Our founders recognized that 'men were not angels' and that checks and balances in government were critical to avoid threats to the rule of law.
It's such a dangerous thing for desperation to drive litigation.
No one wants a president to be guilty of obstruction of justice. The only thing worse than that is a guilty president who goes without punishment.
The nice thing about the 'House of Cards' is they did 70 takes, so it was a little different. You only get one at the Supreme Court.
Americans can tolerate some secrecy, particularly when it is rooted in protection of the public's interests. But when the claims appear to hide wrongdoing, they begin to curdle.
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.
The Mueller report is a long subtweet of the Barr memo and demolishes it and says that is absolutely wrong, and fundamentally, in this country, whether you are a high person or a low official, anyone can obstruct justice.
One thing we know about government after the New Deal is that checks and balances through whistle-blowing is terrible policy.
I've been in two different administrations, and I would say, particularly, President Obama was really careful to make sure that he wouldn't invoke executive privilege unless absolutely necessary. He only invoked it once in eight years, even though many years he had Congress opposed to him in terms of being from the opposite party.
In our Constitution, our bedrock principle, you know - indeed, what the nation was founded on - is an idea of freedom of religion: that we don't single out people because of their religion.
Donald Trump is the swamp.
The special counsel regulations were written to provide the public with confidence that justice was done.
Trump abuses every privilege in the same way. It's kind of like King George. Take a legal concept and then stretch it beyond all recognition, and that's what you have Trump doing.
Even though Mr. Trump can give his campaign as much of his own money as he wants to, he can't ask other people to front the money for him and promise to pay them back later without reporting the arrangement in a timely fashion to the Federal Election Commission.
Sometimes momentous government action leaves everyone uncertain about the next move.
I like doing scholarship for its own sake.
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.
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.
Independence sounds good in theory, but in practice, it is mutually exclusive with accountability. The more independence you give a prosecutor, the less you make that prosecutor accountable to the public and regular checks and balances.
Even if I might say to myself, 'I don't need health insurance. I won't get sick,' the fact is, as human beings with mortality, we are going to get sick, and it's unpredictable when.
