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...
What Is Robert Mueller Looking For?
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...
March Madness, Washington-Style
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...
A Million Dollars a Minute
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...
It Can Happen Here
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...
Lying, Spying, and Hiding
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...
A Conspiracy of Silence Assaults Privacy
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...
Did Donald Trump Change His Mind on Domestic Spying?
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...
Congress Plotting To Cut a Hole in the 4th Amendment, Again
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...
Yes, the Constitution Applies to the New York Bomber
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...


