Quotes from Benjamin Wittes

It is possible for great nations to rot from within.

To get a FISA warrant to spy on a suspected spy, the feds go before a super-secret court located in a sealed room in the Department of Justice. With no defense lawyers present, they need only show probable cause that the target is an 'agent of a foreign power' engaged in intelligence gathering against the United States.

Conservatives complain that the Supreme Court is too liberal. Liberals complain that it's too conservative. Both charges are inaccurate: in reality the Court is a careful political actor that arguably represents the center of gravity of American politics better than most politicians do.

Stability in law - particularly constitutional law - is critically important; the Supreme Court would do well to remember that.

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 national security issues now play in the life of the Justice Department or in the role of its chief.

It used to be that what was going to be written on my tombstone was 'Benjamin Wittes, former 'Washington Post' editorial writer,' or 'Benjamin Wittes, who wasn't even a lawyer.' Now it's just, like, 'Benjamin Wittes, who's a friend of Jim Comey's.'

If the 'enemy combatant' cases of Padilla and Hamdi present a clash between liberty and security, each side champions one while giving short shrift to the other.

I'm positively enthusiastic about American surveillance policies.

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 the president's authority to conduct foreign policy.

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

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.

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

Al-Qaida is a cult of martyrdom.

If you believe, as I do, that the scope and range of presidential authority is great, that puts a lot of weight on the civic virtue and decency of the individual who holds the office.

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 don't doubt that there are many presidential acts that would constitute obstructions of justice if anyone but the president engaged in them but which constitute legitimate exercises of presidential power when the president engages in them.

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 people loathe him in good faith.

I defend non-criminal detention.

Good intelligence analysis, after all, is all about discrimination between what's important and what's not.

In the world of President Trump, we really want people who aren't going to lie. We want people who can sit in front of a congressional committee for hours and, however mad they may make us, never give us reason to doubt that they are telling the truth as they see it.

The foundations of modern civil-rights law are exceptionally secure. Conservative judges nibble around the edges sometimes, and people still debate the constitutionality of affirmative-action programs. But almost no one seriously argues about the basic meaning or legitimacy of core civil-rights protections.

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.

I generally favor permissive abortion laws.

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 classified information. That's not really what the statute says. What the statute talks about is information related to the national defense.