Benjamin Wittes Quotes
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For those who support same-sex marriage - and I support it without reservation - the ideal of equality and the belief in the dignity of same-sex relationships necessarily makes the issue seem a great deal like the civil-rights struggles of the past.
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I understand that a lot of people who use phrases like resistance have found my work valuable. But my job is to look at difficult problems of national security in ways that may be useful to policymakers and the public.
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There's all kinds of crazy right-wing conspiracies about me.
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When it comes to letting kids out into dark alleys, we understand that they have things to steal. We need to understand that in online life, too.
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Conservatives complain that the Supreme Court is too liberal. Liberals complain that it's too conservative. Both charges are inaccurate: in reality the Court is a careful political actor that arguably represents the center of gravity of American politics better than most politicians do.
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Government lawyers, like private ones, face the problem routinely of aiding in the defense and development of positions in whose correctness they don't believe.
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The search for the Torah codes is rooted in the unfathomable theological premise that the Torah - itself a set of five books of limited length - contains literally all truth.
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Asking journalists to denounce leaks because of their deleterious effects on the functioning of government is as hopeless as asking an airline to denounce jet fuel because of its impact on the environment.
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Eric Holder is a decent man.
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To get a FISA warrant to spy on a suspected spy, the feds go before a super-secret court located in a sealed room in the Department of Justice. With no defense lawyers present, they need only show probable cause that the target is an 'agent of a foreign power' engaged in intelligence gathering against the United States.
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I defend non-criminal detention.
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Sometimes, the intelligence community does legal collection against a legitimate foreign intelligence target and that target interacts with U.S. persons, against whom our people thus end up collecting information as a collateral matter.
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When somebody promises to do something, you have to think about whether that's something that you would be willing to see happen because the powers are simply too vast.
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The only way to tyrantproof the presidency is not to elect tyrants to the presidency.
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It's hardly a news flash that a secret, clandestine intelligence agency might resist giving out information about its operations when not not legally required to do so.
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Although environmental groups sometimes raise issues in the confirmation process, environmental protection is not central to the fear-mongering of the liberal interest groups that oppose conservative judges. But the threat to basic environmental protections from conservative jurisprudence is broad-based and severe.
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Liberals have been overselling the threat to reproductive rights for decades.
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In the world of President Trump, we really want people who aren't going to lie. We want people who can sit in front of a congressional committee for hours and, however mad they may make us, never give us reason to doubt that they are telling the truth as they see it.
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Stability in law - particularly constitutional law - is critically important; the Supreme Court would do well to remember that.
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Broadly speaking, the problems with the Espionage Act are that it is hopelessly broad. And we tend to use the Espionage Act - we think about the Espionage Act as forbidding disclosures of classified information. That's not really what the statute says. What the statute talks about is information related to the national defense.
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If Trump wants to corruptly direct the conduct of an investigation in order to out an FBI source who was helping our government investigate Russian interference in our electoral processes, well, Article II of the Constitution begins with these terrifying words: 'The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.'
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There is nothing normal about removing the FBI director, as a general matter. It's an extraordinary measure. This is an office that is typically served for a term of years, 10 years, to be precise.
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The difference between a cult and a religion, of course, lies in extremity.
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Comey really spent an enormous amount of energy in the period in which both he and Trump were in office trying to protect the FBI from political interference from the White House.