Today’s guest is Aaron Hiller ’03, chief counsel and Democratic deputy staff director for the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary.

On this episode, Aaron reflects on the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and what it was like to work on the ensuing two impeachments of former president Donald Trump. The alumnus also shares his thoughts on having a free and fair election this November, his legal heroes, and why he thinks college students should consider working in politics.

Aaron spoke with Morehead-Cain from his office on the Hill before the 2023 D.C. Regional Event for alumni and scholars.

The alumnus received his bachelor’s in biology and philosophy from Carolina. He earned his JD and master’s in public policy from Georgetown University in 2007.

Listen to the episode.

Music credits

The episode’s intro song is by scholar Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the band South of the Soul.

How to listen

On your mobile device, you can listen and subscribe to Catalyze on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. For any other podcast app, you can find the show using our RSS feed.

Catalyze is hosted and produced by Sarah O’Carroll for the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on Twitter or Instagram at @moreheadcain or you can email us at communications@moreheadcain.org.

Episode Transcription

(Sarah)

Aaron, thank you so much for speaking with Catalyze this afternoon.

(Aaron)

Thank you for having me.

(Sarah)

And will you share just where we are right now?

(Aaron)

We are here in my hidey hole office off of the House Judiciary Committee hearing room in Rayburn House office building in Washington, D. C.

(Sarah)

You shared just a few minutes ago that you switch offices when the Republicans control the House versus the other way around. What are some other things that change for you when there’s a flip like this, which, of course, you’ve been here for many of those.

(Aaron)

The United States Senate, there are a lot of rules, I’ve worked on Capitol Hill for a very long time. Most of those rules are beyond my understanding. In the House, there’s really only one rule: majority wins every time. So they control the agenda. They control when we have hearings. They control what the hearings are about. They control most of the witnesses who are going to appear at those hearings. The chairman gets to decide what bills move through the committee. We get to decide none of them. It’s not a lifestyle for everybody. But once you figure out how life in the minority works, there’s a certain calm washes over you, and you realize that if they’re going to say no to most things that we put up for a vote, then we have the power to decide what they say no to. And that can lead to some very fun mischief making, good trouble, as one of our congressmen up here used to say.

(Sarah)

So most people are familiar with the Senate Judiciary Committee when thinking about confirming or the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court justices. What are the primary roles of the House Judiciary Committee, in contrast?

(Aaron)

It’s a great question. We are not on television as often as the Senate Judiciary Committee. That’s true. We’re one of the oldest committees in Congress. We’ve been around since 1813. So our jurisdiction is eclectic. We oversee the Department of Justice. We oversee the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We oversee the Department of Homeland Security, the corner of it that handles immigration. We oversee federal criminal law. We oversee the federal courts. We oversee questions about law enforcement, questions about the constitution, questions about bankruptcy law, questions about intellectual property law, questions about regulations, I could go on. At the end of the day, we’re the lawyers for the House of Representatives, and it’s kind of a fun role to play.

(Sarah)

And going back to how you decide what will be said no to, I’m curious what goes into this strategy in thinking about what are going to be the main priorities, and can you share what some of those are for you all right now and going into an upcoming election?

(Aaron)

Well, you said it exactly right. We are laser focused on one mission above all others. Leader Jeffries has told us, and Chairman Ranking Member Nadler tells us regularly, our job is to take back the House of Representatives. A lot of that these days involves drawing a contrast between our priorities and the majority’s priorities. Last week, the majority ran a set of immigration reforms that, and you don’t have to take my word for it, as Republican members of Congress saying that those things are unfair, un-American, unjust, cruel, and our job is to make that point over and over again and drive it home.

Now, there are going to be issues where we agree. I was in a hearing this morning. The question is about certain surveillance authorities that the FBI and the rest of the intelligence community have where there are some real questions about privacy protections and the civil liberties of United States persons. It was very refreshing to walk into a room where we’re basically in agreement with our Republican counterparts, and I think it lowered the temperature in the room. There was a very adult conversation that was had, and I think it’s going to lead to some cooperation later this year.

(Sarah)

It seems like that kind of consensus seems really rare from the media standpoint. Does that happen more often than people might think where there is cooperation and you just might not see that as much if you’re just reading the news and expecting there to be this sense of polarization.

(Aaron)

I have two answers to your question. It is definitely true that way more cooperation happens than is ever shown on the news. There’s no story to 90% of what we do around here. We’re doing in lockstep with one another, and there’s a certain just basic running of the federal government, overseeing the federal agencies, we have to do that together. We have to decide, just on the logistics, we have to decide when to be in the room at the same time. That said, at no point in my career, I have always—I’ve been on the Hill for 14 years and change—I have always had partners on the other side of the aisle to whom I could reach out and talk about just about anything. And most of the time it’s the members are fighting in the hearing room and the camera is on, but we got to end this hearing in an hour, so what’s our plan to land the plane? And those are really nice relationships to have. After January 6, those relationships are strained, and it’s a little disorienting not to be able to just pick up the phone and call a guy and say, “Hey, how can we do this in the best interest?” It feels like the temperature is coming down a little bit, but we’re not quite there.

(Aaron)

It feels like the temperature is coming down a little bit, but we’re not quite there yet.

(Sarah)

I have some assumptions for why a moment like January 6 would create such a strong divide and a line in the sand for a lot of folks. But can you share more of why that had such an impact in affecting these relationships that you have, such that you don’t feel comfortable calling those trusty people on the other side that you would go to for information or for bouncing ideas from?

(Aaron)

Well, I won’t name names because we’re all polite here on this podcast. There is no doubt in my mind. I really think there’s no doubt in any honest broker’s mind that the past administration and its political supporters, the things they were saying about the election, which they knew to be untrue while they were saying them, they stood up the morning of January 6 and said those things in front of a crowd that they knew to be angry and armed and organized. And one guy stood up and said, “And now we will march to the Capitol.” And the violence that ensued was their responsibility.

I live just a few blocks away from here because I learned at UNC, always live on campus. It’s just a way better lifestyle. My kids watched the National Guard deploy from our front yard. We lived in a Green Zone for weeks. And what a lot of people miss about Capitol Hill is this is a neighborhood where families are raising their children. And we were shut down for a month, occupied by the National Guard because it was not safe to be here. I can’t tell you how scary that is.

(Sarah)

Not only for yourself, but for your family, who’s right there with you.

(Aaron)

For my family, for my team, I run a team of really smart lawyers who are really dedicated to what they do here. Thank God most of them were not on campus that day. We had to find the people who were on campus and hide them. We had to find my boss, who was on the floor, and hide him. I think it’s understandable that our members and my staff and I would have some hard feelings about that even still.

(Sarah)

What does trust look like in your role? And related to that, what does trust with information look like? Because I imagine there’s a lot of different sources and people you could go to. But we’re in the world of politics, and so that certainly would change how you think about someone’s intent in that there could be something strategic. So how do you differentiate and what have you learned about trust and relationship building in navigating these, at times, very tumultuous waters?

(Aaron)

Yeah, on the Hill, as in probably most of life, you’re only as good as your word, and maybe you get tested a little more often on Capitol Hill than you might in another workplace. When we make promises, we deliver. And I think all we can do there is lead by example. So I make promises on behalf of Mr. Nadler, on behalf of our team, to different members of Congress, to our leadership, to members across the aisle and their staffs. It is my job to deliver on those promises every day. That’s how you build trust, really. There’s no shortcut to it. You just have to make good on your word.

(Sarah)

And I imagine, too, you know, actions sometimes can speak louder than words, and so if you show your true colors, then eventually you might not get a second pass with people. So having that integrity would be really important, I think.

(Aaron)

It is deeply important. You’re right. You don’t get a second chance at that. Nobody gets a third.

(Sarah)

And back to incitement, as a legal concept, can you break down what that means? And I think we have a sense of what that entails in layperson terms, but the legal world can be very different. And so what was also the conclusion of the committee in determining that Trump had, in fact, incited violence?

(Aaron)

That’s a very complicated question, so I’m going to give you a politician’s answer. We should not hide from the fact that impeachment is a political judgment, not a legal judgment. It has been the consensus of everybody who has ever studied impeachment that not every crime is an impeachable offense, and not every impeachable offense needs to be a crime, a state or federal crime. That was how the framers of the Constitution talked about impeachment. They said it would be for political crimes. I wish they had been a little more precise in their wording when they wrote the Constitution, having now lived through two impeachment processes from start to finish. But it was the judgment of a majority of the members of the House of Representatives that President Trump incited the riot that attacked the House. We could get into all the legal definitions of incitement and dissect statutes that were written after the Civil War to get at similarly tense times. I don’t know that that would be terribly useful to tell you what members were thinking at the time. Members were angry. Staff were angry. We live up here. You’ve walked around this building for a little bit. This is our home. Our home was invaded. We were angry. The work felt righteous, and we moved very swiftly. It’s very hard to point to another example where there was less ego involved in coming to such a tremendous political decision. My boss waived all committee consideration of the articles. I’ll tell you, that was not the case the first time around. We were fighting for every scrap of jurisdiction, as was the Intelligence Committee, as was the Foreign Affairs Committee. Everybody had a piece of that one. We said, “Let’s go straight to the floor. It’s too important.” I could tell you 100 stories about members who were just focused on making it right, and that is the tool at our disposal that we have to make it right.

(Sarah)

Yeah. How rare when you can safely say that ego isn’t at the center of a lot of conflict, I’d say. And what were some of your feelings and reactions and thinking throughout the impeachment proceedings, knowing that there is a possibility that the Senate would not vote to convict, and in a court of law, you have a case, and if it’s a jury, trial, the jury decides, and there’s a verdict, but in this case, as you said, it’s political, and so can you speak to almost being reasonably sure that the Senate would not go through and yet still having the weight of needing to do this well and right?

(Aaron)

I don’t know that we believed at any moment that we knew for certain at any moment until the vote that the Senate would not convict on the second impeachment. I could tell you a story about why that doesn’t matter because integrity means doing the right thing anyway. But you’re interviewing in my office, I get paid to make political calculations. I believe to this day that if Senator McConnell could have found the votes, they all would have held hands and done it. And I only believe he was one or two short. We were right there. If you ask Jamie Raskin, who’s another member who swallowed any number of horrible, he had just a horrible year. His son had just died. His family was trapped in an office in the Capitol during the riot. He led us through that second impeachment. He was convinced that it would be 100 to nothing. He was certain of it the whole way through. And under that kind of leadership, you lower your shoulder and you do the job. It doesn’t really matter what the outcome is. I sleep quite well at night.

(Sarah)

How important was the outcome for you, for the Senate to go forward?

(Aaron)

I mean, I was arguing for a conviction, and I believed that they should have convicted him. In the years since, the temperature has come down a little bit, and I’m not going to tell you I wasn’t frustrated or angry or sad about the outcome in that trial. Mostly people got some rest. That was really important. We put together the world’s tiniest scrappiest law firm for a month and a half and did this tremendous thing together, and then we all just took a deep breath and went to bed. Any doubts, maybe not all of them, but the doubts that I had about the system at the time and the precise wording, people can love or hate what the DA and Manhattan did last month, I’m sure there are listeners to this podcast who are not going to like what Georgia is likely to do to President Trump. I am sure there are listeners to this podcast who would prefer, for perfectly valid political reasons, that the federal government not indict the President for his actions related to January 6 and the classified documents. But I take great comfort in knowing that the antibodies are at work.

The system moves way too slow in a crisis, and that’s a thing people have a right to question after January 6 and sort of the tumultuous end of the Trump presidency. But here we are, two and a half years later, and it feels finally like the measure of accountability we were so desperate for is on its way.

(Sarah)

Yeah. What were your thoughts during the arraignment? Were you watching or tuning in?

(Aaron)

Yes, like the rest of the country, we were watching that. It’s such an interesting test case. I don’t want to get into the specifics of the case. It’s such a good microcosm for the broader problem we have. I think the broader problem we have in our political dialogue today. President Trump is going to get his day in court. It may not be fair. He has an opportunity to make that case in court in front of a jury of his peers, like the rest of us. And when he says, “Well, if they can come after me, they can come after the rest of you.” Yeah, that’s the point. That’s the point. In this country, nobody is any different than anybody else. And if a prosecutor can convince a grand jury that you have probably committed a crime, then you are indicted, and you get your day in court. There was a time where it would have been unheard of for a national political figure to try to undermine the process.

He’s going to get his day in court. Make a speech at the courthouse steps. None of that’s unusual. Go into the court. Have your lawyers make your case to the jury. If you feel like you’re comfortable getting on the stand to make your case, get on the stand to make your case. But to take to social media and say the things that he says about the prosecutor and the judge, horrible, racist, vile, anti-Semitic things that make all of us less safe and undermine very basic democratic institutions, that is not the right way to do it. And you can hate everything the district attorney in Manhattan has done to the President, and still you ought to have the courage to stand up and say, “That’s not how we go about things in this country.”

(Sarah)

I’m curious, you have a law degree, and you are doing law in your role, but what does it look like to negotiate success and failure without the kind of clarity of a courtroom in this very surreal, at times parallel, universe of politics?

(Aaron)

Well, I don’t know that every courtroom is always that clear. Just to be fair to my fellow lawyers in the courtrooms, the game never really stops up here. You never cross a finish line. Nobody ever rings a bell and says, “Yay, you won, go home now.” It’s always on to the next thing, which I kind of love. I mean, I love that opportunity. I’m so grateful to have the opportunity to lend my hand to the ongoing project for as long as they’ll let me work at it.

How do you define success? I have trophies on the wall around me. A note from Mr. Nadler related to the first impeachment. A note from Speaker Emerita Pelosi related to the second impeachment. Outside in the hallway, I have bills that we’ve signed, that we’ve passed here that I helped to write that became law. Those are great trophies of great victories, but not one of those things is the end of the story.

(Sarah)

And if you were to distill all that happened with the impeachment proceedings and share with the American people, if we can kind of share as sort of a monolith, to understand what that meant, what would you want people to really appreciate about its significance? Because it was a historical case that we’ll think about every year and just what it means for how we think about the future, especially as we’re approaching an election?

(Aaron)

Well, the way I talk about it with my kids, and maybe that’s the best thing to say here, is when something is wrong, you’ve got to stand up. When you see it’s wrong, you cannot stand by, you must stand up. We have an obligation to do that work. There are a lot of people who listen to this podcast who I’m sure find politics distasteful, and that’s probably a very rational reaction to politics today, who find particular politicians distasteful, who would rather let other people handle the problem. But it’s a zero sum game, and if the Morehead community listening to this podcast isn’t more willing to get involved, if people who were selected from all over the country for their integrity—I don’t really care about their political views—for their integrity, can’t stand up and say something about it, we’re in a lot of trouble. I’d like to see more of that from Morehead-Cains, really, around the world. If we don’t fill that space, it’s going to be Jewish Space Lasers all the way down. That’s terrible. We have work to do. I’d like to see more of our folks get in there.

(Sarah)

That was the purpose of one of the scholar-led initiatives from this semester was, it was called Food for Thought, and it was to bring in speakers with very different viewpoints in. Do you have any advice for college students as they’re in this really formative stage of their lives, in being able to not just have identity-based politics, but be able to understand and actively seek out to understand other people with very different political opinions?

(Aaron)

Well, the best piece of advice I can give you, and somebody gave it to me when I was still right before I graduated from Carolina, is if you have the least bit interest in this lifestyle, if you think you have the bug even a little bit, get up to Capitol Hill and grab an internship as quick as you can. And since I have a captive audience, I will tell you that some of the best interns I have ever had have been Morehead scholars. Morehead scholars, if you’re listening, contact me today. I’ll get you a job today. It might not be in my office, but there are a million excellent opportunities for kids from North Carolina to get involved. If this is what you want to do, call me today. We’ll get you hooked up today. You’ll never look back. And if it’s not for you, no hard feelings, man, you’ll have just spent a fabulous semester hanging out in Washington. But if it’s for you, accept no substitute. And if it’s kind of sort of for you, but you feel like campaigning is more your thing than writing bills, great. This is a great way to get your foot in the door there.

And if politics is kind of for you, but you’d rather do it in Raleigh than in Washington, DC, or Austin, Texas, or Salem, Oregon. Great. State and local politics are very important places to be right now. In a lot of ways, some of our state legislatures, that’s the tip of the spear for our arguments for a better vision of America right now. Don’t be shy. Get involved. I guess if there’s another thing, it’s, don’t expect other people to solve this problem for you. The last time I was in the minority, we kept waiting for the cavalry to come. And that might be the moment where I swallowed and decided I was a grown up on Capitol Hill. The cavalry is not coming. It’s us. It’s just us in the room. And I don’t know that, it’s hard, it’s super overwhelming to sit back and think, “Oh my God, the nation’s a mess. How am I going to solve this?” That’s not a question you can fix in an afternoon. You can’t answer that question in an afternoon. But I bet there’s a task in front of you right now. I bet there’s a problem in front of you right now that you know how to solve. Start there. Put your shoulder to the wheel and start right there, right now. Don’t wait. Don’t wait for somebody else to do it. The cavalry is not coming. It’s you. You’re the cavalry. Go help somebody else. The other solutions will start to unfold in time.

(Sarah)

I’m sure for many scholars who are interested in having a career like yours, that you’re their legal hero or political hero. I’m wondering who yours were as a college student and who they are now?

(Aaron)

Fabulous question. I had the really good fortune when I started working here of working for, he’s now passed, a congressman from Detroit, Michigan, named John Conyers. I’ve been thinking of him a lot this week with the passing of Harry Belafonte. They were friends. They grew up together in the civil rights movement. They were both musicians. Mr. Conyers was, according to the story he told, not a very good musician, which is why he joined the army and went to Korea and then came here, ran for office after the fact. I loved working for him. His vision for this country was just inspiring. And he was one of the very few politicians ever to have been endorsed by his friend Martin Luther King, Jr. He employed Rosa Parks for a while, and just to get to breathe that air for a little bit was pretty amazing. I’m not going to tell you I wasn’t a giddy first year in law school when I saw Barack Obama address the Democratic National Convention, that was pretty fun. And I’m a Texas boy at heart. He has his problems, but watching Lyndon Baines Johnson, watching LBJ struggle with the presidency and the things he was trying to accomplish, he might be the first president whose head I was able to get into and start to think through the big ideas he was thinking. I find him inspiring.

(Sarah)

Well, it’s also cool to see from your career path that you’re now a veteran staff member and have just risen in this space, and I’m curious what your aspirations might be, if this feels like a home for you, or if you might consider other plans, if that’s a fair question to ask?

(Aaron)

It’s a totally fair question to ask. I don’t want to be anything else when I grow up. I like this. I have just the best boss. Jerry Nadler is a joy to work for. He is smart, and he is funny, and he trusts us to do business in his name. I think we’re at a really defining moment in Democratic politics where, not on every issue, but on really important issues and issues that are in the jurisdiction of the committee for which I work, we are finally winning the argument. And when it comes to gun violence or bodily integrity or how we talk about the police or how we talk about abortion rights in this country, I believe the bulk of the American people are with us. And it is a privilege to get to give expression to what people are feeling across the country right now on each of those things.

(Sarah)

And being part of this committee, you work with a group of just really smart, talented people. And back to the impeachment proceedings, what was it like to have the highs and lows together and just being in the room making these decisions, knowing so much is at stake?

(Aaron)

Well, the highs are very high and the lows are very low. The January 6, the second impeachment, was an extraordinarily intense experience. It happened very quickly. It was a very personal experience. Each of the impeachment managers involved and all of the other members of Congress, including Mr. Nadler, involved, were all here on January 6, all had their own stories on January 6. I said earlier, we were led by Mr. Raskin, who is as brilliant a constitutional scholar as anybody I’ve ever met, and just deeply was so deeply committed to the cause. I think the country was lucky to have him. Listen, listener, you may think the second impeachment was wildly off base, but Jamie Raskin did a service to all of us. And the fact that he had just lost his son and was willing to do that anyway and did not break while he was doing it is a testament to his inner strength. It was such a privilege to get to work for him. We had our moments. Some of those moments have now been shared in different books that have been written about impeachment by a number of people. One of my favorite was, so we had an opportunity to walk to the Senate floor, and I’m a House guy. I don’t get to go on the Senate floor all that often. We had an opportunity to walk the Senate floor and get oriented. And with no notes, Mr. Raskin went to the podium and started quoting Thomas Payne off the top of his head, The American Crisis, which is, for a certain breed of American history nerd, quite inspirational. And there wasn’t a dry eye in the House. I mean, we would have walked through a wall for him. That was just the best. I wish the conviction had turned out another way, but again, we all got some rest. We lived through a pandemic. Here we are on the other side, and it does feel like the system is starting to right itself. I’m not telling you I’m not worried about the system. I’m not telling you I wouldn’t like some things to work a little faster. Hopefully, it’ll never have to happen. But if it has to happen, I hope the system works quicker next time around. But I think the system is starting to work, and I take great comfort in that.

(Sarah)

That’s reassuring to hear. As we are facing another election, from your perspective, what are the odds of having a free and fair one, whatever that might mean?

(Aaron)

The last election was the midterm election, and the 2020 election before that was, by every indication, the most secure election we’ve run in the Internet era. As with most problems in this country, the only people who can mess it up are people of bad faith from within the country. I do not believe a foreign adversary—I’m not telling you no foreign adversary is going to try—but I do not believe a foreign adversary has the capability of materially affecting the outcome of an election, nor do I believe there is widespread voter fraud. There are very few instances. There was one notable instance in North Carolina that we don’t have to get into today that involved a former White House chief of staff who may or may not have lived in North Carolina when he cast a ballot there. There’s no indication on the horizon that allegations of fraud are anything but talk. Now, that can be deeply unsettling. But the way to stand, again, the system works. At the end of the last presidential election, they went to 56, 58, 60, depending on how you count them, different judges. Some were Democrats, some were Republicans, some were appointed by Trump. Some were appointed by Obama. Universally, they said, even the ones who said, “We wish you had shown us some evidence,” universally, they said, “There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud here. You’ve failed to state any colorable claim on which we might challenge any of these results. Thank you for playing.” And here we are today. No, I have great faith in the resiliency of our democracy. I just wish the folks who were undermining it would knock it off already.

(Sarah)

Well, it’s great to talk with you, Aaron. Thank you for having us in your office and wishing you the best with the next big projects coming up for you.

(Aaron)

Thanks so much. I’m a longtime listener. It’s so fun to get to participate.

(Sarah)

So great to have you on.

(Aaron)

Appreciate it.