‘Her instincts don’t fit the moment,’ said Andrew Lelling, former U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts.
Suffolk County district attorney Rachael Rollins is on track to be confirmed Wednesday as U.S. attorney for Massachusetts — a prospect that has her current and future colleagues concerned, according to multiple sources familiar with the thinking inside the office Rollins currently runs and the one she will likely soon inherit.
Senate Judiciary Republicans broke with precedent by voting unanimously against her confirmation in September, but she was discharged out of committee by a full Senate vote on Friday and will likely be confirmed in a party-line vote.
The concerns about Rollins are twofold: the extremely lax approach to law enforcement that got her elected in deep blue Boston is ill-suited to the current high-crime environment, and her temperament and managerial skills make her a poor fit for a public facing role in a high-profile DA’s office.
Rollins ran for Suffolk DA in 2018 on a promise to “dismantle” what she considers to be a fundamentally corrupt criminal-justice system. In keeping with that promise, she released a list of 15 charges “for which the default is to decline prosecuting (unless supervisor permission is obtained).” The list includes drug possession, drug possession with intent to distribute, trespassing, shoplifting, breaking and entering — so long as the perpetrator broke into a vacant property “for the purpose of sleeping or seeking refuge from the cold” — wanton or malicious destruction of property, and resisting arrest.
Rollins’s general commitment to remaking the criminal-justice system has alarmed the Boston law-enforcement community, but there’s one particular crime on her list — possession with intent to distribute — that has many of her colleagues deeply worried about the approach she’ll bring to the U.S. attorney’s office. They spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation should Rollins be confirmed.
Upon taking office, Rollins issued a memo to prosecutors directing them not to bring “intent to distribute” charges against even heroin and fentanyl dealers, so long as the suspects were not caught with more than $1,000 worth of the controlled substance. As opioid-overdose deaths continue to ravage Boston and greater New England, prosecutors who spoke to National Review said that Rollins’s policies could not be more mismatched to the moment.
In her role as U.S. attorney, Rollins would be dealing with much larger quantities of illegal drugs than she does currently, so it’s not clear where she would draw the line on prosecuting, but “it’s a bad instinct,” said Andrew Lelling, who served as U.S. attorney for Massachusetts under President Trump.
“As a federal prosecutor, you want to hammer every dealer, to increase the average street price,” he said. “It’s an economics issue. That’s why the DEA employs economists. You’re never going to stop trafficking, but what you can do is increase the street price so that it’s more difficult for people to buy. Her instincts don’t fit the moment.”
After peaking in 2016 at 30.7 opioid overdose deaths per 100,000 people, more than twice the national average, overdose deaths in Massachusetts again spiked to more than 30 per 100,000 during the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020. Deaths have since come down slightly but remain elevated compared with the national average. Even before the COVID spike, in 2018, the year Rollins campaigned for DA, Massachusetts ranked fifth in the nation for opioid-overdose deaths. This despite the state doubling its spending on substance-abuse programs since 2015.
Massachusetts public safety and security secretary Thomas A. Turco praised Rollins’s “efforts to think differently’’ when she came into office — but he quickly called out her stance on drug enforcement as too lenient for the current environment.
“Several of the policies announced in the memo would, if implemented as proposed, put at risk the Commonwealth’s ongoing efforts to combat the ongoing crisis of the opioid epidemic and substantially restrict government’s ability to protect victims threatened with serious crimes,” he said.
According to a source familiar with the thinking inside the Massachusetts U.S. attorney’s office, there is also widespread concern that upon taking office, Rollins will overrule veteran career prosecutors and immediately dismiss a slate of pending cases, particularly those dealing with drug possession and immigration infractions.
Senate Judiciary Republicans share the concerns of Turco and many of Rollins’s colleagues. Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who has led the charge against her confirmation, often groups Rollins with other so-called “Soros prosecutors” elected with the backing of progressive non-profits funded by liberal billionaire George Soros. This class of prosecutors came to power in major cities across the country in the low-crime environment of 2014–2016, but their approach now threatens to bleed into the federal level at a very inopportune moment, according to Rafael Mangual, a senior fellow and head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute.
“Police departments in progressive jurisdictions were working to reroute cases to federal prosecutors when dangerous people needed to be taken off the street and the local prosecutor wouldn’t do it,” he said. “But once the progressive movement bleeds into federal government, we can expect that work around to go away.”
And it’s not just Rollins’s lax approach to drug enforcement that has prosecutors in both offices worried; they’re also concerned about her ability to handle scrutiny.
Earlier this year, a Dorchester woman filed a complaint against the district attorney, accusing Rollins of harassing her in a store parking lot, flashing the sirens on her government-issued SUV, and threatening to write her a ticket for parking improperly. When a local-news crew went to Rollins’s house to ask her about the incident, she began shouting at the crew to “get away” from her children, and said that “as a black woman” they were putting her life in danger by publicizing her address.
The news team said on-air that they did not approach Rollins’s door, interact with her kids, or publicize her address in any way. After the incident, she issued a string of tweets which implied that she was concerned the camera man was pointing a gun at her, causing her to fear for her safety and that of her children.
It’s not the only time Rollins has responded with vitriolic attacks when publicly confronted about her actions as DA. While participating in a panel discussion in February, Rollins was challenged by U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, McGregor Scott, who argued that her policies were not truly progressive because they harm the very communities she claims to represent. In response, Rollins launched into a racial tirade, saying, “I really don’t have much time for more white men telling me what communities of color need, because they don’t know.” Scott spent 14 years as a prosecutor in local California district attorneys’ offices.
And even when criticisms are leveled privately by colleagues, Rollins has a habit of responding with accusations of racism, according to two sources who have worked with her in the past. That approach has had some success cowing the younger prosecutors who work in the Suffolk DA’s office, but Rollins is liable to run into managerial issues if she tries to wield it against the more experienced federal prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office, according to one source who previously worked in the office.
In their respective speeches on the Senate floor last week, senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey of Massachusetts touted the endorsements Rollins has received from high-profile law-enforcement officials in Massachusetts. But they didn’t mention that only one of the 60 signatures on an open letter endorsing Rollins came from a fellow Massachusetts district attorney; the other ten refused to sign.
Rollins’s office did not comment by press time.