Our founders recognized that 'men were not angels' and that checks and balances in government were critical to avoid threats to the rule of law.
Neal Katyal
It's such a dangerous thing for desperation to drive litigation.
In our Constitution, our bedrock principle, you know - indeed, what the nation was founded on - is an idea of freedom of religion: that we don't single out people because of their religion.
The nice thing about the 'House of Cards' is they did 70 takes, so it was a little different. You only get one at the Supreme Court.
Unanimity is important because it signals that the justices can rise above their differences and interpret the law without partisanship.
One of our Constitution's greatest virtues is that it looks to judges as a source of reasoned, practical, rights-minded decision making.
Some commentators have attacked the special counsel regulations as giving the attorney general the power to close a case against the president, as Mr. Barr did with the obstruction of justice investigation into Donald Trump. But the critics' complaint here is not with the regulations but with the Constitution itself.
The Mueller report is a long subtweet of the Barr memo and demolishes it and says that is absolutely wrong, and fundamentally, in this country, whether you are a high person or a low official, anyone can obstruct justice.
Justice Scalia was usually particularly challenging to me at oral argument, but I so respected his intellect and commitment to the pursuit of truth.
President Trump has criticized the Mueller investigation, fired Jim Comey, savagely attacked the FBI, and repeatedly suggested the Russia campaign influence in 2016 was a hoax. In the wake of all of this, the American people need to be assured that Mueller can carry out his investigation without interference.
I don't think the fact that something occurs in public or in private matters at all to obstruction of justice. I mean, if I publicly threaten the prosecutor who's investigating me, I don't think it'd be a particularly compelling defense to say, 'Oh, I did it in public.'
Independence sounds good in theory, but in practice, it is mutually exclusive with accountability. The more independence you give a prosecutor, the less you make that prosecutor accountable to the public and regular checks and balances.
No one wants a president to be guilty of obstruction of justice. The only thing worse than that is a guilty president who goes without punishment.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States uprooted more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens, and confined them in internment camps. The Solicitor General was largely responsible for the defense of those policies.
The Supreme Court has been very clear: when it comes to religious discrimination, you can take intent into consideration.
The upshot of the Nixon tapes case was that any president is going to have an extremely hard time resisting a request from a law enforcement officer.
Donald Trump is the swamp.
I've been in two different administrations, and I would say, particularly, President Obama was really careful to make sure that he wouldn't invoke executive privilege unless absolutely necessary. He only invoked it once in eight years, even though many years he had Congress opposed to him in terms of being from the opposite party.
It's definitely true that law enforcement investigations expand over time in appropriate ways.
I think probably, you know, from my perspective, the folks who say a sitting president cannot be indicted have the better of the argument that the president can't be indicted - put, you know, through a criminal trial while he is president - and that the proper way to do it is to impeach him first, remove him, and then seek criminal prosecution.
Even though Mr. Trump can give his campaign as much of his own money as he wants to, he can't ask other people to front the money for him and promise to pay them back later without reporting the arrangement in a timely fashion to the Federal Election Commission.
I like doing scholarship for its own sake.
I never want to be in the business of predicting what the U.S. Supreme Court will do.
At times, President Trump has behaved far worse than Nixon did.
I didn't go to fancy schools or come from money or from a family that valued law or public speaking in any shape or form.
The special-counsel regulations were drafted at a unique historical moment. We were approaching the end of President Bill Clinton's second term, and no one knew who would be elected president the next year.
Trump abuses every privilege in the same way. It's kind of like King George. Take a legal concept and then stretch it beyond all recognition, and that's what you have Trump doing.
I said that my parents had come from India. They thought America was a place where people were treated equally, and their kids would have an amazing life.
Prosecutors use the conspiracy doctrine to punish two or more people who merely agree to commit a criminal act. They don't even have to actually perform the act; they just need to have agreed to do so.
The public has every right to see Robert S. Mueller III's conclusions. Absolutely nothing in the law or the regulations prevents the report from becoming public. Indeed, the relevant sources of law give Attorney General P. William Barr all the latitude in the world to make it public.
We have learned Trump's disregard for the truth, and the rule of law is real.
Every time a president invokes executive privilege, there are three relevant audiences he has to think about: the courts, Congress, and the public.
I can tell you that standard D.O.J. protocol is that you let official acts speak for themselves. You don't go and spin your action. For example, when I ran the Solicitor General's office, there would be all sorts of times when the litigants would make something up, and we would just never comment to the press. It is not what we do.
One thing we know about government after the New Deal is that checks and balances through whistle-blowing is terrible policy.
Even if I might say to myself, 'I don't need health insurance. I won't get sick,' the fact is, as human beings with mortality, we are going to get sick, and it's unpredictable when.
Appointing special counsel Robert Mueller to probe Russian meddling in the 2016 election (and any possible ties to President Trump's campaign) was the only choice the Justice Department had. This is the best way to deal with the conflicts and potential conflicts of interest these matters posed.
Americans can tolerate some secrecy, particularly when it is rooted in protection of the public's interests. But when the claims appear to hide wrongdoing, they begin to curdle.
When it comes to investigating a president, the special counsel regulations I had the privilege of drafting in 1998-99 say that such inquiries have one ultimate destination: Congress.
Everything having to do with President Trump and Russia, whether it is Mr. Trump's demand for an investigation into the investigation by the special counsel Robert Mueller, or whether Mr. Trump will testify, requires an answer to one essential background question: Can Mr. Mueller seek to indict the president?
Sometimes momentous government action leaves everyone uncertain about the next move.
If you are looking for someone to break the mold, the last guy you look to is Robert Mueller.
In 2006, I argued and won Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a Supreme Court case that struck down President George W. Bush's use of military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.
I think that the terms of the Affordable Care Act do give the states a fair amount of wiggle room and to do things as they see fit. The Affordable Care Act was not designed as some sort of one-size-fits-all solution from Washington. There's lots of discretion given to the states.
Institutionalizing dissent in our agencies moves us toward a healthier democracy and helps fulfill our founders' vision.
Our constitutional system is defined by a balance between the public's need for transparency and the government's need to have a zone of secrecy around decision making. Both are important, yet they are mutually exclusive.
The special counsel regulations were written to provide the public with confidence that justice was done.
Obstruction of justice requires a corrupt intent.
If I got my hands on the Mueller report, the thing I'd want to see is what are the reasons why Barr made the conclusion about obstruction of justice that he did? Was it because of the facts? If so, why didn't he try and interview Trump to learn all the facts?
Appellate advocacy, particularly at the Supreme Court, is really intimate. I mean, you're just a few feet away from the Chief Justice. You know, if you're sweating, they see you.
It simply cannot be that the president can name his own temporary attorney general to supervise an investigation in which he and his family have a direct, concrete interest.
