CPAC 2019 - An Interview with Pat Nolan

Thank you. Good afternoon. This is what's amazing about CPAC. Matt Schlapp's out here saying, you've got to talk to Pat Nolan. And you just sit there. And here I am talking to Pat Nolan for you. You can't beat that. Pat is the director of the American Conservative Union Center for Criminal Justice Reform. I've known him for many years. He was first elected to the California State Assembly when he was 28 years old. He became the California Assembly leader. And that's when I worked for him, in 1987. And he has a lot of distinctions in his career. One of them is he thinks he's the only convicted felon to be at the White House for three bill signings. Four now. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? So anyway, let's talk about your life, Pat. You started out as one of the cavemen in the California Assembly. You were one of the young Turks of the cavemen. What did a good conservative think about the criminal justice system and what lawmakers should do when you were a lawmaker in 1987? Well, first, so the great audience of CPAC knows, I was a Reaganite from his first campaign, the first primary. Myself, Dana Rohrabacher, Sean Steele, a whole bunch of us cut our teeth in Reagan. And he taught us that we should raise a banner of bold colors, not pale pastels. And so when we got to the Assembly, we were there to stir the pot. And we were part of the tax reform revolt of Prop 13. And as Reagan said, it was a prairie fire that swept the country. And on crime, we were reliably tough on crime. I'd grown up on Crenshaw Boulevard. And not only myself, but all my brothers and sisters, our neighbors, were victims of crime. So the thinking at the time was, get the bad guys, toss them in prison, and we'll have safer communities. So let's fast forward to 1988 when the FBI entered your life. They raided your office. What happened? Yeah. We're seeing, as some of my friends have said, I was the canary in the tunnel conservatives should have been paying attention to. The FBI targeted me for prosecution on a bill that was absolutely a good bill. I never asked for or accepted a contribution while it was still pending for my vote. I voted for it in good faith. They contributed to me. But through a series of leaks and thug tactics, they tried to pressure my supporters into saying that they had contributed to me as a way to influence my vote. And it was not only conservatives, but liberals reacted in horror at that. Because as many people told them, I was one of the good guys. I was a straight arrow. But I learned a lot from the process through that. Not only did they intimidate and threaten witnesses, and one of the things I learned is when the FBI interviews you, they won't allow you to tape the conversation. Instead, they write it down in what they call a 302, and they put things in quotes that aren't quotes. They aren't stenographers. But then, and this is what happened to General Flynn, then they come back to you and say, oh, you said this, and that contradicts that. No, when you object to that, and they said this to many of the people that worked for me, well, who are they going to believe, fine, upstanding FBI agents, or somebody that works for a crooked politician like you? And you hung in the wind for five years. The Ranger office in 1988, you were indicted in 1993, and then in 1994, you were scheduled to go to trial. And you pleaded guilty. So the day that you pleaded guilty, you came out of the courthouse and said you weren't. Explain that. Yeah, I thought, like most people, well, you don't plead guilty unless you're guilty. But my children were five years, four years, and 10 months, and they stacked charges against me. The one that contributed to my campaign, not to me personally, but they got six felonies out of it in the charging. They always overcharge. And I was facing a minimum of 21 years in prison. I would have lost the whole childhood of my children. And to me, the calculus was easy. I'd worked very hard to try to change. I fought Willie Brown every day on the floor. He was the speaker. And I brought our caucus within five votes of defeating him and electing a Republican speaker. And they took me out. But I couldn't afford to miss all those years with my children. So I lied and said I did something, and then walked out of the courthouse and said, I just lied because I didn't do anything, but I need to protect my family. But God has a plan for each of us. And as Joseph said to his brothers, they tried to kill him. They sold him into slavery. And he said, what man intended for evil, God intended for good. And he knit together my experiences to prepare me for this work, which is warning conservatives and leading conservatives and saying, this big government, if they can do that to me, think of what they do to a young kid from an abusive family that runs away from home and gets in trouble. And that's what Van Jones was talking about. And I know you don't. We chatted before this, and I know that you don't want to give this poor me in prison talk. So talk for a second about how your faith got you through this. Yeah. Thank you for that. I'd always wondered, would my faith withstand a serious challenge like this? But at every step of the way, God made it clear that his hand was on me. He doesn't save us from the pain of situations, but he does remind us that he's there. And I'll just give you one example. I arrived at prison. I'm a fat old white guy, and we've all seen movies at prison. And here I was, a politician, a Republican politician, going into prison. And I had some trepidations. And they sent over the guard on rotation. Normally, it would have been my counselor, but she was off that day. And there were 700 guards that worked at this complex. And as I stepped through the layers of barbed wire, he said, hi, I'm Officer Bernalzani. And I said, hi, I'm Pat Nolan. And he said, oh, I know who you are. My prayer group's been praying for you. Now, what are the chances of that? 700 guards there. He's the only one that would have been praying for me. And yet, by God's hand, he was there. And through so many occasions, he made it obvious that he was preparing me. My wife said this, too. Pat, he's got a purpose in this. Although people would say, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And we laughed and said, yeah, but God, we're about as strong as we want to be for a while. But yeah. So I mean, you've been involved. And I want to just go through some of the names of the people that you've dealt with in the course of the career. I mean, you've been involved with the Religious Land Use and Institutional Persons Act, Fair Sentencing Act, First Step Act, Prison Rape Elimination Act, all these years. And you've dealt with people on both sides. Let's talk about some of the people that you dealt with. Chuck Colson played such a big part in your life. Yeah. And here again, this is God really blessing me. Chuck recruited me while I was still in prison. And he was like an older brother to me. He took me under his wing. And I learned so much from him. And his vision was that conservatives should be involved in criminal justice reform. We shouldn't leave it to the liberals, because he didn't feel that they would run it, right? And so he did that for me. But also, Teddy Kennedy, who I thought was evil incarnate. But when Harry Reid tried to strip prisoners of their religious freedom, Ted Kennedy and John Ashcroft joined together to say this is wrong. And I was blessed to be able to put together a press conference with the two of them. And just as Matt and Van are together, I found there's power in getting left and right. So when Kennedy wanted to sponsor the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which is really a stain on our character, you get sent to prison, your sentence doesn't ever include being raped. And yet thousands of men and women are raped inside, about half by guards, about half by other prisoners. So they wanted to have Arlen Specter. And I said, no, he doesn't bring anybody with him. He's a liberal Republican. We want to have Jeff Sessions. And they said, oh, you're nuts. He'll never do it. But he did. The moral issues was such that he said, yes, we need to take a stand and say this is wrong. And so it was that type of left, right. Sam Brownback was a great hero of this. Dick Durbin, actually, was good to work with. Not on anything else, but on these issues, he was. Well, so you've been involved in signings for Bill with Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, who was the best for you to work with? I think Trump. He had a passion for this. He was skeptical, but I don't have time to go into this. But God put me together with Jared Kushner 10 years earlier when neither of us ever would have thought Trump would be president. But we worked together, and Trump was convinced that this was wrong, that we were really hurting our society by having so many people unable to support their family, unable to find work. I hate to do this, but I'm really scrupulous about stopping on time. So tell me, what's the next thing you want to get done, Pat? First, prosecutorial abuse. We need to hold them personally accountable when they violate our rights. Second, mental health. We have so many people that are mentally ill that get sent to prison, and they're not evil. They're sick, and they need help. I'll give you one more thing to say, and then we've got to run. What's the last third thing? I think it's trying to give shorter sentences, but more things that prepare them to come out. Thank you. Thank you very much, everyone.