Christopher Buckley Quotes

I believe executive privilege should protect the President's conversations with key aides ... but on substantive matters of concern I do not believe executive privilege ought to exist.

The question of impeaching Donald Trump is about replacing the toxic partisanship of today's Republican party with America's traditional rule of law. It has become a constitutional imperative.

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.

We must keep the pressure on Congress to curb Obama's continued abuse of power. We must always expose that abuse to fellow citizens.

Every time a president invokes executive privilege, there are three relevant audiences he has to think about: the courts, Congress, and the public.

The president can violate the law, and when he does, he is supposed to be held accountable. That is supposed to be one of the pillars of our democracy.

In a case involving his private conduct, a President should be treated like any private citizen. The rule of law requires no more - and no less.

Mr. Trump, Americans can't afford, and don't want, to worry about the latest lawsuit filed against their president. And you're not immune from these suits once you enter the Oval Office. Anything you've done before taking office is fair game.

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

And I think we as a people need to stop being disingenuous about what the Constitution provides for. It does not provide for this all-encompassing power that we've seen exercised over the last several decades. It's what's gotten us into this bankrupt position.

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government.

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.

You have a good judicial system in the U.S., as you have learned from the Nixon-Watergate period.

I believe that successfully addressing our national security needs while protecting our basic freedoms and civil liberties requires continual Congressional oversight, and I will continue to work to assert the role of this body in carrying out this grave responsibility.

I learned a couple things. The government can do to you whatever they want. They can break the laws, federal laws, as they see fit... You can't turn laws on and off as you deem fit.

Having found, from experience, that impeachment is an impracticable thing, a mere scare-crow, they consider themselves secure for life; they skulk from responsibility to public opinion.

You’ve got to have safeguards [on law enforcement authorities] if we’re going to continue to have the freedom we’ve had for the past 200 years.

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

The President of the United States will not stand and be questioned like a chicken thief by men whose names he does not even know.

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

unconstitutional, unnecessary, extrajudicial

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.

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.

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.