Andrew P. Napolitano

A popular way to begin the first day of class in constitutional law in many American law schools is to ask the students what sets the U.S. Constitution apart from all others. Usually, they answer that it’s the clauses that guarantee the freedom of speech, privacy and due process. Yes, each of those guarantees – … Continue reading “War and the Separation of Powers”

Robert Mueller is the special counsel appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May 2017 to probe the nature and extent of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. The investigation began in October 2016 under President Barack Obama when the FBI took seriously the boast of Carter Page, one of candidate Donald Trump’s … Continue reading “What Is Robert Mueller Looking For?”

For the past few days, the nation’s media and political class have been fixated on the firing of the No. 2 person in the FBI, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. McCabe became embroiled in the investigation of President Donald Trump because of his alleged approval of the use of a political dossier, written about Trump and … Continue reading “March Madness, Washington-Style”

Imagine you open the faucet of your kitchen sink expecting water and instead out comes cash. Now imagine that it comes out at the rate of $1 million a minute. You call your plumber, who thinks you’re crazy. To get you off the phone, he opines that it is your sink and therefore must be … Continue reading “A Million Dollars a Minute”

We remain embroiled in a debate over the nature and extent of our own government’s spying on us. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was enacted in 1978 as a response to the unlawful government spying of the Watergate era, was a lawful means for the government to engage in foreign surveillance on U.S. soil, … Continue reading “It Can Happen Here”

I have argued for a few weeks now that House Intelligence Committee members have committed misconduct in office by concealing evidence of spying abuses by the National Security Agency and the FBI. They did this by sitting on a four-page memo that summarizes the abuse of raw intelligence data while Congress was debating a massive … Continue reading “Lying, Spying, and Hiding”

During the past three weeks, Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed into law vast new powers for the NSA and the FBI to spy on innocent Americans and selectively to pass on to law enforcement the fruits of that spying. Those fruits can now lawfully include all fiber-optic data transmitted to or in the … Continue reading “A Conspiracy of Silence Assaults Privacy”

Late last week, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, repeated his public observations that members of the intelligence community – particularly the CIA, the NSA and the intelligence division of the FBI – are not trustworthy with the nation’s intelligence secrets. Because he has a security clearance at … Continue reading “Did Donald Trump Change His Mind on Domestic Spying?”

Hidden beneath the controversy stirred up last week by the publication of a book called Fire and Fury, a highly critical insider’s view of the Trump White House that the president has not only denounced on national television but also tried to prevent from being published and distributed, are the efforts of the Trump administration … Continue reading “Congress Plotting To Cut a Hole in the 4th Amendment, Again”

For the second time in two months, someone who has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State has plotted to kill innocents in New York City and has executed his plot. According to police, at the height of the Monday morning rush hour this week, in an underground pedestrian walkway that I have used many times, … Continue reading “Yes, the Constitution Applies to the New York Bomber”