Trey Gowdy Quotes

Unless a president can protect the privacy of the advice he gets, he cannot get the advice he needs.

Executive Privilege

I’m not your lawyer. But if I were in your shoes, I’d tell the President to burn the tapes immediately and then proclaim he’d done so as a matter of national security and executive privilege and out of an obligation to protect the office of the presidency.

The President is entitled to keep secret those conversations which a President may have had with his aids for the purpose of advising him in his Constitutional duties. Executive privilege cannot cover crimes, for they are not Constitutional duties.

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.

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.

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.

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

Every president since George Washington has taken executive privilege seriously. Every Republican president has.

That's the good thing about being president, I can do whatever I want.

When the President does it, that means that it's not illegal.

Protection really takes on the personality of the President.

The powers that are surrendered [by Congress] to one President remain to be used by others.

When a President asserts constitutional powers he needs to be pretty certain he has those powers.

I don’t know if President (George W.) Bush understood how extreme some of the arguments were about executive power that some people in his administration were making.

Once you become president, you don't even have to stop for red lights. And if it looks like traffic's too bad, you just take a helicopter.

You do not walk into any hearing or committee meeting and reveal confidential communications with the president of the United States, who's entitled to receive confidential communications in your best judgment about a host of issues.

Donald Trump is President of the United States and his National Security Council works for him. If he wants to fire someone, so be it.

Presidential powers are not exercised by a body or group. The Constitution vests 'all executive power' in one and only one person - the president.

There are a lot of presidents in both parties - including President Obama - who had strong claims of executive privilege that I certainly think went too far.

Naturally, the president, as a US citizen, cannot be removed from the country. Nor can the president, who is the country's chief executive, be restricted from access to classified information or provided with falsified information.

I don't get into conversations or information about anything that the president does with his personal attorney.

The office of the president is the most powerful in the world. It is also, at times, the most powerless.

The vice president had a bargaining asset, however, that no ordinary person has: He was next in line to the presidency. I saw no chance that he would resign first, then take his chances on trial, conviction, and jail.

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.