“The only way to tyrantproof the presidency is not to elect tyrants to the presidency.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“I’m a rationalist and a skeptic, someone who safely separates faith from reason.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“I’ve got no problem with drone strikes.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“Good intelligence analysis, after all, is all about discrimination between what’s important and what’s not.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“The nature of constitutional delegations of power is that they entitle the empowered official to do certain things that other people can’t do.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“I normally try to ignore presidential tweets.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“If Trump wants to corruptly direct the conduct of an investigation in order to out an FBI source who was helping our government investigate Russian interference in our electoral processes, well, Article II of the Constitution begins with these terrifying words: ‘The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.’”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“For those who support same-sex marriage – and I support it without reservation – the ideal of equality and the belief in the dignity of same-sex relationships necessarily makes the issue seem a great deal like the civil-rights struggles of the past.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“In general, liberals fear conservative judges far too much. In almost all areas, in fact, they dramatically overstate the stakes.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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.”
― 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.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“Liberals have been overselling the threat to reproductive rights for decades.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“I generally favor permissive abortion laws.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“A generation of women has grown up thinking of reproductive freedom as a constitutional right, and the Court should not casually take away rights that it has determined the Constitution guarantees.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“Stability in law – particularly constitutional law – is critically important; the Supreme Court would do well to remember that.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“One effect of Roe was to mobilize a permanent constituency for criminalizing abortion – a constituency that has driven much of the southern realignment toward conservatism.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“The core constituency that Republicans must satisfy in high court nominations is the party’s social conservative base, which fundamentally cares about issues, not diversity, and has accepted white men who practice the judging it admires.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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
“I’m an unabashed apologist for strong national-security authority. That’s why I might be more alarmed by Trump.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“President Obama’s decision not to go to Congress for help in establishing reasonable standards for the continued detention of Guantanamo detainees is a failure of leadership in the project of putting American law on a sound basis for a long-term confrontation with terrorism. It is bad for the country, for national security, and for civil liberties.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“Eric Holder is a decent man.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“We should never again have an attorney general capable of saying virtually nothing as the law of major intelligence programs and the integrity of his department’s work in overseeing these programs are assailed over a protracted period of time.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“We should stop thinking of Snowden, to the extent that we ever were, as a hero. We should stop thinking of him as a whistleblower.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“In 1999 and 2000, when I was a young editorial writer at the ‘Post’, the ‘Post’ won the public service medal two years running.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“National security is not just things that go boom. It is not just terrorists and foreign adversaries.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“It is possible for great nations to rot from within.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“Reasonable people can disagree about the authorities the NSA should have, when it’s appropriate for the CIA to use drone strikes, and how assertive U.S. foreign policy and intelligence should be.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“It’s hardly a news flash that a secret, clandestine intelligence agency might resist giving out information about its operations when not not legally required to do so.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“Sometimes, the intelligence community does legal collection against a legitimate foreign intelligence target and that target interacts with U.S. persons, against whom our people thus end up collecting information as a collateral matter.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“I have fiercely criticized both the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies and the Obama administration’s – and fiercely defended both as well.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“The concept of war is not the construct that will govern – psychologically, politically, and legally – our continuing response to Al Qaeda.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“Drosnin’s ‘The Bible Code’ would hardly be worth mentioning were it not such a smash hit.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“In any long string of letters, one can find countless anomalies that will seem like convincing proofs of hidden meaning to the mind that wants to believe that the text is somehow special. Numerological tricks, for example, can demonstrate that William Shakespeare wrote the ‘King James Bible.’”
― Benjamin Wittes
“Once upon a time, science, philosophy, and theology were disciplines largely undifferentiated from one another, and proving the existence of God was a fairly commonplace intellectual exercise. But as the scientific method became increasingly refined, particularly through the nineteenth century, science and religion grew apart.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“It might seem perverse for honestly religious people to group their faiths with those of the sadists and megalomaniacs who run most cults, but a growing number are doing just that.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“The difference between a cult and a religion, of course, lies in extremity.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“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.’”
― Benjamin Wittes
“There’s all kinds of crazy right-wing conspiracies about me.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“You cannot denude the presidency of the substance and power of its office. It can’t be done.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“I was much less offended than others were by the CIA’s interrogations in the years after September 11.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“I defend non-criminal detention.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“I’m positively enthusiastic about American surveillance policies.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“Secret courts require great faith that the Justice Department – and future Justice Departments – will act with integrity.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“While I oppose the death penalty as a policy matter, in a legal culture in which we reserve the right to execute people for relatively routine street crimes, it seems quite absurd for the justice system to get squeamish about executing the operational masterminds of Sept. 11.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“Al-Qaida is a cult of martyrdom.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“Back when the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology were one great intellectual hodgepodge, proving the existence of God was a relatively commonplace exercise. To the modern mind, however, science and religion talk past each other.”
― Benjamin Wittes
“The search for the Torah codes is rooted in the unfathomable theological premise that the Torah – itself a set of five books of limited length – contains literally all truth.”
― Benjamin Wittes
Leave a Reply