Benjamin Wittes

“The core constituency that Republicans must satisfy in high court nominations is the party's social conservative base, which fundamentally cares about issues, not diversity, and has accepted...”

“Reasonable people can disagree about the authorities the NSA should have, when it's appropriate for the CIA to use drone strikes, and how assertive U.S. foreign policy and intelligence shoul...”

“Broadly speaking, the problems with the Espionage Act are that it is hopelessly broad. And we tend to use the Espionage Act - we think about the Espionage Act as forbidding disclosures of cl...”

“Sometimes, the intelligence community does legal collection against a legitimate foreign intelligence target and that target interacts with U.S. persons, against whom our people thus end up...”

“There's all kinds of crazy right-wing conspiracies about me.”

“A generation of women has grown up thinking of reproductive freedom as a constitutional right, and the Court should not casually take away rights that it has determined the Constitution guar...”

“The reason the FISA standard is constitutional is that the government is supposed to use FISA surveillance not for criminal investigations but for counterintelligence probes pursued under th...”

“I have fiercely criticized both the Bush administration's counterterrorism policies and the Obama administration's - and fiercely defended both as well.”

“It might seem perverse for honestly religious people to group their faiths with those of the sadists and megalomaniacs who run most cults, but a growing number are doing just that.”

“Political as well as religious cults can be distinguished from legitimate organizations by their use of doublethink. Though political cults espouse extremist ideologies, not extremist theolo...”

“Eric Holder is a decent man.”

“The notion of law enforcement as professional, not political, began developing as an aspiration and an ethos even while, in practice, the FBI was the personal fiefdom of J. Edgar Hoover.”

“Although environmental groups sometimes raise issues in the confirmation process, environmental protection is not central to the fear-mongering of the liberal interest groups that oppose con...”

“How exactly the obstruction-of-justice statutes interact with the president's broad powers to supervise the executive branch under Article II of the Constitution is a genuinely difficult que...”

“If Trump wants to corruptly direct the conduct of an investigation in order to out an FBI source who was helping our government investigate Russian interference in our electoral processes, w...”

“The difference between a cult and a religion, of course, lies in extremity.”

“Full disclosure: James Comey is a friend. I won't pretend to neutrality about him. He is a highly honorable and decent person, and I have no doubt that he made the many judgments for which p...”

“Secret courts require great faith that the Justice Department - and future Justice Departments - will act with integrity.”

“It is possible for great nations to rot from within.”

“The nature of the job of attorney general has changed - irrevocably. And we should never again have an attorney general, of either party, capable of expressing surprise at the role that nati...”