Benjamin Wittes

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 conservative judges. But the threat to basic environmental protections from conservative jurisprudence is broad-based and severe. ”

Government lawyers, like private ones, face the problem routinely of aiding in the defense and development of positions in whose correctness they don't believe. ”

The quickest way to detect a cult is to sniff for doublethink. The cult seeks control over its membership not by providing a coherent theological system but by providing the opposite: an unstable theology infinitely malleable to the needs of the cult's top echelon and uninterpretable at all times to anyone below that level. ”

The idea that the president doesn't interfere in law-enforcement investigative matters is one of our deep normative expectations of the modern presidency. But it is not a matter of law. Legally, if the president of the United States wants to direct the specific conduct of investigations, that is his constitutional prerogative. ”

I understand that a lot of people who use phrases like #resistance have found my work valuable. But my job is to look at difficult problems of national security in ways that may be useful to policymakers and the public. ”

In a way I never did with George W. Bush or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, I will write about the actions of the Trump presidency with the working assumption that our nation must be protected both by and from the president. ”

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. ”