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Benjamin Wittes

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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
#Information
#Intelligence
#News
#Secret
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
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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
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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
#Constitution
#Difficult
#How
#Question
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
#Enemy
#Liberty
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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
#Career
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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
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#Online
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Eric Holder is a decent man. - Benjamin Wittes
#Decent Man
#Decent
#Eric
#Holder
#Man
The concept of war is not the construct that will govern - psychologically, politically, and legally - our continuing response to Al Qaeda. - Benjamin Wittes
#Concept
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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
#Acting
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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
#Deep
#Expectations
#Law
#Matter
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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
#Authority
#Government
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#Reason
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
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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
#CIA
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#Intelligence
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The only way to tyrantproof the presidency is not to elect tyrants to the presidency. - Benjamin Wittes
#Elect
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#Presidency
#Tyrants
#Way
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
#America
#Constitution
#Government
#Power
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
#Equality
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#Marriage
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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
#Environmental
#Process
#Sometimes
The difference between a cult and a religion, of course, lies in extremity. - Benjamin Wittes
#Between
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#Cult
#Difference
#Lies
#Religion
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
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#Death
#Justice
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#Street
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
#Community
#Intelligence
#Legal
#People
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