When Loretta Lynch started work as an Assistant United States Attorney in Brooklyn, in the early nineteen-nineties, Peter Norling, her first supervisor, had some reservations. “I was concerned that she’s very soft-spoken,” he recalled, “but then, on about her second or third day on the job, I walked by her office and I overheard her conversation with a defense attorney. She was saying, ‘I think we’ve said all we have to say to one another,’ and she hangs up the phone. And I said to myself, ‘Lack of spine will not be a problem for Loretta.’ ”
Norling, who remains a prosecutor in the office, was reminiscing the other night at a raucous dinner for about three hundred alums of the U.S. Attorney’s office. Lynch, who is fifty-seven, worked her way into the top job in the Brooklyn office, serving two terms as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, until Barack Obama brought her on as Attorney General, in 2015, making her the eighty-third person and the first African-American woman in the post. “Thank you for welcoming me home,” Lynch told the group. Born and raised in North Carolina, Lynch still projects the steely gentility that Norling identified decades earlier. There was a reflective quality to her talk, too, not just because her tenure in Washington was cut off after only twenty-one months but because new management appears poised to take the Justice Department in such a different direction. “People have to feel connected to our justice system or there is no justice,” she said. “We see that disconnect growing and growing.”
Lynch’s priorities as Attorney General already look like remnants from a distant era. Lynch’s Justice Department filed a lawsuit to invalidate North Carolina’s “bathroom law,” and in a speech at the time she said to the transgender community that “we see you; we stand with you; and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.” (Under Jeff Sessions, her successor, the department is retreating from such cases.) Lynch told the group that this crusade grew out of her experiences in Brooklyn. “We are the only Cabinet agency named after an ideal,” she said. “That’s why it was important to speak out on the L.G.B.T.Q. issue. We were defending vulnerable victims, people who didn’t have anyone to speak up for them. We took that idea from Brooklyn to Washington to make it real, and it came from all of you.” Likewise, Lynch and her predecessor Eric Holder responded to the events in Ferguson by trying to smooth relations between police and the African-American community. (President Trump has already signed an executive order aimed at curbing violence against the police, and both he and Sessions have embraced the Blue Lives Matter cause.) “We thought it was important to listen to both sides when it came to police and community relations,” she said. “We tried to broker peace in the streets, see the world as they did at their level, and listen to everyone with a stake in the community.” Not all Lynch’s memories of her time in Washington were fond, though. “Testifying before Congress was absolutely lovely,” she said, with a wry grin. “It made me wistful for my days in Brooklyn in interview rooms, talking to murderers and getting honest answers.”
Still, this was not a night to dwell on disappointments but, rather, to celebrate a local girl who made good. No Eastern District event would be complete without a few shots at the office’s rival federal prosecutors in Manhattan’s Southern District of New York. “We had a few S.D.N.Y. alums in Washington,” Lynch said, “but we converted them.” And notwithstanding her Southern roots, Lynch brought some New York swagger to the capital. “We had bagel contests between Washington and New York,” featuring Gotham’s H&H. “You can guess who won,” she said. Still, Lynch recalled that few moments were more memorable than her first week in her new office. “I got a big bouquet of flowers, and the card said they were from Aretha Franklin,” Lynch recalled. “That was pretty cool.” ♦
