-Contra Costa Times, July 21, 2010 by Steven Harmon
http://www.contracostatimes.com/ci_15570014?nclick_check=1

“Presidential power is really designed to expand during periods of crisis brought on by foreign threats and national security concerns,” Yoo said.

-San Francisco Chronicle, Politics Blog, July 21, 2010 by Justin Ho
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/nov05election/detail?entry_id=68428

[Yoo] said it will take 20 to 25 years to get a sense of where Bush will rank among the presidents. “But I also think people will not think of him as the worst president that you hear about all the time now. They have access to the archives, and they’ll see the kinds of context that there was around the decisions he had to make.”

-The Sacramento Bee, July 22, 2010 by Gina Kim
http://www.sacbee.com/2010/07/22/2906839/bush-administration-torture-memo.html#ixzz0uR8oqGEr

“It’s a wartime policy question,” Yoo said. “American presidents, when they know the threats the country is under, it’s no surprise they made the choices they did.”

The Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2010 by John Yoo
http://bit.ly/aM01HV (requires registration; go to G:\Law School in the News\News Clips for article)

Mr. Obama may have had little choice but to fire the general to restore civilian control over the military. And for this no-win situation, he has only his partisan allies in Congress to blame. It directly and predictably arose not from the war in Afghanistan, but from congressional efforts to undermine the Iraq war and the war on terrorism during the Bush years.

The Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2010 by John Yoo
bit.ly/afF6kO (requires registration; go to G:\Law School in the News\News Clips for article)

It may well be the Supreme Court that rides to Mr. Obama’s rescue. Even as it rejects the administration’s symbolic terrorism legislation, the court’s new flexibility may lead to its own Miranda modifications to ease the burdens on our military, intelligence and police. That would give the administration more flexibility to fight terrorism within the criminal-justice paradigm, though at the expense of weakening the civil liberties of all Americans.

-The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 16, 2010 by John Yoo
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/93870464.html#axzz0oJ35OAdW

There is a lot to like about Kagan: She is qualified, smart, engaging, and can lead a large, fractious place like a law school. But her gay-rights stance shows her adopting the lazy conventional liberalism of the faculty lounge over the common sense of real people (allegedly prized by this administration) and innovative or inspired thinking—hence the thinness of her published scholarship.

-The New York Times, May 25, 2010 by John Yoo
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/opinion/26yoo.html?scp=3&sq=Berkeley&st=nyt

From the time of George Washington, presidents have understood Article II to grant them the authority to hire and fire all subordinate officers of the United States, and hence command their activities, even though the Constitution mentions only the power to appoint, not to remove. If Elena Kagan will not even permit presidents this small constitutional right, who can doubt that she will reject executive powers of greater consequence?

The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2, 2010 by John Yoo
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/92606454.html

Republicans can use the confirmation process to draw even sharper contrasts on the issues that have sparked popular opposition to Obama. They will have to accept a nominee who supports abortion and racial preferences; they will get no one else from this administration. But they can draw the line at judges who support the massive expansion of the welfare state at home while restricting the government’s power to safeguard the nation from its foreign enemies.

The Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2010 by John Yoo
http://bit.ly/9acSTu (requires registration; go to G:\Law School in the News\News Clips for article)

To satisfy his base, President Obama will have to nominate a justice who is pro-choice, favors racial preferences and likes broad government regulation of the economy. But he also has the flexibility to choose a justice who believes in a return to a restrained judicial role in war and national security. Senate Republicans should support the president’s nominee if he does.

Los Angeles Times, March 29, 2010 by Carol J. Williams
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-john-yoo29-2010mar29,0,2621577,full.story

“I don’t really care whether they agree with me or not. I don’t care whether they follow me or not. Our mission is to make them better thinkers,” he says. “I would be just as pleased if one of my students became a Democratic [appointed] Supreme Court justice.”

Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2010 by James Oliphant
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-dc-judge24-2010mar24,0,300298,print.story

“I think he’s very well qualified,” said Yoo, who also teaches law at UC Berkeley. “He’s someone who would be chosen by a Democratic president, not a Republican one, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be a good judge on the bench.”

Los Angeles Times, March 9, 2010 by Carol J. Williams
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-goodwin-liu9-2010mar09,0,1301596.story

“Given the electrically charged climate in Washington, any nominee can become a lightning rod,” said Christopher Edley Jr., dean of Berkeley’s law school. “On the merits, he should be noncontroversial. But the reality will be a roll of the dice.”

Yoo said of Liu’s nomination to the 9th Circuit that “he’s not someone a Republican president would pick, but for a Democratic nominee, he’s a very good choice.”

-San Francisco Chronicle, March 5, 2010 by Debra J. Sanders
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/05/EDQ91CAT1C.DTL&type=printable

As former Bush attorney and current UC Berkeley law Professor John Yoo noted, “The president can and should put into place political appointees who agree with him. The Obama administration has placed detainee lawyers in important positions in the government because, clearly, the president agrees with the ACLU perspective on the war on terrorism.”

-The New York Times, March 9, 2010 by John Schwartz
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/us/politics/10lawyers.html

“What’s the big whoop?” he asked. “The Constitution makes the president the chief law enforcement officer. We had an election. President Obama has softer policies on terror than his predecessor.” He said, “He can and should put people into office who share his views.” Once the American people know who the policy makers are, he said, “they can decide whether they agree with him or not.”

The Washington Post Live Q&As, March 3, 2010 by John Yoo
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2010/03/03/DI2010030301148.html

I think men such as Washington, Lincoln or FDR broadly exercised their executive power because they genuinely saw terrible threats to American national security. They often did so knowing that their actions would be controversial and that they would provoke severe political reactions against them. They went forward anyway, giving presidential power, I argue in my book, a somewhat tragic quality.

The Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2010 by John Yoo
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704188104575083473537079844.html?KEYWORDS=Berkeley#printMode

Ending the Justice Department’s ethics witch hunt not only brought an unjust persecution to an end, but it protects the president’s constitutional ability to fight the enemies that threaten our nation today.

San Francisco Chronicle, February 23, 2010 by Debra J. Saunders
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/23/EDVU1C5CBO.DTL&type=printable

“They never actually followed the standards they’re charged with keeping,” Yoo told me—which is odd, because holding lawyers to professional standards is “all this office does.”

UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Christopher Edley Jr., who … has resisted the calls for ideological cleansing of the law-school faculty in favor of academic freedom.…said in a statement last week, “I hope these new developments will end the arguments about faculty sanctions, but we should and will continue to argue about what is right or wrong, legal or illegal in combating terrorism. That’s why we are here.”

-U.S. News & World Report, February 18, 2010 by Alex Kingsbury
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2010/02/18/john-yoo-defends-torture-memo-blasts-bush-administration.html

The American people would have thought differently about our opinions if they had known about the al Qaeda plots that were disrupted and the people who were captured, information that could only have been gathered through interrogation.

-The New York Times, February 19, 2010 by Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/us/politics/20justice.html

Mr. Yoo denied that the White House or the Central Intelligence Agency, which had requested the legal opinion, had exerted any pressure on him in his legal findings. “I don’t think of them as being particularly aggressive,” Mr. Yoo said, adding, “I had never felt that anybody was pushing us in one direction or another.”

-NPR, February 23, 2010 Host Neal Conan
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124007547

We had to do that job in an area where the law was written in very vague terms. The statute contained no examples of what was prohibited, interrogation methods that were close to the line. And there were very few judicial precedents, almost none at the time.

The New York Times, February 13, 2010 by Daniel Weintraub
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/us/14sfpolitics.html?scp=1&sq=Berkeley&st=cse

Mr. Yoo attributes the demand to the unusual nature of the course, which allows students to exercise their legal creativity. “There is no right answer,” he said.

-Real Clear Politics, February 7, 2010 Host Fareed Zakaria
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/02/07/interview_with_john_yoo_on_the_treatment_of_detainees_100213.html

I think, actually, a lot of the confusion in the foreign policy community, in the United States and other countries, is that for the first time we’ve confronted this kind of enemy, and we’re actually trying to develop a regime of legal rules that actually apply to them.

-The New York Times, February 10, 2010 by Adam Liptak
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/us/11law.html

Allowing any sort of contributions to terrorist organizations “simply because the donor intends that they be used for ‘peaceful’ purposes directly conflicts with Congress’s determination that no quarantine can effectively isolate ‘good’ activities from the evil of terrorism.”

-The Oakland Tribune, February 11, 2010 by Elizabeth Pfeffer
http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/localnews/ci_14385653

Yoo’s response to accusations that he provided the Bush administration with justifications for using torture has been that he only set the limits of what would be crossing the line. That line, according to Yoo, can be interpreted differently by the president depending on national security.

-San Mateo Daily Journal, February 12, 2010 by Bill Silverfarb
http://www.smdailyjournal.com/article_preview.php?id=124970

“I have no problem debating people who disagree with me. That’s how you determine what is right, ultimately,” Yoo told the Daily Journal.

-San Francisco Chronicle, January 16, 2010 by Carolyn Lochhead
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/16/MNA51BIQN7.DTL&type=printable

“The law doesn’t compel anyone to make any policy decision,” Yoo said. “The war in Iraq was legal. That doesn’t compel the choice to go to war.”

-NPR, All Things Considered, January 19, 2010 Host Madeleine Brand
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122734173

“You look at who most scholars think are our greatest presidents, men like Washington, Lincoln and FDR. These are presidents who were no shrinking violets. They embraced their power. They used their powers vigorously to attack the challenges of their day often, or sometimes, in direct conflict with the Congress and the Supreme Court. ”

-KGO AM 810, January 20, 2010 Host Gil Gross
http://www.kgoam810.com/Article.asp?id=1667684&nId=15&spid=25697

“We were less than a year after 9/11 and the government had captured … people who really planned and executed the 9/11 attacks themselves and were responsible for planning other future Al Qaeda attacks. And the government, the CIA, came to the justice department and the White House and said, ‘What can we do that’s legal?’”

-The New York Times, January 21, 2010 by Walter Isaacson
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/books/review/Isaacson-t.html

As the United States entered a semipermanent state of national emergency, marked by multiple wars and boosts in defense spending, power naturally flowed to the presidency, Yoo writes. The cold war brought forth one of the framers’ great fears, a large standing army in peacetime.

-The Washington Post, January 10, 2010 by Jack Rakove
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010801498.html

The great lesson of this past decade of misrule has been that our system works best when all three institutions are fully engaged. However much we celebrate the heroic presidents, Americans, as a people, have a stake in seeing the whole government achieve its potential. Yet what Yoo forces us to confront is the reality of all the striking advantages the executive enjoys. It is, in its way, an enticing portrait of presidential power—and a disturbing one.

-The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 11, 2010 Host Jon Stewart
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-january-11-2010/john-yoo-pt–1

“In the end, it is still good for us to have the President able to make those good decisions, even at the cost of sometimes having Presidents who make the bad ones. It’s worth it to our system to be able to have a Lincoln or an FDR, even if the price is to have someone like a Nixon…. I think that’s part of the price we have to have in our system in order to be able to respond quickly to terrible challenges to the country.”

-Forbes, January 15, 2010 by Peter Robinson
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/14/john-yoo-national-security-afghanistan-opinions-columnists-peter-robinson.html

As Yoo argues in the masterful new book he has just published, Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush, the Founders intended the authority of the chief executive to remain flexible. “The president’s powers are meant to fluctuate,” Yoo explained, “expanding in emergencies then retracting in peacetime.”

-The Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2010 by Arthur Herman
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703436504574641210437351786.html#printMode

Crisis and Command is a carefully argued historical survey of the evolution of presidential power, particularly the power to make war. The book reveals how the Bush war on terror, far from overstepping constitutional bounds, was rooted in a tradition that reaches back to George Washington himself.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 10, 2010 by John Yoo
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/81082822.html

Has the Obama administration retarded the integration of information by our intelligence agencies out of a touchiness for civil liberties? Some of the administration’s political appointees had attacked the Bush administration’s terrorist policies on exactly such grounds.

The New York Times, December 29, 2009 by Deborah Solomon
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03fob-q4-t.html?scp=9&sq=Berkeley&st=nyt

“The idea is that the president’s power grows and changes based on circumstances, and that’s what the framers of the Constitution wanted. They wanted it to exist so the president could react to crises immediately.”