In her first interview since announcing her run for Suffolk district attorney, Rachael Rollins acknowledged that the federal watchdog reports that led to her resignation as U.S. Attorney in 2023 were “incredibly damning,” but argued that her leadership and innovation are exactly what the office needs right now.
As Rollins mounts a bid to return to public office, she addressed the allegations of her misconduct in office and said she will work hard to regain voters’ trust.
“I will own that this entire situation, when I was U.S. attorney, was incredibly messy,” Rollins said. “I feel shame, like, remorse about what happened. But what is important to me is for you to understand that DOJ policy allows me, as the U.S. attorney, to do these things, and I believed I had that authority.”
But she told GBH News’ Jim Braude and Shirley Leung of The Boston Globe that it’s an open question “whether the people of Suffolk County buy that or not.”
Rollins was elected as Suffolk DA in 2018 before leaving that job in 2022 to become the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts. The first woman of color to serve as district attorney anywhere in the state, Rollins was heralded as a trailblazer and champion of criminal justice reform when she was first elected Suffolk DA. She made waves with a pledge not to prosecute some low-level crimes.
Rollins is now battling to reclaim her old seat from her successor. She’s running in a three-person Democratic primary against incumbent Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden and Boston lawyer Linda Champion.
She argued she’s more qualified for the role now, having served both as DA and federal prosecutor.
“When I had the privilege of leading that office in 2019 to 2022. We were the most innovative and exceptional DA’s office in the country, hands down, and I believe we’ve lost that,” Rollins said. “We are lacking inspiration, we are lacking leadership, and we’re lacking transparency.”
President Joe Biden nominated Rollins as U.S. attorney for Massachusetts in 2021. Republicans opposed the pick, and Vice President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking votes to confirm Rollins to the post.
Rollins resigned as U.S. attorney 16 months after she was sworn in, following federal probes that alleged multiple instances of misconduct, including interfering in the race to succeed her as DA and improperly attending a political fundraiser featuring First Lady Jill Biden.
“I concede that that report is incredibly damning,” Rollins said, going on to mention her work to get charges dropped against both an MIT professor accused of hiding ties to China and a Boston man incarcerated 22 years for a murder he maintained he did not commit.
“What I’m saying, Jim, is I am also the DA and the U.S. attorney that has exonerated Gang Chen, that has exonerated Sean Ellis, who was accused of murder,” Rollins said.
Asked why voters should trust her again, Rollins noted that the report from the Department of Justice’s inspector general described allegations of misconduct, not adjudicated facts.
“But I will also say your current DA has a state ethics violation that was so egregious that he had to pay a $5,000 fine,” Rollins said. “There’s only one other candidate in the race aside from me. Neither one of us have ever had to pay a fine for anything.”
Hayden in 2024 paid a $5,000 civil penalty, admitting to the state Ethics Commission that he’d failed to stop his staff from issuing a press statement aimed at discrediting a rival in the 2022 Democratic primary. That’s the same election in which Rollins was accused of interfering.
Contacted for comment on Rollins’ statements, a spokesperson for Hayden’s campaign said, “Rollins lied to federal investigators under oath, lied to and misled her own staff, lied to the public, and was eventually forced to resign in disgrace. The idea that she thinks the absence of a fine excuses her conduct — when federal investigators found that she engaged in the most egregious misconduct they had encountered — is ridiculous.”
In the interview, Rollins referenced Maine Democrat Graham Platner, who won a U.S. Senate primary Tuesday despite a string of controversies. Those include sexually explicit text messages he sent while married and a tattoo that’s recognized as a Nazi symbol.
“What I want to say is, certain people are allowed to be racist, antisemite creeps, right?” she said. “And as long as your wife is like, ‘But he’s my creep,’ I don’t know, right? Like, it’s just — some of these things before used to be nonstarters, and now we’re in a world where they aren’t, right?”
