Words matter. These are the best Neal Katyal Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I used to walk down the Justice Department on the fifth floor and see all those portraits of legendary attorneys general, Griffin Bell and Robert Jackson and people like that. Bill Barr will not be like that.
We have learned Trump’s disregard for the truth, and the rule of law is real.
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.
Donald Trump is the swamp.
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.
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?
I have no doubt that if confirmed, Judge Gorsuch would help to restore confidence in the rule of law. His years on the bench reveal a commitment to judicial independence – a record that should give the American people confidence that he will not compromise principle to favor the president who appointed him.
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?
Presidents routinely testify in criminal cases. You know, George W. Bush did it with Valerie Plame. Bill Clinton did it three times with Ken Starr. Gerald Ford did it with respect to a testimony about a Charles Manson follower. And Ronald Reagan, I think, is perhaps the most important precedent.
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.
In general, presidents do sit for interviews or respond to requests from prosecutors because they take their constitutional responsibility to faithfully execute the laws seriously, and running away from a prosecutor isn’t consistent with faithfully executing the laws.
My wife is a doctor at a veteran’s hospital.
The Supreme Court has been very clear: when it comes to religious discrimination, you can take intent into consideration.
Barr has thrown himself in with Trump in ways unbecoming to the nation’s highest legal official. His conduct in trying to clear Trump is of a piece with his baseless attacks on ‘spying’ by the FBI and his defiance of Congress’s subpoenas.
Executive branch rules require sensitive classified information to be discussed in specialized facilities that are designed to guard against the possibility that officials are being targeted for surveillance outside of the workplace.
The hospital room of a cabinet official is exactly the type of target ripe for surveillance by a foreign power.
The Supreme Court is very capable of acting quickly when it needs to.
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.
Firing the prosecutor who’s about to get you or your campaign is kind of quintessential obstruction of justice.
One thing we know about government after the New Deal is that checks and balances through whistle-blowing is terrible policy.
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.
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.
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.
Trump knows he’s facing some pretty strong criminal liability when he leaves office, one way or another. Even if a sitting president can’t be indicted, he’s got to know his future looks like it’s behind bars unless he cuts some sort of deal with the prosecutors.
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.
Sometimes momentous government action leaves everyone uncertain about the next move.
Institutionalizing dissent in our agencies moves us toward a healthier democracy and helps fulfill our founders’ vision.
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.
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.
I generally sleep about four hours.
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.
If you are looking for someone to break the mold, the last guy you look to is Robert Mueller.
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.
The joy of great fiction is that it transports the reader to another world, where new characters live in otherwise unimaginable ways. It is one of the most powerful ways of generating empathy that I know.
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.
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.
It’s definitely true that law enforcement investigations expand over time in appropriate ways.
The Supreme Court should televise its proceedings.
I never want to be in the business of predicting what the U.S. Supreme Court will do.
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.’
