Neal Katyal

Lawyer

1970-03-12

Quotes by Neal Katyal

• Barr has thrown himself in with Trump in ways unbecoming to the nation's highest legal official. His conduct in trying to clear Trump is of a piece with his baseless attacks on 'spying' by the FBI and his defiance of Congress's subpoenas.

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• If Barr wants to keep defending Trump, he should take a page from one of his predecessors, Henry Stanbery, who stepped down as attorney general to serve as President Andrew Johnson's impeachment counsel. Stanbery, notably, tried to come back as attorney general after the impeachment proceedings concluded. The Senate did not confirm him.

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• Donald Trump is the swamp.

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• 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?

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• Presidents routinely testify in criminal cases. You know, George W. Bush did it with Valerie Plame. Bill Clinton did it three times with Ken Starr. Gerald Ford did it with respect to a testimony about a Charles Manson follower. And Ronald Reagan, I think, is perhaps the most important precedent.

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• I don't think the fact that something occurs in public or in private matters at all to obstruction of justice. I mean, if I publicly threaten the prosecutor who's investigating me, I don't think it'd be a particularly compelling defense to say, 'Oh, I did it in public.'

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• 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.

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• There is no doubt that dissents can serve a useful role by explaining when a justice thinks the majority has gone off the deep end. But unanimity also sends its own powerful message - one that might be eclipsed in the headlines by a sensational dissent but could ultimately have a greater impact.

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• Unanimity is important because it signals that the justices can rise above their differences and interpret the law without partisanship.

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• 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.

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• Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States uprooted more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens, and confined them in internment camps. The Solicitor General was largely responsible for the defense of those policies.

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• I think that the terms of the Affordable Care Act do give the states a fair amount of wiggle room and to do things as they see fit. The Affordable Care Act was not designed as some sort of one-size-fits-all solution from Washington. There's lots of discretion given to the states.

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• 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.

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