Quotes from Jeffrey Toobin

The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy led directly to the passage of a historic law, the Gun Control Act of 1968.

For a long time, the Court has moved toward outlawing all forms of racial preference, including affirmative action, and Obama seems accepting, even supportive, of the change.

There is always sleaze in the news. And you know what? The news is always a combination of things that are interesting and things that are important.

The United States, like any great power, is always going to have an intelligence operation, and some electronic surveillance is obligatory in the modern world.

The result always mattered more than the rhetoric.

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power—and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.

In the end, notwithstanding a surreal detour in the 1970s, Patricia led the life she for which she was destined back in Hillsborough. The story of Patricia Hearst, as extraordinary as it once was, had a familiar, even predictable ending. She did not turn into a revolutionary. She turned into her mother.

He did what good lawyers always do. He shifted his argument in the direction his audience was already going.

That day was also the first time a case of COVID-19 was diagnosed in South Korea, which promptly began an orderly regime of testing that limited the immediate impact of the virus. In contrast, Trump that night addressed the growing threat with his customary salesman's patter. "We have it totally under control," he said. No, they didn't, and Trump's feckless indifference in those early days cost thousands of American lives.

The biggest police gun battle ever to take place on American soil had begun, and it was on live television. —

There were two kinds of cases before the Supreme Court. There were abortion cases—and there were all the others. Abortion was (and is) the central legal issue before the Court. It defined the judicial philosophies of the justices. It dominated the nomination and confirmation process. It nearly delineated the difference between the national Democratic and Republican parties.

Toughened or coarsened by their worldly lives, the other dissenters could shrug and move on, but Souter couldn't. His whole life was being a judge.

Trump had been lying for his entire adult life, and far from being brought down by this pervasive dishonesty, he had been elected president of the United States. Why change what was working so well? And in any event, what man in his eighth decade changes such a fundamental aspect of his character? Not Trump.

To a degree that can scarcely be imagined today, the bomb became a common mode of American political expression. In 1972, there were 1,962 actual and attempted bombings in the United States, with twenty-five people killed; in 1973, 1,955 bombings, with twenty-two killed; in 1974, 2,044 bombings, with twenty-four killed. The

Instead, Giuliani pressed ahead, with Trump's encouragement, to begin a full-scale investigation about Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine. If Giuliani had done anything else, Donald Trump would not have been impeached. For this reason, Giuliani's work must rank among the most disastrous pieces of advocacy in the history of American lawyering.

I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job," Trump told the Russians. "I faced great pressure because of Russia. That's taken off.

It was the job of Trump's lawyer to tell him not to do it. But that's not what Giuliani did. To the contrary, Trump sent Giuliani to Ukraine, and he went. Together, the two men didn't just advocate for collusion with Ukraine; they executed it.

It was the clearest evidence so far, according to many in the Mueller office, that the president had committed a crime in office—obstruction of justice.

In 2013, Trump's son Eric told the sportswriter James Dodson, "We don't rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia." (On Twitter, Eric Trump denied having made the remark.)

In the trial and throughout Trump's presidency, there was never any doubt about his character or his conduct—his dishonesty, his arrogance, his ignorance, and his narcissism.

The White House released the military aid to Ukraine after allegations of the link to the Biden investigation became public. In other words, the Trump administration released the aid only because it was caught linking the aid to the quest for political dirt.

Purple prose attracts attention more than converts.

He saw the Constitution as the vehicle to keep ecumenical passions in check.

Trump did, in short, exactly what Mueller said he did. The two men—president and prosecutor—were like photo negatives of each other. Trump could not tell the truth, and Mueller could not tell a lie.