Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey Denies Wanting To Be U.S. Attorney General, Blames Trump For Migrants Surge

By Matt McDonald | September 4, 2024, 19:34 EDT

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey addresses the Democratic National Convention on August 22, 2024. DNC Broadcast Facebook Via State House News Service

Governor Maura Healey told Massachusetts reporters that she doesn’t want to be attorney general of the United States – days after not quite saying that on national television.

Healey, a Democrat, who is in her first term as governor, was asked Sunday, September 1 on CBS’s Face The Nation about possible federal ambitions if Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, is elected president in November.

A transcript of Healey’s exchange with CBS’s Nancy Cordes is below:

Nancy Cordes:  You’re the former state attorney general, and your name has been floated as a possible U.S. attorney general, if Vice President Harris is elected. Is that a job that you’d be interested in?

Maura Healey:  I love being governor of this state. I love what we’ve been able to do, free community college, better access to health care, making sure that we do things to move forward economically. I’m a pro-growth Democrat, as is Kamala Harris. We just cut taxes here in the state, which is also something that Kamala Harris wants to do — cut taxes for the middle class. Donald Trump only wants to raise taxes for the ultra-wealthy. So I’m focused, Nancy, on doing everything I can to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in November. It will be good not just for Massachusetts, it will be good for America.

Since Healey didn’t answer the question, it led reporters closer to home to ask it again.

State House News Service reported on Wednesday, September 4 that Healey denied an interest in becoming federal attorney general.

When asked the question, State House News Service reported:

“No,” Healey quickly responded. “I love being governor.”

She continued, “I am very interested in making sure that Massachusetts has the best, best federal partner, and that’s why I am so strongly supporting and working for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to be elected. It matters a lot to the state. It matters to our future, and it matters a heck of a lot to this country. And so you’re going to continue to see me out there on the trail finding ways to support Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who are going to deliver for Massachusetts, deliver for families and deliver the kind of growth that we need and take the country in the direction that we need to go forward.”

On another topic during the interview on CBS on Sunday, September 1, Healey tried out a one-liner, when asked about former President Donald Trump’s announcement that he wants mandatory health insurance coverage for in vitro fertilization.

“I don’t think Donald Trump can spell IVF, let alone understand what it means,” Healey said.

On immigration, Healey noted that the number of migrants coming across the United States’s southern border with Mexico has dropped significantly since President Joe Biden announced in June 2024 that the federal government would limit the number of people allowed to come into the country to make a claim for asylum.

It was a reversal for Biden, whose administration shortly after taking office in January 2021 ended the Trump administration’s policy of requiring would-be immigrants to wait in Mexico while waiting for a hearing before an immigration judge to consider their application for asylum, and instead began allowing migrants to come into the United States to make their claim and then released them into the country while waiting for the hearing.

Cordes, the CBS interviewer, asked Healey why Biden waited until June 2024 to implement that policy, when Healey declared a state of emergency over migrants and state-funded shelters for them in August 2023.

“But if you think that this policy is working, do you wish that the administration would have put it into effect a lot sooner, back when you and other Democratic governors first started sounding the alarm bells?” Cordes asked.

“No, I think the administration has handled this as best it could,” Healey said.

She added that Congress is at fault, and blamed Trump for steering Republicans in Congress away from a border deal that she says would have improved the situation, though Trump says it would have made things worse.

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