Andrew P. Napolitano

Trump travel ban continues on its strange odyssey

The weird odyssey of President Trump's travel bans continues. The original ban, signed as an executive order Jan. 27, barred absolutely all immigrants and refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries. The countries had actually been chosen by the State Department of former President Obama. Mr. Obama never signed a ban, but Mr. Trump did.

September 27, 2017

Paul Manafort indictment spells legal trouble for Trump

The Donald Trump I know is a smart guy who often thinks a few steps ahead of those whose will he is trying to bend. But I lately wonder whether he grasps the gravity of the legal peril that is beginning to show up around him.

September 20, 2017

Hurricanes, other natural disasters are God’s will

Like many Americans during the past three weeks, I've been bombarded by news about the destructive power of Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma in Florida. The stories are of misery, death and destruction.

September 13, 2017

DACA and the rule of immigration law

Earlier this week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that in six months, the Department of Justice will begin the long process for deportation proceedings against 800,000 young people who came to America as babies and young children in the care of their parents and others because those entries into this country were and remain unlawful.

September 6, 2017

Creeping dangers to the rule of law

Amid the bad news this summer of racial tensions in Charlottesville and biblical-like floods in Houston and preening saber rattling between Pyongyang and Washington, a dangerous below-the-radar trend has been developing about which all who believe that the Constitution means what it says should be concerned. It is the reckless influence upon local law enforcement coming from the Trump administration.

August 30, 2017

Afghanistan strategy gives Trump focus other than Charlottesville

On the heels of his worst week in office, during which his crude comments about race were widely perceived as defending racism and hatred -- comments that sent some of his natural domestic allies fleeing -- President Trump could not bring himself to articulate a mea culpa.

August 23, 2017

Charlottesville shows why free speech is important

Last weekend, serious violence broke out in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a group of white supremacist demonstrators was confronted by a group of folks who were there to condemn the message the demonstrators had come to advance. The message was critical of the government for removing a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee from a public place.

August 16, 2017

Sanctuary cities run afoul of the rule of law

Earlier this week, the Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) told the mayor of Chicago that it would cease funding grants to the Chicago Police Department that had been approved in the Obama administration because Chicago city officials were not cooperating with federal immigration officials.

August 9, 2017

Spying is clearly spelled out by Constitution

What if the federal government captures in real time the contents of every telephone call, email and text message and all the fiber-optic data generated by every person and entity in the United States 24/7/365? What if this mass surveillance was never authorized by any federal law?

August 2, 2017

Jeff Sessions recusal leaves Trump under siege

During the past two weeks, President Trump has made no secret of his unhappiness at the management of the Department of Justice (DOJ) under Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Actually, Mr. Trump seems most agitated at the growing parts of the Justice Department that are not under Mr. Sessions' management.

July 26, 2017

Donald Trump Jr.’s Russian meeting may be an actual crime

Last week, The New York Times revealed that in June 2016, Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son; Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and chief confidant; Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump's then-campaign chief executive; and others met secretly at Trump Tower with a former Russian prosecutor and a former Soviet counterintelligence agent to discuss what negative (most likely computer-generated) information the Russians might have to offer them about Hillary Clinton.

July 19, 2017

Trump immigration policy will run afoul of the Supreme Court

Earlier this week, after nearly uniform rejections by judges all across the country, President Trump achieved a court victory in the persistent challenges to his most recent executive order restricting the immigration of people into the United States from six predominately Muslim countries.

June 28, 2017

Donald Trump criminal investigation could hinge on FBI ‘target’

I was surprised last weekend when one of President Trump's lawyers told my colleague Chris Wallace twice on "Fox News Sunday" that the president is being investigated by the FBI and then told him twice that he is not. This same lawyer repeated the "not being investigated" argument on a half-dozen other Sunday shows but did not repeat the "is being investigated" remark.

June 21, 2017

Government works for the people

Last week, when former FBI Director James Comey gave his long-awaited public testimony about his apparently rough-and-tumble relationship with President Trump, he painted a bleak picture. The essence of Mr. Comey's testimony was that the president asked him to drop an investigation of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn -- Mr. Trump's former national security adviser -- and then asked him to do so in return for keeping his job as FBI director and then fired him for not obeying his order.

June 14, 2017

Russia hack details should be known to public

Last weekend, the FBI arrested an employee of a corporation in Augusta, Ga., that had a contract with the National Security Agency (NSA) and charged her with espionage. Espionage occurs when someone who has been entrusted to safeguard state secrets fails to do so. In this case, the government alleges that the person to whom state secrets had been entrusted is 25-year-old Reality Leigh Winner, who had a top-secret national security clearance.

June 7, 2017

Domestic spying makes mockery of the Constitution

After the Watergate era had ended and Jimmy Carter was in the White House and the Senate's Church Committee had attempted to grasp the full extent of lawless government surveillance in America during the LBJ and Nixon years, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA declared that it provided the sole source for federal surveillance in America for intelligence purposes.

May 31, 2017

Donald Trump may fall to obstruction of justice

The bad news for President Trump keeps coming his way, notwithstanding a generally bravura performance on the foreign stage this past week in Riyadh, Jerusalem and Vatican City. Yet while he is overseas, his colleagues here in the United States have been advising him to hire criminal defense counsel, and he has apparently begun that process. Can the president be charged with obstructing justice when he asks that federal investigations of his friends be shut down?

May 24, 2017

Rogue intelligence agents trigger crisis for Trump

In a period of seven days this month, President Trump fired James Comey as director of the FBI and was accused of sharing top-secret intelligence data with the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador to the United States, the latter a known Russian spy.

May 17, 2017

Repeal and replace Obamacare progress slowed

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives crafted a partisan compromise bill that endorsed and reinforced the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. This was done notwithstanding claims to the contrary by President Trump and the House Republican leadership, who want us to believe that this bill, if it becomes law, will effectively repeal and replace Obamacare.

May 10, 2017

Domestic spying revelation shows NSA lied

Late last week, President Trump told CBS News that domestic surveillance of American citizens should be the "No. 1" topic of inquiry until we can find out "what the hell is going on" with it. Also late last week, the National Security Agency (NSA) -- the federal government's 60,000-person-strong domestic spying agency -- announced that it would voluntarily hold back on its more aggressive uses of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

May 3, 2017