A top prosecutor in President Donald Trump's Justice Department pitched an unsettling idea for wiping out crime during a conservative livestream.
Ellis Boyle, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, suggested that removing the worst 5 percent of the population from society and keeping them from having children would create a far better population within a few generations, the Bulwark reported Wednesday. Writer Andrew Egger described it as an "astonishing" idea for a prominent Justice Department prosecutor to openly back.
Boyle made the remarks during an Oct. 21 episode of "NC Chats," a local conservative livestream, where he appeared to discuss the Trump administration's investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and the indictments of several noncitizens accused of illegally voting in North Carolina in 2024.
The conversation eventually turned to crime and to violent offenders who escape punishment through insanity defenses. Host Cassie Clark said she has lived with PTSD for most of her life and has never hurt anyone because she knows "right from wrong."
Boyle responded by citing the claim that "5 percent of the population cause 90 percent of the crime," a figure he said he first heard from someone else before looking into it himself.
Then he went further.
"If you took out [the] 5 percent of the population that's bad and removed them from society, so they don't create mayhem and create, you know, babies with the gene pool of more bad, then I think, in two, maybe three generations, think of how great this population would be," Boyle said. "But that's something that takes willpower."
"That's very biblical," Clark replied. "I like it."
"Praise the Lord," Boyle answered.
Egger noted that criminologists have long found that a small share of people commit most violent crime, but argued that tying that research to talk of cleansing the gene pool echoes the eugenics movement behind some of the worst human rights abuses of the 20th century. He also noted that Boyle did not frame his remarks in terms of race.
Before taking the job, Boyle worked as a private-sector trial lawyer and as general counsel for North Carolina's Department of Public Safety, according to his government biography. He also served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the civil division of the office he now leads. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed him to the post last year.
Later in the interview, Boyle urged caution after Clark said she would be fine rolling most laws back to the early 1800s. "You should be very careful when you say that," he told her.
