Benjamin Wittes Quotes
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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 is no doubt in my mind that Article II limits to a considerable degree the application of the obstruction statutes to the president when he is acting in his capacity as chief law-enforcement officer of the country.
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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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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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The concept of war is not the construct that will govern - psychologically, politically, and legally - our continuing response to Al Qaeda.
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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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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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I generally favor permissive abortion laws.
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I'm positively enthusiastic about American surveillance policies.
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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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Liberals have been overselling the threat to reproductive rights for decades.
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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.
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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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The only way to tyrantproof the presidency is not to elect tyrants to the presidency.
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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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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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It used to be that what was going to be written on my tombstone was 'Benjamin Wittes, former 'Washington Post' editorial writer,' or 'Benjamin Wittes, who wasn't even a lawyer.' Now it's just, like, 'Benjamin Wittes, who's a friend of Jim Comey's.'
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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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In general, liberals fear conservative judges far too much. In almost all areas, in fact, they dramatically overstate the stakes.
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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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Eric Holder is a decent man.
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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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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.