Trump fired Jim Comey because the most dangerous thing in the world, if you are Donald Trump, is a person who tells the truth, is dogged, you can't control, and who is as committed as Comey is to the institutional independence of an organization that has the power to investigate you.

Benjamin Wittes

Categorized in : World Telling The Truth Independence

Recommended additon to the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights: "A right to not have your data rise up and attack you."

Benjamin Wittes

data bills rights

Asking journalists to denounce leaks because of their deleterious effects on the functioning of government is as hopeless as asking an airline to denounce jet fuel because of its impact on the environment.

Benjamin Wittes

impact government asking

Comey really spent an enormous amount of energy in the period in which both he and Trump were in office trying to protect the FBI from political interference from the White House.

Benjamin Wittes

political office house

There is nothing normal about removing the FBI director, as a general matter. It's an extraordinary measure. This is an office that is typically served for a term of years, 10 years, to be precise.

Benjamin Wittes

fbi term office

As a general matter, if the president wants to withdraw from a treaty, he simply gets to do that. And that's part of the powers of the office.

Benjamin Wittes

office president want

When somebody promises to do something, you have to think about whether that's something that you would be willing to see happen because the powers are simply too vast.

Benjamin Wittes

would-be promise thinking

You know, you don't get to survive that long without making some compromises.

Benjamin Wittes

compromise long

This is not comparing apples to oranges, it's apples to orangutans.

Benjamin Wittes

world

I think the administration is in a much stronger place if they can say we have gotten it down to a core group of people we're not going to let and we want to hold them somewhere other than Guantanamo.

Benjamin Wittes

world

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.

Benjamin Wittes

nation will never way

The only way to tyrantproof the presidency is not to elect tyrants to the presidency.

Benjamin Wittes

elect only tyrants way

The difference between a cult and a religion, of course, lies in extremity.

Benjamin Wittes

lies difference cult religion

Political as well as religious cults can be distinguished from legitimate organizations by their use of doublethink. Though political cults espouse extremist ideologies, not extremist theologies, operationally they are virtually identical to religious cults, and they also go to great lengths to control the vocabularies of their members.

Benjamin Wittes

control great go political

I've got no problem with drone strikes.

Benjamin Wittes

got no-problem strikes problem

When it comes to letting kids out into dark alleys, we understand that they have things to steal. We need to understand that in online life, too.

Benjamin Wittes

need understand dark life

June 10, 2002, the day John Ashcroft announced the arrest of Jose Padilla, marked a low point in Ashcroft's career as Attorney General.

Benjamin Wittes

low point career day

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.

Benjamin Wittes

short security giving enemy

How exactly the obstruction-of-justice statutes interact with the president's broad powers to supervise the executive branch under Article II of the Constitution is a genuinely difficult question.

Benjamin Wittes

question how constitution difficult

There is no doubt in my mind that Article II limits to a considerable degree the application of the obstruction statutes to the president when he is acting in his capacity as chief law-enforcement officer of the country.

Benjamin Wittes

limits doubt mind country

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.

Benjamin Wittes

president power doubt justice