Andrew P. Napolitano

Troublesome questions for President Trump

In a startling revelation earlier this week, The New York Times published what it claims are 40 questions that special counsel Robert Mueller sent to lawyers for President Donald Trump. The questions are apparently a road map of inquiry that Mr. Mueller and his prosecutors and FBI agents plan to put to the president if the president agrees to sit down for an interview with them.

May 2, 2018

At war and with the separation of powers

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.

April 25, 2018

Trump and the attorney-client privilege

A few weeks ago, President Trump was an outwardly happy man because of the utterance of one solitary word from the lips of special counsel Robert Mueller to one of Mr. Trump's lawyers. The word that thrilled the president and his legal team was "subject."

April 18, 2018

The real threat to Trump

In the midst of worrying about North Korea, Syria and Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives this fall, President Donald Trump is now worrying about a government assault on his own business, which targeted his own lawyer.

April 11, 2018

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 the FBI took seriously the boast of Carter Page, one of candidate Donald Trump's foreign policy advisers, that he had worked for the Kremlin.

April 4, 2018

The meaning of Easter is that if there’s hope for the dead, there’s hope for the living

What is the connection between personal freedom and rising from the dead?

March 28, 2018

Purpose of the Constitution is to restrain government, FISA has done exactly the opposite

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.

March 21, 2018

What Stormy Daniels has to say, sordid as it may be, must not be subject to government censorship

When James Madison drafted the First Amendment — "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech" -- he made sure to use the article "the" in front of the word "freedom." What seemed normal to him and superfluous to moderns was actually a profound signal that has resonated for 227 years. The signal was that because the freedom of speech existed before the government that was formed to protect it came into existence, it does not have its origins in government.

March 14, 2018

‘Let him arrest me!’

Late Monday afternoon, we were treated to a series of bizarre interviews on nearly every major cable television channel except Fox when a colorful character named Sam Nunberg, a former personal and political aide to Donald Trump, took to the airwaves to denounce a grand jury subpoena he received compelling the production of documents and live testimony.

March 7, 2018

When the government disarms in selected zones it increases helplessness

The Ash Wednesday massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, seems to have broken more hearts than similar tragedies that preceded it. It was no more senseless than other American school shootings, but there is something about the innocence and bravery and eloquence of the youthful survivors that has touched the souls of Americans deeply.

February 28, 2018

Robert Mueller in hot pursuit

Last Friday, a federal grand jury sitting in Washington, D.C., indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian corporations for conspiracy and for using false instruments and computer hacking so as to influence the American presidential election in 2016. The indictment alleges a vast, organized and professional effort, funded by tens of millions of dollars, whereby Russian spies passed themselves off as Americans on the internet, on the telephone and even in person here in the U.S. to sow discord about Hillary Clinton and thereby assist in the election of Donald Trump.

February 21, 2018

Unchecked government spending has consequences for all

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 your money. So you spend it wildly. Then you realize that the money wasn't yours and you owe it back.

February 14, 2018

A lawful means for foreign surveillance on U.S. soil has ordinary Americans in its sights

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, but it has morphed into unchecked government spying on ordinary Americans.

February 7, 2018

‘Foreign intelligence surveillance’ has become surveillance of all Americans

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 expansion of FISA.

January 31, 2018

Why the House Intelligence Committee must reveal what it knows about NSA and FBI intelligence abuses

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.

January 24, 2018

Did Donald Trump change his mind about domestic spying?

Late last week, Rep. Devin Nunes, California Republican, 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 the "top secret" level and knows how others who have access to secrets have used and abused them, his allegations are extraordinary.

January 17, 2018

To Trump: Preserve, protect, defend the Constitution as written

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 and congressional leadership to bypass the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

January 10, 2018

2018 Fantasy league game, office-pool style

A multiple-choice, current events challenge.

January 3, 2018

Merry Christmas in our hearts and words

What if Christmas is a core value of belief in a personal God who lived among us and His freely given promise of eternal salvation that no believer should reject or apologize for?

December 27, 2017

By procuring Trump transition team’s emails, the FBI can find lies in every inconsistency

Within hours of his victory in last year's presidential election, Donald Trump dispatched his lawyers to establish a nonprofit corporation to manage his transition from private life to the presidency. This was done pursuant to a federal statute that provides for taxpayer-funded assistance to the newly elected — but not yet inaugurated — president. The statutory term for the corporation is the presidential transition team, or PTT.

December 20, 2017