Neal Katyal Quotes

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.

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.

It simply cannot be that the president can name his own temporary attorney general to supervise an investigation in which he and his family have a direct, concrete interest.

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

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?

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.

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

Thanks to presidential immunity and executive control of the Justice Department, there are no consequences to executive branch lawbreaking. And when it comes to presidential lawbreaking, the sitting president could literally strangle someone to death on national television and meet with no consequences.

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.

You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I'm innocent. You've got to believe I'm innocent. If you don't, take my job.

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.

If the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him.

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

There is nothing in the Constitution that authorizes or makes it the official duty of a President to have anything to do with criminal activities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Donald Trump wants to ignore the rule of law. He ignores the Constitution. He ignores the subpoenas. The Republicans in the House and Senate are afraid to stand up to him, with only a few exceptions.

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.'

If Nixon is not forced to turn over tapes of his conversations with the ring of men who were conversing on their violations of the law, then liberty will soon be dead in this nation. If Nixon gets away with that, then Nixon makes the law as he goes along - not the Congress nor the courts. The old Court you and I served so long will not be worthy of its traditions if Nixon can twist, turn and fashion the law as he sees fit.

The Constitution gives the president of the United States an extraordinarily wide grant of authority to use the power of the pardon.

Americans want to believe that we are a nation of laws, and no one is above them, including the president. Mr. Trump's and his associates' actions during his campaign and during his brief time in office are extremely troubling.