Attorney General Peter Nerohna talks about suing Trump and the future of Rhode Island - Part One

"In my view, you can't negotiate with Trump. You can’t reason with him. You have to fight him. As long as we go into this with that mindset, we’ll come out on the other side. I’m confident of it."

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha was in South Kingstown on Sunday to talk about the “battles he’s waging to protect civil rights, public safety, and government accountability,” according to organizers from the South County Social Justice Coalition. Over 90 minutes, Attorney General Neronha answered questions about the multiple lawsuits he and 22 other attorneys general have filed against the overreach of the Trump Administration. Jonathan Pitts-Wiley, artistic director of Mixed Magic Theater, moderated the event.

Because the transcript is too long for an email, I divided it into two parts.

Here’s Part 2.

Here’s the video:

Jonathan Pitts-Wiley: Many public officials, regardless of political affiliation, have remained silent in the face of actions taken by this presidential administration. As the Attorney General, can you discuss your decision to speak truth to power and be a vocal opponent of these policies?

Peter Neronha: If you know what’s right, it doesn’t take much time or effort to figure out what to do. And then, if you have the skillset and people who can do something about it, you do it. I can’t point to a crystallization of when we decided to act other than to say that as early as the summer of 2024, some of my Democratic attorney general colleagues and I were concerned that regardless of who the Democratic candidate was at the time - it was President Biden - we were in trouble in the battleground states. My colleagues in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona were worried about what President Trump might do in his second term because we had seen enough of it in the first term to be concerned about some of his policies.

We were worried that some of the initial stabilizations that were there the first time wouldn’t be there the second time. So we agreed in May or June that we would tie our staff together and ask them to think - whether looking at Project 2025 or what the president said on the campaign trail. We would look at those issues, research the law around them, and have them ready. From our political perspective, we were hoping for the best but preparing for the worst, so when the president was elected, that work continued, and when he took office, we were ready to go. It wasn’t like, in January, we had to decide what to do; we knew what to do and were prepared to do it.

Collectively, we brought 11 cases, and we’ve been successful. We’ve had that success, most of it, because our staff is incredible. The attorneys general talk three days a week. The staff speaks every day, and they are incredibly talented. I hope I’ll get a chance to reflect on that a little bit more as we talk. of them sitting right over here, South Kingstown’s own Sarah Rice.

One of the best things that ever happened to me in my administration was Sarah deciding to come home to Rhode Island during Covid because she’s argued, the Trump work aside, some of our most significant cases. She defended our gun safety laws, for example. She argued the Block Island Champlin’s Marina expansion case in the Supreme Court, which was critical to environmental protection in Rhode Island. We won that case against pretty heavy odds. She argued a case involving the transfer of our largest utility and won significant benefits for Rhode Island. Without Sarah and the team that she works with, our job would be much more difficult.

But to get back to it, there’s a lot of enthusiasm among the staff. They’re great lawyers. My fellow attorneys generally get along great. I think we share some leadership qualities. This is a moment for attorneys general. We are lawyers. We are not afraid of a fight. We know who we represent - the people of our state, the values that we collectively hold, and, frankly, the rule of law in our constitution.

Warming to this fight was not a moment’s decision, but it wasn’t a hard one. We knew what was right, and we knew that the way to move the needle in the direction of the rule of law and what’s right was to bring lawsuits against the administration and fight back against them.

Jonathan Pitts-Wiley: You connected with the other attorneys general, hopefully not in a Signal chat that gets leaked to everybody...

Peter Neronha: We’re on Zoom.

Jonathan Pitts-Wiley: You’re on Zoom? Well, there you go. When it comes to the other attorneys general in the country who may be in opposition to you, what is that like? Is it like, "We don’t talk to you."?

Peter Neronha: It’s not that we don’t talk to them, but you have to remember, it’s very difficult to work with attorneys, 18 of whom went to court to try to overturn the election in 2020. If you were to meet them, I’m not saying they’re bad people, but their views are so disconsonant with what I believe our democracy stands for; they’re hard to work with. There was no basis to overturn the 2020 election, but when you have 18 Republican colleagues who went to court in Pennsylvania to try to overturn it, those are hard people to work with. We have one conference a year in Washington where we are together. And look, they’re free to join our cases, and many of our cases bring relief. Take, for example, some of our work involving funding freezes.

The only states that get relief from those funding freezes are those that sued, so the 22 states and the District of Columbia get relief. Their money flows, and the states that don’t sue, the red states, it doesn’t. That puts my Republican colleagues in a tough spot. Eliminating USAID - which, through its funding, buys an enormous amount of soy from the heartland, like in Kansas - is hurting Kansas farmers. That’s a good policy for their constituents. That’s for them to answer. But I don’t lose any sleep at night about the inability to work across the aisle with that group. Anytime they want to join a case or support a case that we’re bringing that tries to push back against the administration as they sideline the Congress - President Trump sidelined the Congress. Think about that for a minute. That’s what he’s doing.

Whenever he stops congressionally appropriated money from coming to Rhode Island - one-third of our budget is federal funds - he says, "I don’t care what the Congress said, I’m going to stop the flow of money because I don’t think it should come." And when judges agree with us and our team, he and his acolytes undermine the judiciary to the point where Chiefice Roberts has to come out and say impeaching a judge is not an answer to a ruling you don’t like. I was a federal prosecutor for a long time, prosecuting significant criminals in Rhode Island. After they had been convicted, all those individuals accepted their penalty and often went to federal prison. No one talked about impeaching judges back then. However, the president thinks that impeachments are appropriate if he gets a ruling he doesn’t like, so he undermines the judiciary and sidelines Congress, leaving power in one place: the executive branch.

If you read the Federalist Paper, you’ll see that the founders set up our system of government so that the judicial branch was the last word on what the law says. Congress passes the laws, and the president faithfully executes them - not changes them - and spending laws are those laws. When President Trump does that, he says, "I want all the power." Well, that’s not our system of government, and that is where the real danger lies. In these cases, you can lose the forest from the trees. The trees are the cases. The forest is the authoritarian bent of the administration.

Jonathan Pitts-Wiley: Across the nation, state attorneys general are taking to the courts to challenge the legality of a number of this administration’s executive orders and directives. Could you tell us about the lawsuit your office is pursuing before Judge McConnell? More broadly, can you tell us which lawsuits your office is involved with, independently or in conjunction with other states?

Peter Neronha: I’m looking forward to talking about it. There are 22 states plus the District of Columbia. There are 23 of us. We talk for about an hour Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And many of those conversations are, “Okay, the Trump Administration, as we forecasted, has done X. We need to push back. We need to file a lawsuit.”

Remember, I mentioned the preparation period. Each office took various subject matter subject areas. For example, we took the rule of law, which I’m not sure what that even means. It was a lot of work. It sounded a little vague to me.

Some offices focused on immigration, and some focused on choice and abortion access in states that haven’t banned it, as the federal government may go after that. Some focused on conditional funding, that is, conditioning federal funding on compliance with whatever the president decides and the administration’s priorities, whether we like those priorities here or not.

Before I get into the rest, I want to make this point: sometimes I forget to make it: The president thinks about it as his money. Well, it’s not his money; it’s all our money. April 15th is coming, and we will all pay our federal taxes, which will go down to Washington. And the whole idea is to put it in a pot and then send it back out. Some of it must run the federal government and pay for our collective defense, but then some comes back to us. So when the president says, "I’m not sending it," that’s our money he’s taking. We have a right to be pissed off, upset, and angry about it.

In any event, we talk about who’s been working on a particular issue, where we want to bring the lawsuit, and which states want to co-lead it. Typically, out of the 23, three, four, or five states will co-lead the litigation. Our staff, if we’re a co-lead, will draft the paperwork. What does that paperwork look like? It’s a complaint against the federal government and its agencies. It’ll be a motion for a temporary restraining order. Typically, those are the two things that we’ll need to prepare and file.

Those things are lengthy documents, as those of you who are lawyers or follow the law will know. A lot of times, they have to be done very quickly. It’s a little bit like making sausage, I suppose, but the team will split up the work among those three or four co-lead offices, and then they will get that paperwork ready to go, and we’ll file it quickly. We filed three of the 11 here in Rhode Island. I’ll take each one of them in turn.

The first one came about very quickly. Sarah spotted the OMB memo on Blue Sky, right? She’s nodding.

So Sarah spotted it on Blue Sky, and I saw it too. I think I knew after Sarah did, but I saw it, too. When I saw it, it was like a photograph of this memorandum for the Office of Management and Budget in the executive branch of the Trump Administration. It said that they would effectively freeze all federal funding until it could be reviewed for its consistency with the President’s executive orders. He had issued a number of them by that time. All of us had the same reaction, or most of us did. "He can’t do that. He can’t freeze money already appropriated by the Congress."

Now, he and Congress, down the road, can decide how to spend the money. That’s a subject for another day and an area of concern, but it’s like a contract in terms of what’s already been appropriated. He can’t change that. There were conversations among us in the office, myself and my team, including Sarah and others, and there were conversations among the AGs and their staff. Ultimately, we decided we needed to file a case fast because the states needed this money. For example, the night that memo came out, our state Medicaid office tried to draw down Medicaid funds to pay for health care coverage for Rhode Islanders. About a third of our population was told by the federal government that they couldn’t do it. They didn’t know how long they wouldn’t be able to do it, and they wouldn’t put anything in writing, which is a bad sign if what you’re doing is lawful as a former prosecutor; that got my attention.

Overnight, we had to draft a complaint and a motion for a temporary restraining order to get it on file. The next day, coordinating among four or five offices, we decided where to file it. It came down to New York and Rhode Island. I felt strongly it shouldn’t be filed in Washington. I think these cases are best filed out in the field where everyday Americans live, including in small states like ours. That work got done, and that case was on file. The next afternoon, we were in court in front of Judge McConnell, and we got a temporary restraining order [TRO], which stopped that freeze.

Stopping that freeze would have affected one-third of our state’s budget, including money for Medicare, other healthcare infrastructure, and law enforcement. My Medicaid Fraud Unit would’ve been impacted. That federal money impacts our state budget and was threatened by this president—here and around the country. We were able to bring that to a halt.

We had filed a birthright citizenship case in Massachusetts and another in Washington state that we also won. For that one, we sought a nationwide injunction because we wanted every child born in the United States to be a citizen in some states and others. We won those cases, too. But that OMB case was the first case we filed here, which is very significant.

The next case we filed, which was in the last week or so, was when the Department of Health and Human Services, under Secretary Kennedy, abruptly halted public health funding for what, in their mind, had a connection to COVID-19. Our view was much broader than that—everything from childhood vaccination, vaccination clinics, and planning for the next pandemic. We sit here today in relative comfort with one another, but we all know that during covid, a lot of people died - more than a million people across the country and 800 million worldwide. I saw the monument on the Mall in Washington where children planted white flags for their family members. You could sit down and read the message to the family members. At that time, the running count on the Washington Mall was over 600,000 people.

If we think another pandemic won’t come and that COVID-19 was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, I wouldn’t want to take that bet. I see some of you aren’t taking it either, and you’re smart not to. Secretary Kennedy cut $31 million in our state budget, which our state leaders would have to find to do that work. It was $11 billion around the country. We went to court here in Rhode Island, and we stopped there as well. Sarah argued that, too. We’ve had great success in front of Judge McElroy.

The president likes to talk about shock and awe. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I will say that as a former US Attorney, I was proud of Sarah’s argument and all of the work that the statistics did. It goes beyond Sarah, and she’ll be the first to tell you about the collective work that went into the writing so that Judge McElroy would have what she needed to rule in favor so quickly.

We halted that. That’s $11 billion nationwide for public health, including $31 million. Some in Rhode Island will say, "Trump did us a favor by giving us the $220 million for the bridge President Biden had agreed to give us. Trump followed through on that, and that’s good; no one will say that’s bad. Some might say we should have had that money nailed down before Trump took office, but he gave it to us. He gave us $220 million and then took back $31 million - and it won’t be the last time the president tries to take money back from us. It’s more than a shell game, but you have to look at it that way.

We filed case number three late Friday afternoon. The president has tried to effectively eliminate three federal agencies. He tried to eliminate more than three, but the three that we were concerned about are agencies that play a significant role in our lives but are probably not always at the top of our minds. One is a federal agency that funds and assists local libraries. One is an agency that provides mediation services in labor disputes so that our workers will keep working, our industries will keep doing what they do, and we won’t go through all the tumult that comes with a labor strike, which impacts all of us in one way or the other. The last was an agency that helped support minority businesses. What the president has effectively done is get rid of all the employees. When you eliminate all the employees and terminate grants, no new grants are coming down because there’s no one to do them. Then, the grants that you have run headlong into what we believe is illegal: those are congressionally allocated funds the president can’t stop. Take the library funds, for example, the inter-library loan service, children’s education over the summer programs, programs for older Rhode Islanders, and programs for all of us that are important to the quality of our lives and the education of our children.

We brought that complaint on Friday afternoon. I was in federal court at an unveiling of a portrait of Judge Smith, who’s taking senior status. I was sitting next to the acting United States Attorney, and she said to me, "You’re not going to file anything and serve me with another complaint here, are you?" I said, "Actually, we are, but I don’t know if we filed it yet. Let me check my email. It’s coming in 10 minutes." So I ruined her Friday afternoon. That complaint is filed. We’ll argue that in the early part of the week. I expect we’ll be successful there as well.

Someone asked me why these court orders aren’t being enforced. They are. In the funding case, the first case, the federal government’s response was passive aggressiveness. They say they’ve turned it on, and when you try to get the money, you find that you can’t. So we’ve had to go back a few times, most recently about FEMA funding. That’s a big deal in Hawaii, as you remember, the Maui fires, and California. It also impacts money right here at home in Rhode Island. Judge McConnell granted our motion to enforce. That came down on Friday. The court issued a TRO in the second case on Saturday. I believe that FEMA or the federal government has 48 hours to return to Judge McConnell and tell them they’ve complied.

The approach is to put ourselves in a better position if we have to seek contempt against the administration. That is a major step, and on appeal, we want to make sure that we have been more than reasonable by trying to bring the federal government to heel here. Sorry for the long answer, but the office and our ag staff have done much work over the last 75 Days of Trumpism.

Jonathan Pitts-Wiley: As Tip O’Neill and many others have commented over the years, all politics is local. Given this reality, can you discuss how the state budget process affects your work as Attorney General?

Peter Neronha: This is not a subject I love talking about; some might say otherwise, but the reality is that the governor and I don’t have a very good relationship. I would point to the fact that we’ve done our job to investigate his administration at least three times and then issue reports about it so that you can make your own judgments as to whether or not what we concluded was correct. All of those investigations are on our website. It’s all there for you to read. The governor has taken offense to that. As a result, for the last several years, he has not been sympathetic to my request to add staff to my office to do the work that, mostly Sarah, has led. Everything from environmental protection and healthcare - God knows we have done a lot of work around Roger Williams and Fatima Hospitals to a good end over the last several years. So healthcare, consumer protection, and civil rights.

Nevertheless, I have been able to add those people because when we brought the opioid cases against the opioid manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies, in addition to around $300 million that we brought back for substance abuse prevention and treatment, we were also granted. After all, our lawyers did a lot of work on those cases, and we could use about $15 million in legal fees to support our work. I agreed with the Speaker of the House and the Senate President, with whom I have a great relationship, that we could hire 10 additional lawyers as long as I paid for them out of that pot of money. And we did. Those lawyers come to work every day working for you, for you’re not paying for it out of your taxpayer dollars. They’re being paid for out of money we’ve recovered.

Do I think that’s the way we should run our office? I can think of reasons not to do that, but as some would say, any port in a storm, and if the work needs to get done and if I can’t do it, then I’m going to figure out a way to do it because I am your lawyer and I feel it is important for us to get the work done. There’s a lot of work, and Sarah would like to see me succeed in getting more people into the office for no other reason so she could spend more time with her wonderful children and her husband. I do worry about burnout on the part of my staff. We’re a small office. We have only 30 civil attorneys and about 70 prosecutors, and every one of those lawyers is working hard. To make a very long story short, this time around, I asked the governor to put in his budget additional positions so that we could build out the office because Sarah doesn’t do this work; she and her team do all kinds of other stuff that’s also important. The governor, once again, did not call us back, shall we say. But I’m confident this year that the Senate and the House understand the need for us to be stronger regarding personnel. We have a lot of outstanding lawyers who want to join us in doing this work. We hired a strong healthcare lawyer from the Federal Department of Health and Human Services.

The president had put him on administrative leave, along with many of his colleagues. He wanted to work, not get paid. He could have been paid through August. Instead, he decided to join us in April. That’s the person and lawyer—the kinds of people of character—I can bring on as long as I have the budget to do that.

What we will do this time is tap into that legal fee fund to pay these people. They will come on and work for you. It’s not a done deal yet, but I’m confident the Speaker, Senate President, the House and Senate finance chairs, and their committees will allow us to do that, and that will allow us to continue to do the work, notwithstanding the governor’s unwillingness to support it.

The governor could have stood with me, and we could have jointly done this work, but he chose otherwise. It’s not impacting what we’re doing. As you can see, we’ve already brought three cases in Rhode Island. There will be more. We’ve been successful. We will continue to be successful. We’re working hard. We believe in the work. We know how important it is to save our democracy for our children and grandchildren, so in the big picture, we will be fine.

Jonathan Pitts-Wiley: What should Rhode Island do now, Mr. Attorney General? What should we do, especially those who believe in the rule of law? What should we do as an electorate, as a population, as citizens, as neighbors, and as a community? What should Rhode Islanders be doing?

Peter Neronha: That’s the hardest question, and I’ll tell you why. My wife is sitting out there, my son is out there too, and they work hard. They’re both doctors, and I’m proud of both of them. They go to work every day, and they see their patients. Zach’s in the hospital, mainly in Chicago, but when they come home, they’re as frustrated as you are.

I get to go to work and sue Trump, and it feels good.

Shelly will come to me and say, “Oh my God, what happened today? I’m so frustrated. I can’t believe what he’s doing.” I say, “I don’t want to talk about it because I’m living it all day.” But I do get it.

I don’t have an easy answer because I know how powerless it must feel as you watch what’s happening around you. You want to contribute, you’re anxious, and we’re a long way from the midterms, let alone the next presidential election. I read an interesting editorial today. I think it was in the Globe, and it said that if we had only remained part of Britain, we’d be calling for new elections. If people lose faith in the government, you’ve got to call for an election. If only. God, we didn’t feel that way a few years ago, did we? The 4th of July will never feel quite the same. It will again.

I get it. People have raised this with me in East Providence and Barrington, as I’ve gone around and had sessions like this. Yesterday, I thought, was inspiring. All over this country, in small towns, small cities, and big cities, getting out there and letting the administration know that those of us who view the world the way we view it aren’t going to go away quietly. We believe in the rule of law, that we believe in our democratic values, and that we believe that the majority doesn’t rule. Our system of government is set up to protect the views of the minority, which currently, at least for the moment, we are.

Getting out and expressing yourself, whether it be in that setting or when you’re with friends or even when you’re - I think some of us feel afraid, like that person next to me, if I say, "Jesus, Trump’s driving me crazy today," they’re going to be one of those folks, and they won’t like it. Well, I don’t think those folks are bad people. I don’t. They’re Americans like us, and we can agree to disagree respectfully, but I think it can be cathartic to tell the person you may not know sitting next to you, or even your group of friends, how you’re feeling. I am not asking you to write letters to me, so please don’t. But the ones that we get, and I get a handful every week, they mean something.

My staff loves to open and read them. My assistants love reading them. Sarah and some of my folks are from all over Rhode Island. If you see them and thank them, that will mean a lot. I know you’ll vote, so I don’t need to tell you to do that. Letters to the editor are great. I went to Washington for orientation as a US Attorney in the Obama Administration. It was about 2009, and going to the main building was a big deal to me. I don’t want to say I was intimidated, but I had a healthy respect for it. And they told us, "With the Democratic US Attorneys, we’ve got to remind you that you’re the US Attorney, and with Republican US Attorneys, we’ve got to remind them that they’re only the US Attorney."

I’m saying that for those of us who see the world as we do - not that we’re monolithic - but that sometimes we worry about being as expressive as maybe the other folks are. We should express what we think to one another and to people we run into, and if you can use the written word and you like writing to your local newspaper, when the midterms do come up, write letters to support candidates that look at the world the way you do. Get involved in local politics.

A lot of these same battles are playing out around the rights of transgender students right here in our local communities. One example: Why is the president targeting libraries? Because he wants to decide, among other things, what people can read in them. If you get involved in local politics, you can support local politicians who see the world as you do. You can move the needle there. But ultimately, you have to find a way that brings you hope and satisfaction. Here’s where I find hope: In the staff in our collective offices. We built the biggest and best law firm in the country.

When I was in Los Angeles for an AG conference, the 23 of us went into a room. We were talking about all kinds of things. We all have egos, and I’m from a small state; you should see an AG from a big state. It’s herding cats. And I remember that after two hours, when we finished whatever we were doing, I walked out and said to some people outside, "The white smoke is going to go up. We finally made a decision."

But when I went back into the ballroom to get my stuff where I left it, there were 20 or so assistant attorneys general, like Sarah, sitting around a table. Keith Hoffman from my office was with me on that trip, and they were talking to many others by video, including some of my staff back home. I took hope from that. These are lawyers who will fight for you. It’s not a nine-to-five job for them. They work hard weekends and nights because they care as much as you do. If you know they’re fighting for you every day, we won’t stop. We’re ready and going to get it done because that’s what we do; know that we’re doing our part; take some hope from that.

I take some inspiration from that. It keeps me going. Then, I find ways to support that and other work. In the end, we’ll come out the other side. I was on an email string with my fellow former US Attorneys, and if you can believe it, there’s an association of former US Attorneys. One of the things that have been a big subject of debate is supporting the men and women in the Department office who are career prosecutors and now facing an administration led by Pam Bondi, where one of the first things they’re told is, "You can’t use paper straws anymore." I’m not joking. They got a memo. No more paper straws. This is where the priorities are. Lawyers are being fired in the Department office, and you can’t fire career lawyers. The administration doesn’t care.

They have some service protection. There’s a whole process by which you can remove an assistant US Attorney. The Trump Administration is firing them. There’s a guy they promoted. He went to court within the last couple of days and acknowledged to the court in Maryland or DC that "Yes, the administration had deported somebody to El Salvador who didn’t deserve to be deported." He acknowledged that fact, and the Trump Administration put him on administrative leave that afternoon. But the former US Attorneys can’t agree on whether we should put out a statement or not supporting those Assistant US Attorneys.

Even among my Obama friends, there’s been a lot of back and forth. What I said to them, because they’re all dear friends of mine, and my message to everyone is, we’re going to get through it as long as we don’t get complacent, as long as we don’t lose hope, as long as we don’t lose the fight, and as long as we’re not silent.

In my view, you can’t negotiate with Trump. You can’t reason with him. You have to fight him, and as long as we go into this with that mindset, we’ll come out on the other side. I’m confident of it.

Here’s Part 2.