Neal Katyal Quotes

The laws have become so straight-jacketing that presidents and their aides dare not keep journals or diaries, lest they be subpoenaed by avid special prosecutors.

It is not the Congress's job to rubber stamp bad decisions [of 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.

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.

In our system of government, the president is not supposed to be above the law. He is not a king; his word is not the law.

Whether the Constitution allows indictment of a sitting president is debatable.

But history shows that when courts intervene because a president is trying to shield his own conduct, the deck is stacked against him.

We should not burden a sitting president with civil suits, criminal investigations, or criminal prosecutions.

It's very difficult to pin down the President of the United States without subpoena powers.

This is a case if the President is permitted to be above the law, then we no longer have a republic.

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.

The House of Representatives has never sued a sitting president in all of U.S. history.

I believe Watergate shows that the system did work. Particularly the Judiciary and the Congress, and ultimately an independent prosecutor working in the Executive Branch.

When the President of the United States breaks the law he must be held accountable. That is why I am introducing today a resolution to censure George W. Bush…. At the very heart of our constitution is the assumption that some members of the government will do wrong, and when they do, others in the government must do right…. The President has broken the law. Congress must act…. Our job is not to stand up and cheer when the President breaks the law.

Executive Privilege

The federal government, of course, enjoys a crucial advantage in its ability to evade laws. It owns the prosecutor.

That the president of the United States may be subpoenaed, and examined as a witness, and required to produce any paper in his possession, is not controverted.

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.

The upshot of the Nixon tapes case was that any president is going to have an extremely hard time resisting a request from a law enforcement officer.

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.

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.

I would sue any president that exceeds his or her powers.

When it comes to investigating a president, the special counsel regulations I had the privilege of drafting in 1998-99 say that such inquiries have one ultimate destination: Congress.

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 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.