can charge an obstruction of justice. If you can add that count, you're gonna be able to show what [00:15:00] the criminal state of mind is and really get to that in front of the jury, which is a huge benefit of adding charges.

Ben Miller: I saw that and I actually didn't even exactly know what it meant, but often. In these big cases you prosecuted, you also got them for obstruction of justice. That sounds bad, but it may not mean exactly what I thought it meant. What does it look like when you're getting someone for obstruction of justice that lying?

Hallie Hoffman: It usually is, would be lying to a law enforcement agent who is taking a statement. If you could show a direct lie, it's totally case dependent, and I'm thinking through my cases. Most of them did involve. Lies to law enforcement agents in statements that were being made.

Ben Miller: Isn't that what got Martha Stewart imprisoned?

Hallie Hoffman: Exactly. You could see scenarios where people try to tamper with witnesses. That can be a different charge that could bleed into obstruction of justice.

Ben Miller: You're saying what's happening behind the scenes is that there's this less monolithic, more [00:16:00] singular or entrepreneurial group of people who are making these things happen, but that doesn't seem to be the main reason why people have lost trust. I mean, I know you said there's been certain instances. Of abuse.

It seems like it's broader than even that. One of my friends was a US Attorney General in New York or her assistant, US Attorney General. He says he got so jaundice because you just see so much bad behavior. I don't know if that's what you experienced as well.

Hallie Hoffman: You see a ton of bad behavior. You said US Attorney's office. I don't know if there's a difference between federal and state. I believe there probably is because I've always. To more in the federal level. If the feds don't take a case, the state may take it, but if the state doesn't take a case, it doesn't get done.

And I think there is such a higher volume on the state side. I don't know if this is a fair analogy. This might go totally in left field about what you were saying about being disconcerted, but when I was at DEA, people sometimes ask me, oh, well how do you not get overwhelmed? We're just gonna lose this war on drugs.

We would say at DEA, this is a war to [00:17:00] save lives in 2023, which I believe was the highest amount of Fentanyl recovery. It's 386 million lethal doses were recovered by the Drug enforcement administration. That is a unbelievable amount, and if you focus on the lives saved, it's a different way of seeing it.

It's the yang, the yang. It really does drive you forward in terms of mission.

Ben Miller: I'm trying to put that in perspective. 'cause I don't know anything about any of the things you're talking about. Is that dozens of cases, hundreds of cases? Is that a few that really move the needle?

Hallie Hoffman: That's hundreds of cases, that type of seizure, thousands potentially across the country. There also are administrative forfeitures that the DEA will do, where they will forfeit a huge volume of drugs in a criminal case, you seize them, you charge it criminally, but it also allows you to take instrumentalities of the crime sometimes [00:18:00] that is to try and have a lasting impact on the system.

Ben Miller: To an instrumentality of the crime.

Hallie Hoffman: The vehicles that are used to transport the drug. This is just an example. I'm not talking about any specific case. If you think of it as an operation, you're not just seizing the drugs, you're also seizing the vehicles, the money that they may or may not have. Getting back to this point of maximum impact with one case, you need to use all the tools and it might have many different tentacles that go out in different ways, so it may not just be the criminal case itself.

It may be associated with an administrative forfeiture or a civil forfeiture that's gonna accompany the criminal case.

Ben Miller: So I have some libertarian friends. I used to have this debate before we legalized marijuana in so many states, so, okay. What do you think the world looks like without? Drug enforcement, what does it look like without the de deterrent, without the forfeitures? Because I feel like for you to appreciate what the consequences are, you have to see what it would look like.

[00:19:00] Imagine a counterfactual where there's a lot less police, a lot less criminal justice. I know this is a little speculative. It helps, I think, get at this question of what's actually the loss of trust costing you? You said 300 million lethal doses or something. Is that 1% of other drugs in America? Do you have any sense of how much is being stopped?

Hallie Hoffman: The counterfactual is if you're not stopping it, that's going into our communities. That is a huge destructive impact. I'm trying to imagine, and I'm thinking back to a terrible story about fentanyl when I was criminal chief. In the northern district of California. By the way, the northern district is like 15 counties, so it's Monterey up to the Oregon border.

There is a wide variety of crime in those counties, a lot of violent crime. Obviously you have also all the San Jose Tech crime, but you also have a lot of organized crime. You have Salinas, which is terrible, murder [00:20:00] issues, et cetera. This particular case. Was a father who had overdosed on fentanyl when he was taking care of his child, and the child crawled on top of him to check on.

His father breathed in. The dad was still actually breathing, and when the father woke up, the infant was dead next to him. At that moment, this was like nothing we had ever seen before. So it is hard for me when we're talking about legalization. I can't think of a world where that poison is so rampant.

What I go to is, okay, well then it's a weapon and the people who have it would have power. You would have cartels keeping the power over US citizens, which I think would be a terrible place to be.

Ben Miller: I feel like over the decade with a. Is legalizing or you just saw some defund, the police arguments. I think there's sometimes this argument [00:21:00] that the cure is worse than the disease. You've seen the inside of it. Can you help blow that argument up?

Hallie Hoffman: I think we saw to a degree what happens when it goes unregulated. We saw that with the opioid crisis and we saw how that tore apart communities and disproportionately impacted some of the poorer communities in certain parts of this country, and it was disastrous. There will be impact felt for generations from that in terms of defund the police.

This fundamentally gets back to the trust that we were talking about earlier. When I was in San Francisco during a time now, I think it's changing a little bit, but I can't tell you how many people would come up to me on the side and thank me for what we were doing. There was a toleration of the crime as long as it didn't reach certain populations.

I think that's not something that's discussed if people are actually victims of the crime. I think there needs to be a focus on the protection [00:22:00] of citizens and victims, which. What public safety is this supposed to be? I think that is only possible in a world where there are no bad actors. Maybe such a world exists.

We do not live in that world right now from what I've seen and until we do, the worst thing to do is to take away funding because. You need funding to have appropriate education. I believe at DEA, the shooting incidents for 0.01% of operations incredibly low. There's a lot of reasons for that. DEA has planned enforcement actions.

Unlike state police, it's not as reactive. Usually there are these planned operations. We also have a extremely thorough use of force. Program where lawyers from the general counsel's team, the chief counsel's team, go out with agents and do training in the field on use of force, which I think is an incredible program.

Things like that cost money to do. And if you take [00:23:00] away and defund, you're not gonna be able to have programs like that.

Ben Miller: But notice what's happening with this and so many other things is that social media, what gets viral are these anecdotal. Narratives that aren't necessarily representative of what's actually happening around anything, but those are what become the public narrative or what become truth. One of the downsides of social media has been this change in how the public views anything because of the way that media is decentralized, the pros and cons, decentralization.

It's a hard thing to combat in any sector I can imagine.

Hallie Hoffman: Maybe there's a good there. Maybe if you can flip that in. There is more light to be shed on all the work that's going on in the past, I think there has been just such a focus on these problematic situations. Get a. Lot of airtime. There hasn't been as much emphasis on the great work that is going on in law enforcement, which is needed in order to build that public trust.

I don't know how you make that as [00:24:00] interesting, because maybe it's just not as interesting to people. I don't know

Ben Miller: Especi. Lawyers are afraid to talk to the public

Hallie Hoffman: Here we are back at the start.

Ben Miller: burdened by facts. You've been in these large organizations, I don't know how big DEA is or DOJ, but a massive, what breaks down as you scale justice.

Hallie Hoffman: DA, by the way, is about 10,000.

Ben Miller: It's not as big as I thought.

Hallie Hoffman: But DEA is part of DOJ. DOJ is obviously much larger. Going back to this small number of cases and the driver of these cases, and I wouldn't say it breaks down, I would say that it needs to be acknowledged and accommodated for. I think the way to do that is this public awareness that we've been talking about.

I think what is another accommodation that in both of these organizations would be extremely helpful is with internal management and leadership. It's very hard to incentivize [00:25:00] and hold people accountable in these systems. I think these systems generally think that if you have expertise, you're automatically gonna be a good manager.

Or a good leader, and obviously we know that's the whole skillset that needs to be taught, but there's not a focus on developing managers and think about trying to motivate a team where you can't incentivize by money. The way you can incentivize is by mission, and that's a lot. Where they see colleagues who are not putting in the drive, not putting in the time, and there's really no consequences.

Now, I think these things are changing, but it is very hard to grow a team in these systems.

Ben Miller: I live in Washington, DC so I've seen government for most of my life. And the fact that you can't manage and hire and fire in a government organization is one of the primary reasons why it doesn't operate at a level of excellence that it could, or is that the [00:26:00] same type of thing you're saying, or is something different?

Hallie Hoffman: That's what I'm talking about. And I tried as much as I could to think of ways even in small ways. There are certain mechanisms in the justice system to give certain benefits, but it is difficult when I think of different supervisors, people raising their hand to be supervisors. It is so mission driven.

It's incredible what these people do because they'll put their neck out there to take on these roles where they don't have the tools to actually incentivize or fire or. Do something with their team, and yet they're also held accountable by the members of the team. It's pretty remarkable to me actually how much mission drives these supervisors, but giving them tools would make a huge difference.

Ben Miller: When I talk to politicians, I complain to politicians about this. They say it's not like a legislative act. It's actually the public unions that control a lot of this. It's not like there's legislation that put this in place. [00:27:00] I don't know how you address this problem.

Hallie Hoffman: I can't tell you how many times in sort of an agency Chief counsel wall, you're told, oh, we can't do that. 'cause the lawyers say No. Then I say, which lawyer? When I first got to da, I actually wanted to put a doll in my office and be like, oh, was it Merv over here? Because I'd ask around, who gave you that advice?

Where does it come from? It's almost like this allure. I'm not saying that lawyers don't say that, but it's all about risk assessment usually. Sometimes there's a very hard line that you cannot cross, but short of that, it's usually a question of risk. Do you wanna do this or don't you? Because here are the potential consequences that will happen when you do it.

I can't cite to why that mentality is greater in the government than in the private. If it is, I don't know. Maybe you could speak to that, but maybe that's done elsewhere too, that they just say, oh, the lawyers told me that I couldn't do it.

Ben Miller: Definitely exists elsewhere 'cause I know it exists in our organization. [00:28:00] I always say it's all about risk. And what the risk is. Well, not so much criminal risk, but usually it's business risk. If you're like a customer of our platform, all of our designs are actually these abstract art. And the reasons abstract art is if it wasn't abstract, actually there'd be a lot of compliance.

We just make abstract art.

Hallie Hoffman: I love that.

Ben Miller: It's like such a random consequence of regulations that all of our design and our hero images are abstract art.

Hallie Hoffman: That is another great adaptation when we're talking about what you can do to scale this because you need to put it in a large organization, is finding those reoccurring barriers and removing them. You see a problem that is getting in the way of a lot of different things and you can figure out a way to maximize, so you can't have 10 people on a case.

You can only have two. You gotta have the right to, but you have to have the flexibility to. Staff it in the way you need to staff it.

Ben Miller: You've said this, and I actually literally complained about this around business law, but justice is so [00:29:00] slow in America. I got involved in a case that my father was involved with that literally had been going on for 15 years, maybe 20 years. It was something like mid eighties, the mid two thousands. I just thought it was insane.

And you said it has to be slow, it has to be individualized. Does it have to be that slow? I don't understand.

Hallie Hoffman: I don't mean it has to be that slow. I mean, right now it is that slow because it is individualized now. It does need to be individualized because obviously they're individual cases. That's. Very important. A person has a right to face their accusers. There's all of these rights that are really important and critical rights, but justice can be achieved at a quicker pace.

There's no question about that. The key is trying to find those barriers, and I think remove them, just because it's individualized doesn't mean that there aren't ways of. Multiplying the work that you're doing. There are certain forms that you can put into place to try and do a higher volume of cases quicker, [00:30:00] even when you're individually assessing the facts of the case.

One example, the DEA can take administrative actions against a pharmacy or a drug manufacturer, or a doctor who is mis prescribing or not using their licenses. D it gives the ability. To handle controlled substances to these entities. If they aren't using it at the right way, we can bring an administrative action that forces them to either do it at the right way, give up their license, whatever.

It's like the SEC's, administrative actions against corporations, and sometimes those go with criminal cases. Same thing in the drug context, but. There was a low number because there are administrative law judges that ultimately review those, and there's a limited number of administrative law judges.

There's a limited number of agents, but there are ways still that you can increase the volume because there are certain aspects that are repeated over and over. You know that [00:31:00] you're gonna have to prove A, B, and c. It doesn't mean that you are gonna give the same A, B, and C for every case, but it means that you generally know the structure is A, B, and C.

There's a lot of ways that we can help the process so that we could do more of these. And in fact, that has occurred and there were like record numbers done in last years of these cases. So it is possible, it is important to recognize that while these systems. Are so in some ways hallowed and true and wonderful.

Justice is an ideal, and this is such an important fundamental part of our system. There are modifications that can be made, and we know this because in March, 2020, I was criminal chief. When the US shut down, crime doesn't stop. It morphed into other ways in that moment. I saw the judges, the defense counsel, the US Attorney's Office, everyone got together on calls and figured out how are we gonna do this?

How are we gonna work with the warden? How are we gonna get someone [00:32:00] into a jail? How are we gonna make sure they have their confrontation clause rights preserved on a video call? How are we gonna make sure they talk to their defense counsel? We went through every single step of the process that needed to happen and figured out a way to get it done, even in a circumstance where we couldn't put two people in the same room together.

Obviously we all know that these urgency creates innovation. It was what got so many of these court systems used to be paper filings. People had to drop it in, drop boxes. Until COVID, these changes can occur. That will speed up the process. The key, I think, is finding out how we can, being open to making the changes.

Ben Miller: Other than that example of the paper moving to digital, what other things changed for the better as a result of forced rapid adoption of a different way of doing the justice system?

Hallie Hoffman: Each district operates differently. The district I was in did most of the charging through the grand jury. If you can't bring in a grand [00:33:00] jury, obviously it becomes difficult to do the charging. There is a way to charge criminal cases through complaints, which a lot of other districts do where. Literally, it's an affidavit of an agent that goes in that can then be examined by the court.

Ultimately, a grand jury does need to weigh in on it, but it does move the process on a little bit faster, and it has the secondary aspect of informing the court and a little bit more information about the case rather than just the indictment that comes down to the grand jury. So there are tools like that that get a little bit forgotten, and then they get uncovered when the need arises.

Video court appearances limited still in the criminal context because defendants have the right to face their accusers. But during the time, there was some adoption of video which allowed victims to participate from afar, and I think has changed the dynamic of the ability to communicate with [00:34:00] victims in a really significant way.

Ben Miller: I can imagine if you're a victim, the last thing you wanna do is be in the same room and it must be so stressful. What about reforms? I know some of them are less feasible, but if you had more or even infinite power to reform the system, what would you do Different.

Hallie Hoffman: It's hard for me to put my finger on exactly how the legislative reform would looked, but I would want to figure out a way where there could be more discretion and accountability, because I think when it is only held at certain levels in the system, it really clogs up the system. I think there are so many things that we could do internally.

It takes great leaders, but the US attorney at the time was very open. When I was criminal chief that the AUSAs themselves signed the indictment and I created a structure where my name's on the top of it that they're signing it. They only came up [00:35:00] the three levels to me when it was something that was being done differently.

If they were proposing something outside the ordinary. If I'm looking at 20 instead of 300, it's a very different story. It's that pyramid, and so how do you get rid of it? I think another internal way of doing it is we all know that these big cases, there are endless motions being filed almost to the point of shutting down the case because there are limited numbers of attorneys on the case when there is the assistance of a appellate attorney, which is usually within.

The criminal division of US Attorney's office, it can be incredibly helpful to sort of cut through some of the motions. That case I was talking about earlier, I remember when I was prosecuting that case, going to a wedding on, unlike the East coast, someone was in Michigan and writing defense motions in the case, they were like outsourced just at home writing emotions.

Ben Miller: If you had infinite [00:36:00] power, you're a dictator for a day, you're whatever. Aren't there any bigger, more sweeping, simpler solutions? Just seems so depressing that like it requires only trench warfare.

Hallie Hoffman: Dictator for a day. I would wanna shorten the timelines. I guess if I'm dictator for a day, it, I don't have to be thinking about the limited number of judicial resources, but that's a limiting factor. When you charge a case, there's only so many time slots in a week where a judge can bring that defendant in and move the case forward.

If I were dictator for a day, I would put on time periods. The case has to move at a certain point. Motions have to be filed within X number of days after the indictment comes through, and then they have to be heard wide days after. There would be an exception, obviously, for complex cases. There are these local rules sometimes that exist, but the rules have been eaten by the realities [00:37:00] of how practice normally happens, and it just takes a long time to get to trial.

Ben Miller: For me person far from this, but I look at country and see if we had 10 x more judges and 10 x more resources. It's still not that big a percentage of the US GDPI don't think that we're spending on justice. If we 10 XD it, would the country be better off or do you think it probably wouldn't change ultimately that much?

Hallie Hoffman: You'd have to have it in combination with some of the stuff I was talking about. I don't think throwing resources at it without any confines will really. Solve the problem. I think it would have to be a combination of we're gonna put more resources and we're gonna make sure, and we're gonna say, because we put these resources, everyone is going to get into court by a certain day.

They have to have the trial date, and by the way, there is the right to a speedy trial. It just oftentimes gets waived. That does exist. It's just not something that you normally see happen

Ben Miller: Do people waive their right to a [00:38:00] speedy trial?

Hallie Hoffman: oftentimes.

Ben Miller: What does that mean?

Hallie Hoffman: If they're filing motions, they will pause the speedy trial clock. They'll ask for a trial date that's beyond the speedy trial, and they'll say, the court will make a ruling that it's a complex case and it can't be done.

By the way I'm talking the federal system. I can't speak to the state system, the state system, my guess is that it moves much quicker than the federal system. Although, I don't know,

Ben Miller: I only know business courts and they're not fast.

Hallie Hoffman: I do think the criminal justice system does tend to move much faster than the civil system.

Ben Miller: It's wild to me. If time matters for you, you've lost. If you're in a business situation and one party basically can move on, you can't move on. You're done. You made reference to some large corporate cases. I know one where there was a very large company. I don't know if I'm allowed to say which one. There was like explosion.

It sounded like there was just a huge case and then the company subsequently went bankrupt, which felt like it was culturally consistent and I don't know how much you can [00:39:00] speak to it. It's seemed like a very interesting example of trying to keep large companies accountable and how hard it is under the law.

Corporations are people to some extent, but yet they're not really accountable like people are.

Hallie Hoffman: It is extremely rare for a corporation to. Face criminal charges. A lot of times you'll either hear about a corporation facing civil sanctions or you'll hear about individuals in a corporation facing criminal charges that actually had been decreasing. The Justice Department a few years ago, I think, started increasing NDAs and DPAs deferred prosecution agreements, non-prosecution agreements, where these aren't these agreements that if you modify and change your behavior and they see an improvement, then they won't charge you.

The Justice Depart was sort of leaning into these different aspects. I think what isn't understood potentially is the amount of consequences to a corporation that faces criminal charges because it is so rare. A lot of times people might [00:40:00] say, oh, well, what happens? The corporation can't go to jail. But in a way, they do go to jail because if there is a criminal conviction against a corporation, they actually have a period of probation.

Following their sentence with the court, if you can think of what happens during a probationary period, there's a probation officer. If it's a federal case, that means that probation officer has access to law enforcement agents and they get a report that the corporation is doing something untoward.

Doesn't even have to be in the same exact area, but they're supposed to behave in a certain way for five years or whatever the period of probation is. The corporation is under sort of a microscope, which is a form of prison. I would say for the corporation. It's an extreme consequence. It can also be followed by a period of supervised release where the judge is making sure that the corporation essentially does no wrong, and if they do, then the judge makes a decision.[00:41:00]

Springs and executives is giving feedback to the corporation about how they are doing as a corporation, which I could imagine would be very hard to run a corporation in that rubric. There are other consequences. The case, I think that you are mentioning, they had to put an ad in the paper. The Wall Street Journal saying that the corporation was a convicted felon to notify victims that as part of a consequence of their actions, eight people died and 38 homes were destroyed.

There are a lot of different consequences that can come from a corporate conviction that I think sometimes it's not understood. It's pretty significant, which is why it is rare for corporations to get charged, but it is extremely rare for them to go to trial.

Ben Miller: It seems like in that instance, that company ended up continuing to follow a culture of bad behavior and then ultimately went bankrupt because more bad things happened. Maybe [00:42:00] recidivism is common among corporations as it is among people, but didn't seem like the conviction changed the trajectory of the company.

Hallie Hoffman: Maybe the hope would be that it brought to light what was going on in the corporation and because of the conviction, the consequences that you're. Identifying were a light was shed on them as opposed to if there hadn't been the case brought.

Ben Miller: If I were thinking about, okay, you can go to prison, or they can be an ad about you in the Wall Street Journal, I'd be like, oh, I'll just take this ad.

Hallie Hoffman: The judge can issue orders when you're in probation or supervised relief set by the company. Generally, when corporations are in that position, they might also have to have a federal monitor that is monitoring their activity. In order to be able to prove a corporate entities, the crime has to be so persuasive through the corporation.

That's when it's gonna get to that point past individuals. It's going to be more likely in those circumstances that it's so ingrained in the corporation that maybe it can [00:43:00] pivot and maybe it can come out of it, but that's why they have to go through a period of probation.

Ben Miller: If you look at the next five years, so it's five years from now, it's middle of 2030. AI's probably completely transformed a lot of sectors. What do you see as trends? No one saw fentanyl coming, I don't think, and it had this huge effect. What are like the things that worry you and make you hopeful forward the rest of this decade?

Hallie Hoffman: Crime used to be confined to certain localities. There was a street corner, there was a racetrack, there was a convenience store. There were all these different localities. Now it's within the confines of one's home in a place that people feel very safe. There's sitting on their couch. There's access to designer drugs.

There's access to potential grooming that we would think wouldn't happen. I think that is going to be pivotal for us to figure out how, when locality is no longer the issue, and you really think [00:44:00] about, okay, all the access to crime. Identity fraud, financial fraud, violent crime even is brought into your home.

And we're a place where we have all thought of ourselves as very safe. What does that mean before I cause you to be too depressed? I think you have seen more and more efforts of private and public partnerships. I think the tech companies are coming in and talking more to the government. You've seen increased.

Focus on public safety. I think people are recognizing this issue, but I think that's an area that everyone understands. We have to lean into.

Ben Miller: I'm an AI optimist, which is actually unusual. Most people are AI pessimists outside of Silicon Valley, so I think AI is gonna help with that, but obviously it could make it worse. My last question is about human insights and human behavior. You've seen people probably at their worst. Maybe you've seen people at their best when you were in tech.

Maybe also when we watch these agents really try to get after big [00:45:00] problems, do you have any harder insights on human nature?

Hallie Hoffman: It's that last thing that you mentioned. I'm still an optimist 22 years in DOJ, and I've seen a lot of bad actors. I would still say that. The fact that we have so many investigators and lawyers and other public servants willing to put their lives on their line. It's remarkable. Even with everything else we've talked about.

I've just seen over and over so many incredible cases. I had a case where this agent was undercover for six years. It was the longest undercover in the history. Now it's probably been surpassed, but it was a crazy case.

Ben Miller: What kind of undercover is that?

Hallie Hoffman: There was illegally importation of counterfeit cigarettes coming in the country and drugs and weapons.

They were coming through ports and the undercover was, they had an inside with someone at customs and facilitated this activity and it was an [00:46:00] incredible case. This whole team dedicated so much of their lives to making sure, and it was this international case. It's just remarkable. I'm citing these big cases.

I also think when I was criminal chief in California, there was a San Francisco police officer who worked with this A TF agent to put together this operation. They were smaller cases, but they ended up taking out like 148 defendants, which was this massive amount of guns and drugs in the Bay Area.

There's just these individual drivers that I think make me very optimistic, even though I have seen some of the most deplorable behavior.

Ben Miller: I bet I've had this debate with somebody, which is that in any city I know in Washington, DC. A very small number of people are responsible for the vast majority of crime. DC is about 600,000 people. It's probably a few hundred, and yet it's not how we police the system.

Hallie Hoffman: So there's a lot of opportunity.

Ben Miller: Why is that? I know there's civil rights issues and things like [00:47:00] that, but it just seems strange.

Your A TF story made me think of that. If you can just figure out how to prosecute the. A few hundred people who are responsible for the vast measure of crime, you could have the a very effective, cost effective, and socially effective impact. Mostly, it doesn't seem to be what happens, and I'm not sure why.

Hallie Hoffman: There can be a lot done with strategic investigations. I think that's what you're talking about in a way that protects civil liberties. You throw out civil rights, I'm assuming it's focusing singularly on a particular individual, which if that particular individual is engaged in crime, it's totally appropriate to be investigating the crime that they're committing.

There is a distinction there that I think is an important one.

Ben Miller: I'm like totally guilty of social media informed view of the world. I see these posts about people who've been arrested 55 times, come in and outta the system, in and outta the system, and then they do horrible thing eventually. And I wonder, well, what's going on here? Why is this happening? It's this [00:48:00] concentrated source of the problem, which is mostly my experience.

It's Preto principle, it's always 80 20. It's always this small group people, these are the founders you're talking about in your organization. They can have good effects or bad effects, but it's always these tail effects, yet it's just sort of not the narrative.

Hallie Hoffman: I think you're touching on the needed flexibility to change an organization. When I came to DEA, the way the organizational structure even was of the Chief Council's office was crazy to me because it's like 140 attorneys, but not necessarily. Structurally the way that met what we were doing as a mission.

Now, when I asked where did this come from? Why are these two things separated? When one would inform the other, and it should be the same attorneys working on it because they all the way through the system would know how to regulate and was told, well, it's always been that way. These are the things that I think drive people crazy.

I've been that way for 30 years. When I reorganized it, I got a lot of, oh, [00:49:00] are you allowed to do that? Of course you can do a reorganization. Territorially, it makes people very uncomfortable, but having the difficult conversations with the people is something that unfortunately, I think maybe in all organizations, but it does seem that people shy away from which is necessary to change it to a position where you can do strategic cases, and I think clear the path for people to be able to focus on that.

Ben Miller: I feel lucky as a American that we have people like you who can be as successful as you were in business and then go back to public service and do this founders or entrepreneurial activity reforming the system. So thank you again for coming on onward. I really appreciate it.

Hallie Hoffman: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate being here.

Ben Miller: All right, onward.