Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
No responsible scholar who thinks a sitting president cannot be indicted also thinks an attorney general can try to truncate a process of oversight - by Congress, for example - by 'pre-clearing' the president in advance.
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 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.
The idea that the special counsel regulations, which were written to provide the public with confidence against a coverup, would empower an attorney general to restrict disclosure in an investigation of the president is a nonstarter.
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.
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.
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.
Traditionally, in America, we have accountability as kind of a key feature of each branch of government in some way. So, you know, you obviously have to run for office. Or if you're a judge, you've got to be nominated by political officials and so on.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
I don't think that the Supreme Court really takes cases with kind of a theme in mind. They get about 10,000 requests a year, and what are called 'petitions for certiorari,' which are essentially 30 page documents which say, 'Hey, Court, hear my case.' And they don't take very many of them.
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.
There is no doubt that dissents can serve a useful role by explaining when a justice thinks the majority has gone off the deep end. But unanimity also sends its own powerful message - one that might be eclipsed in the headlines by a sensational dissent but could ultimately have a greater impact.
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.
Merrick Garland was the most qualified nominee, not just in our lifetimes but perhaps in the history of the United States Supreme Court. The chief judge of the D.C. Circuit for 20 years, the nation's second-highest court. Never once been overruled by the Court in his 20 years. He was extraordinary.
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.
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.
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?
President Clinton invoked executive power a bunch of times... I think once he started doing that, the courts really pushed back on him. He couldn't use it for things that actually had a better basis. He used it for things that were personal, like the Lewinsky investigation, trying to block his aides from testifying.
When I was at the Justice Department, there were these people who I called legal Houdinis, who - they would find any law; they would find a loophole and a way around it and often very tendentious and not true, and, you know, these are people who didn't respect the rule of law. But, you know, those people were there.
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.
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.
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.
I don't want to get into predicting how Judge Gorsuch would vote on the Supreme Court as a Justice Gorsuch. But I will say that those of us who've seen him in court as a judge, those of us who have worked with him as I have on a appellate rules committee, understand that this is a man who brings independence and integrity to the job.
If Barr wants to keep defending Trump, he should take a page from one of his predecessors, Henry Stanbery, who stepped down as attorney general to serve as President Andrew Johnson's impeachment counsel. Stanbery, notably, tried to come back as attorney general after the impeachment proceedings concluded. The Senate did not confirm him.
Trump and Barr both insist that he has been cleared, but that's not what more than 1,000 former federal prosecutors who read the Mueller report say: The evidence described in the report would lead to an indictment of anyone else in the country. If that's right, we simply cannot have a president who remains in office because of a technicality.
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.