It’s definitely true that law enforcement investigations expand over time in appropriate ways. Neal Katyal Read Quote
The Solicitor General is responsible for overseeing appellate litigation on behalf of the United States and with representing the United States in the Supreme Court. Neal Katyal Read Quote
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. Neal Katyal Read Quote
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. Neal Katyal Read Quote
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. Neal Katyal Read Quote
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. Neal Katyal Read Quote
When I was at the Justice Department, there were these people who I called legal Houdinis, who – they would find any law; they would find a loophole and a way around it and often very tendentious and not true, and, you know, these are people who didn’t respect the rule of law. But, you know, those people were there. Neal Katyal Read Quote
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. Neal Katyal Read Quote
I don’t think that the Supreme Court really takes cases with kind of a theme in mind. They get about 10,000 requests a year, and what are called ‘petitions for certiorari,’ which are essentially 30 page documents which say, ‘Hey, Court, hear my case.’ And they don’t take very many of them. Neal Katyal Read Quote
