Neal Katyal Quotes

Isn’t that a sweetheart deal. The Attorney General is appointed by the President; then investigates the President.

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.

President Bush has asserted the right to wiretap and eavesdrop on any American without a warrant in the name of fighting terrorism. He has asserted presidential power beyond stated constitutional rights, and there is no Republican gutsy enough to call his hand.

They haul you up there for, you know, week after week in this kind of star chamber proceeding. Then at the end of it they say, well, we found nothing, but now it's time for special counsel.

The president doesn't order the military to seize political opponents. He doesn't order his intelligence community to lie about national security for political purposes. He uses the military or intelligence communities to protect the United States and our citizens, not to help him win elections.

Presidential power was overruled by the high bench in July 1974, when President Nixon was ordered to turn over some audio tapes of his White House conversations, including the 'smoking gun' tape of June 23, 1972, that revealing the Watergate cover up.

I don't want to hear again from the attorney general or anyone on this floor that this government has shown it can be trusted to use the power we give it with restraint and care.

If the President really wanted to know exactly how Rove and Libby were involved, he could walk down to their offices and demand that they answer him honestly.

The President seems to extend executive privilege way out past the atmosphere. What he says is executive privilege is nothing but executive poppycock.

It is highly improper of the President of the United States to employ extra-legal pressures in an effort to defeat the amendment …. The President has no constitutional role to play in the amending process.

The firing of FBI Director James Comey was the biggest mistake in modern political history.

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 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.

We would never accept a prime minister saying, 'Well, maybe I'll intervene and use a trade issue as a link to an independent investigation into criminal activity.'

I don't doubt that there are many presidential acts that would constitute obstructions of justice if anyone but the president engaged in them but which constitute legitimate exercises of presidential power when the president engages in them.

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.

I believe that Donald Trump in the White House would be more abusive to the Constitution than Barack Obama, and that's saying a lot.

A president with a pen in their hand is a very powerful person.

It's a huge deal when you have got people of the Department of Justice and FBI making fundamental misrepresentations to the FISA court.

The idea that the president doesn't interfere in law-enforcement investigative matters is one of our deep normative expectations of the modern presidency. But it is not a matter of law. Legally, if the president of the United States wants to direct the specific conduct of investigations, that is his constitutional prerogative.

Even George W. Bush, who as president pushed the boundaries of executive power, never proposed a statutory scheme to hold people indefinitely.

Unfortunately, once a person who is willing to act against the interests of the United States assumes the awesome powers of the presidency, the laws and investigative techniques we use in ordinary national security situations are woefully inadequate.

It is uncomfortable in the extreme for people, and particularly for members of the press, to confront the notion that a president could be so far outside the bounds of tradition that he must be treated differently from his predecessors.

President Obama was well known for his interfering in Justice Department matters.

Any U.S. attorney's office would fall over itself to investigate, for example, a state governor who, while running for reelection against a former mayor, so much as hinted to the mayor's successor that, say, highway funds would be restricted unless the current mayor were to announce an inquiry into her predecessor's alleged corruption.