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

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

I generally sleep about four hours.

My wife is a doctor at a veteran's hospital.

I think there is a role for courts in a variety of areas, but the notion that we can allow a federal judge to run our greenhouse gas policy strikes me as preposterous.

Traditionally, in America, we have accountability as kind of a key feature of each branch of government in some way. So, you know, you obviously have to run for office. Or if you're a judge, you've got to be nominated by political officials and so on.

Firing the prosecutor who's about to get you or your campaign is kind of quintessential obstruction of justice.

I used to walk down the Justice Department on the fifth floor and see all those portraits of legendary attorneys general, Griffin Bell and Robert Jackson and people like that. Bill Barr will not be like that.

Trump knows he's facing some pretty strong criminal liability when he leaves office, one way or another. Even if a sitting president can't be indicted, he's got to know his future looks like it's behind bars unless he cuts some sort of deal with the prosecutors.

Our Supreme Court has been very clear that the government can't just simply say something and make it so.

The Supreme Court should televise its proceedings.

I don't want to get into predicting how Judge Gorsuch would vote on the Supreme Court as a Justice Gorsuch. But I will say that those of us who've seen him in court as a judge, those of us who have worked with him as I have on a appellate rules committee, understand that this is a man who brings independence and integrity to the job.

The idea that the special counsel regulations, which were written to provide the public with confidence against a coverup, would empower an attorney general to restrict disclosure in an investigation of the president is a nonstarter.

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

Executive branch rules require sensitive classified information to be discussed in specialized facilities that are designed to guard against the possibility that officials are being targeted for surveillance outside of the workplace.

The hospital room of a cabinet official is exactly the type of target ripe for surveillance by a foreign power.

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.

Barr has thrown himself in with Trump in ways unbecoming to the nation's highest legal official. His conduct in trying to clear Trump is of a piece with his baseless attacks on 'spying' by the FBI and his defiance of Congress's subpoenas.

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.

If Barr wants to keep defending Trump, he should take a page from one of his predecessors, Henry Stanbery, who stepped down as attorney general to serve as President Andrew Johnson's impeachment counsel. Stanbery, notably, tried to come back as attorney general after the impeachment proceedings concluded. The Senate did not confirm him.

No responsible scholar who thinks a sitting president cannot be indicted also thinks an attorney general can try to truncate a process of oversight - by Congress, for example - by 'pre-clearing' the president in advance.

The joy of great fiction is that it transports the reader to another world, where new characters live in otherwise unimaginable ways. It is one of the most powerful ways of generating empathy that I know.

President Clinton invoked executive power a bunch of times... I think once he started doing that, the courts really pushed back on him. He couldn't use it for things that actually had a better basis. He used it for things that were personal, like the Lewinsky investigation, trying to block his aides from testifying.

My parents wanted to keep me away from girls, so they sent me to a Catholic boy's school, the Loyola Academy in Chicago.

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.

Presidents routinely testify in criminal cases. You know, George W. Bush did it with Valerie Plame. Bill Clinton did it three times with Ken Starr. Gerald Ford did it with respect to a testimony about a Charles Manson follower. And Ronald Reagan, I think, is perhaps the most important precedent.

The Supreme Court is very capable of acting quickly when it needs to.

Merrick Garland was the most qualified nominee, not just in our lifetimes but perhaps in the history of the United States Supreme Court. The chief judge of the D.C. Circuit for 20 years, the nation's second-highest court. Never once been overruled by the Court in his 20 years. He was extraordinary.

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.

I don't think that the Supreme Court really takes cases with kind of a theme in mind. They get about 10,000 requests a year, and what are called 'petitions for certiorari,' which are essentially 30 page documents which say, 'Hey, Court, hear my case.' And they don't take very many of them.

I have no doubt that if confirmed, Judge Gorsuch would help to restore confidence in the rule of law. His years on the bench reveal a commitment to judicial independence - a record that should give the American people confidence that he will not compromise principle to favor the president who appointed him.

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

There is no doubt that dissents can serve a useful role by explaining when a justice thinks the majority has gone off the deep end. But unanimity also sends its own powerful message - one that might be eclipsed in the headlines by a sensational dissent but could ultimately have a greater impact.

Many programs are built on the government's spending power, and the existence of an extraconstitutional limit on that power is a worrisome development.