[dramatic patriotic music] [dramatic patriotic music continues] - Joining me now, Congressman Dan Bishop, the Republican running for North Carolina's attorney general on the 2024 ballot.

Representative, good to have you on the "State Lines" set, your first visit.

Welcome aboard.

- Terrific to be with you, Kelly.

I'm glad to have the chance.

- Well, I'll start with the softball questions.

Who is Dan Bishop?

And why's the timing right for you to run for North Carolina attorney general?

- The last five years, Kelly, and you can start probably anywhere, but I've served in Congress for the 8th District of North Carolina.

And I have an easy path back there if I wanted to stay, but I decided to leave Congress to run for attorney general because I think law and order needs to be restored everywhere in the country, but certainly in North Carolina, and I'm the candidate who has the long experience in complicated legal matters, has a 29-year career practicing law, to make sure that happens.

- What was it about Congress?

Because I saw you on the national stage.

You would do big hits with the big news outlets and all.

It looked like fun.

I've seen you have friends on the air and enemies on the air, but what was it about D.C. that said, "Ah, five years is enough.

We're gonna come back"?

- Well, I don't think people ought to go up there and stay for 25 years anyway.

And I would say, look, I don't believe the answers are in Washington for now.

I see an institution that's sort of stagnant in some ways.

And we have huge problems that Congress needs to address, but for a variety of reasons that's not happening yet.

Needs to happen.

And in the meantime, I will say I've looked around and the state attorneys general as a phenomenon across the country.

It's an enormously potent position within North Carolina state government.

The tentacles go everywhere.

Every lawyer across every board, commission, agency all answer to the attorney general.

And so there's a lot of involvement across a variety of things in North Carolina government.

But state AGs nationally have been responsible for taking on some of our biggest challenges and setting things right.

And so I'd like to participate in that, and I'll be a robust participant.

- On a bipartisan basis, there are attorneys general, I wanna get the grammar right, that are quiet.

They put their head down, they look inward, they serve their state, representing them in court cases, large and small.

You've got some like, you know, New York, you know, Kansas now with the education, some of that, that are out there in the public sphere and they make brand names out of themselves.

What are you when it comes to that kind of leader, and how do you balance that if you're elected?

- Look, the most important thing is to revere and enforce the law on a non-partisan basis.

Law as an institution is extraordinarily important to our society, both criminal justice law, keeping people safe, but also all aspects of law, civil law, and so forth.

And what we're seeing emerge, you mentioned New York.

Leticia James, the attorney general of New York, ran for that office, did something no candidate for a prosecutorial office in America has ever done before.

And that was to target somebody, name the person, and say she was gonna turn every power at her disposal to the task of destroying a political enemy.

I can't tell you how dangerous that is.

The attorney general's job is to enforce the law.

All of the law.

Not pick and choose what you want to enforce.

Not an ideologized version of the law, where you take your politics and you ram it through the mechanisms of the law that you can manipulate from the perspective of a lawyer.

That's a lot of what has happened, and it needs to stop.

But the foremost important aspect of that, Kelly, is that North Carolinians' families are afraid of crime.

Crime is at persistent 10-year highs.

A lot of folks out in media and some politicians saying, "Oh, we've turned the corner.

It ticked back down this quarter."

Not in North Carolina, by the way.

But it hasn't ticked down anywhere significantly.

We're still at those persistent 10-year highs that triggered, started off the day the worst idea in the history of American politics was articulated, and that was defund police.

- As attorney general, there's bully pulpit, and then there's what you're able to actually do.

Let's talk about that balance, because you're not gonna go on the streets yourself and enforce crime, make police officers more effective, make sheriffs more empowered.

How do you do it as attorney general to set that tone?

- You're absolutely right.

And you sort of asked in the first question, do you wanna go out and be Mr. Hollywood?

Do you wanna make a big show?

And I don't, 'cause that's why I answered.

'Cause the important thing is what I said about what you do.

You enforce law.

I think you do.

It is a public position and one in which there is a bully pulpit.

And there's a great deal of informal power and responsibility to collaborate tightly with the criminal justice infrastructure across the state.

Sheriffs, district attorneys.

Most of the sheriffs in North Carolina endorse my candidacy.

Most of the district attorneys across North Carolina endorse my candidacy.

They are starved for an attorney general that wants to collaborate with them, to find out how they can be more effective, run the state crime lab more effectively, interact with the General Assembly to change policies, where that would be helpful.

So that has been absent on a level that I didn't even realize.

And I hear it all the time.

- How is that ecosystem with, I'll call it an ecosystem of local law enforcement, the city level, county level, as it comes back to Raleigh, not only a deal with now Attorney General Stein, but also a Republican legislature?

It's easily Republican.

Supermajority, in fact.

- I'm sorry, what's your- - [Kelly] I was gonna say, you know, what's the ecosystem like?

- Oh, what's the ecosystem?

Yeah, that's okay.

Well, that's right.

You have a constitutional officer in every state who's the district attorney.

By the way, my opponent says he is gonna be the top prosecutor.

The attorney general doesn't prosecute.

The DAs have all the prosecutorial power.

If they ask the attorney general's special prosecutions unit to come in or give permission, the attorney general can handle a prosecution.

But it only happens, under this attorney general, once or twice a year for the last two or three years.

So you got district attorneys prosecuting, you got a constitutional officer and the sheriff.

The sheriff, particularly in rural counties, very, very important figure.

And every county's important.

Mecklenburg County handles the jailing and so forth, runs the jail.

And then you have municipal police departments under the control of city councils and their city managers and all the municipalities across the state just about.

You know, certainly the larger ones.

And then there's a whole nother dynamic, a federal agency.

So the FBI and federal prosecutors.

It's interesting, Kelly, there's tight coordination and collaboration between state and federal, and yet none of these law enforcement agencies across North Carolina are receiving an intensive collaboration from the Attorney General's Office.

They've told me over and over and over, everywhere I've gone in the state, is 100% absent.

It's the craziest thing I've ever heard.

- How do you do that, get down to that local grassroots level?

You have even said tight collaboration, state and federal.

Take it locally.

Some counties are huge, some are very sparsely populated.

How do you serve all?

- It takes intensive work.

You've gotta be prepared to do the work, and it takes listening.

So we just finished one here in Raleigh today.

We've had now four crime and safety public listening sessions across the state, with crime victims who've suffered some of these horrific crimes and are still waiting for justice, with district attorneys, sheriffs, other law enforcement agencies.

Just received the endorsement of the PBA today, North Carolina's section of the PBA, a police organization that stands for the rights and interests of line law enforcement officers.

They know I'm going to back up the criminal justice system.

They do say the attorney general's the top law enforcement officer of the state, and that's a responsibility.

But what we've often seen, frankly, in the incumbent and in my opponent, is they want to sort of be part of kind of eroding the criminal justice system, putting cops on the defensive, and they don't do what they need to to stand up for tough law and order.

And consequently, that's why you have crime rising.

Last six months in Charlotte, the June 30 report, murders up another 36% in Charlotte, homicides by juveniles up 300%.

Raleigh's figures: homicides up 75%, rapes up, I think the number was 17%.

And people are afraid of that, Kelly.

You look at any polling and you go talk to people very much, you'll hear they're concerned about the safety of their family.

- I want you to look down the street on Jones Street, where that legislature is.

What can Republican leaders expect from you?

Because we have attorney generals, these situations where laws are passed, and they're sued immediately.

And the attorney general will step in, defend some in court.

There has been times when Josh Stein readily admits, if I find it unconstitutional in my conscious, I may not step forward.

How do you lead in that?

Republican is gonna expect you to be on the team, but what are they getting and to that issue?

- Here's one of these little legal tricks that I'm talking about, Kelly.

What you see, it is true that if the General Assembly were to pass a law for which there's no good faith argument that it is constitutional, then it would fall to the attorney general not to support that law.

That's a very rare circumstance.

What we've seen in the Attorney General's Office by Josh Stein, what Jeff Jackson is anxious to do, and he's given answers time and time again publicly about what he wants to do, he wants to go and set up the Attorney General's Office as a policy counterweight to the legislature.

Legislature passes a law.

He doesn't like it.

Voter ID accepted in, you know, well more than 35 states in the United States, tested in the litigation over and over and over again, a mild version of it in North Carolina.

Since it was passed into law in 2013, and then passed by the citizens as a constitutional amendment in 2018, for a decade both of the last two attorneys general have fought its implementation, and it's never been implemented until the primary of this year.

That is lawfare.

That is the perspective of taking...

They don't like the policy of it, even though 80% of North Carolinians seem to.

And so they're gonna use legal trickery, collusive settlements with litigants on the other political side to stop it, to hold it up.

That's got to stop.

And it is something we're seeing in case after case here in North Carolina, by the incumbent and by my opponent, and across the country.

- Would you see it within your purview as attorney general that if you see a big piece of legislation coming through, is it your job to interject to say, "Ladies and gentlemen, you may be passing a law that does not withstand constitutional muster"?

Or is it your job to wait till it passes, and then we decide if someone wants to challenge it?

- Oh, I think the attorney general should be part of the conversation with the legislature.

Needs to have the proper understanding of his constitutional role, though.

The attorney general is the state's lawyer.

The governor has a different role in policy making.

He has a veto.

He has a part of the legislative process because he can exercise that veto.

Attorney general doesn't actually have that.

What the attorney general should bring to the table is the collaboration with the entire criminal justice system across the state, to then go to the General Assembly and say, "We need more resources.

We need this policy change."

The juveniles, as I mentioned earlier.

The chief of police in Charlotte is no rabid right-winger, but he says the juveniles are out of control.

Well, I was part of Raise The Age when that came through like a hot knife through butter in the legislature.

And the legislature has now acted to respond to that, to change that somewhat, in order to get a grip on the juveniles that just need justice.

- Well, last 15 seconds.

You feel voters out there are looking down-ballot, or is Harris-Trump taking the air out of the campaign very quickly?

- This is the most robust campaign for attorney general in the state's history.

People are interested in crime and law and order.

They're gonna wanna pay attention to this race.

- All right, Dan Bishop, Republican nominee for attorney general, thank you very much, sir, for being on "State Lines."

- I appreciate it.

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