Quotes from Neal Katyal

The Mueller report is a long subtweet of the Barr memo and demolishes it and says that is absolutely wrong, and fundamentally, in this country, whether you are a high person or a low official, anyone can obstruct justice.

If I got my hands on the Mueller report, the thing I'd want to see is what are the reasons why Barr made the conclusion about obstruction of justice that he did? Was it because of the facts? If so, why didn't he try and interview Trump to learn all the facts?

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.

In general, presidents do sit for interviews or respond to requests from prosecutors because they take their constitutional responsibility to faithfully execute the laws seriously, and running away from a prosecutor isn't consistent with faithfully executing the laws.

It's definitely true that law enforcement investigations expand over time in appropriate ways.

People tend to take more risks in groups than alone. For these reasons, the law has always treated conspiracy harshly.

I'm blessed with the fact that I don't need a tremendous amount of sleep.

I think probably, you know, from my perspective, the folks who say a sitting president cannot be indicted have the better of the argument that the president can't be indicted - put, you know, through a criminal trial while he is president - and that the proper way to do it is to impeach him first, remove him, and then seek criminal prosecution.

When I was at the Justice Department, there were these people who I called legal Houdinis, who - they would find any law; they would find a loophole and a way around it and often very tendentious and not true, and, you know, these are people who didn't respect the rule of law. But, you know, those people were there.

In some cases, Justice Department leaders can supervise investigations despite having personal knowledge about the entities involved.

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

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.

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.

Our constitutional system is defined by a balance between the public's need for transparency and the government's need to have a zone of secrecy around decision making. Both are important, yet they are mutually exclusive.

If you are looking for someone to break the mold, the last guy you look to is Robert Mueller.

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

Sometimes momentous government action leaves everyone uncertain about the next move.

Institutionalizing dissent in our agencies moves us toward a healthier democracy and helps fulfill our founders' vision.

I can tell you that standard D.O.J. protocol is that you let official acts speak for themselves. You don't go and spin your action. For example, when I ran the Solicitor General's office, there would be all sorts of times when the litigants would make something up, and we would just never comment to the press. It is not what we do.

One thing we know about government after the New Deal is that checks and balances through whistle-blowing is terrible policy.

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.

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.

Obstruction of justice requires a corrupt intent.

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.