Neal Katyal Quotes

Neal Katyal

Profession : Lawyer

Birth : March 12, 1970

The special-counsel regulations were drafted at a unique historical moment. We were approaching the end of President Bill Clinton's second term, and no one knew who would be elected president the next year.

Neal Katyal

Appointing special counsel Robert Mueller to probe Russian meddling in the 2016 election (and any possible ties to President Trump's campaign) was the only choice the Justice Department had. This is the best way to deal with the conflicts and potential conflicts of interest these matters posed.

Neal Katyal

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.

Neal Katyal

The public has every right to see Robert S. Mueller III's conclusions. Absolutely nothing in the law or the regulations prevents the report from becoming public. Indeed, the relevant sources of law give Attorney General P. William Barr all the latitude in the world to make it public.

Neal Katyal

The idea that the special counsel regulations, which were written to provide the public with confidence against a coverup, would empower an attorney general to restrict disclosure in an investigation of the president is a nonstarter.

Neal Katyal

I served in two administrations very high up in the Justice Department.

Neal Katyal

The hospital room of a cabinet official is exactly the type of target ripe for surveillance by a foreign power.

Neal Katyal

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

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.

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.

Neal Katyal

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

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.

Neal Katyal

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.

Neal Katyal

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.

Neal Katyal

No responsible scholar who thinks a sitting president cannot be indicted also thinks an attorney general can try to truncate a process of oversight - by Congress, for example - by 'pre-clearing' the president in advance.

Neal Katyal

At times, President Trump has behaved far worse than Nixon did.

Neal Katyal

President Trump has criticized the Mueller investigation, fired Jim Comey, savagely attacked the FBI, and repeatedly suggested the Russia campaign influence in 2016 was a hoax. In the wake of all of this, the American people need to be assured that Mueller can carry out his investigation without interference.

Neal Katyal

Justice Scalia was usually particularly challenging to me at oral argument, but I so respected his intellect and commitment to the pursuit of truth.

Neal Katyal

The joy of great fiction is that it transports the reader to another world, where new characters live in otherwise unimaginable ways. It is one of the most powerful ways of generating empathy that I know.

Neal Katyal

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