Confirm russian interference in the election, hinders our ability to prevent in the future. So before we begin the discussion, its worth saying a word on the concept of the rule of law, the concept of rule of law goes back to the greeks and its meaning has evolved over time. But eventually what its come to mean is basically a fundamental way in which society prevents the situation in which there is an oligarchy or dictatorship. You have to understand that it has several requirements. Both officials and their agents are accountable under the rule of law. Second is that laws are protective of the fundamental right of citizens, including among others the rights to the freedom of speech and the freedom of press. A third is that laws are made in an open and public manner and that they are fair minded. And the fourth is that the enforcement of law as done by independent tribunals, by adjudicators who are independent of the forces that be. With that, i will begin by asking our commentators to talk a little bit, before we turn to the more meaningful issues for their perspective drawn from their backgrounds. Neil is one of the nations leading Supreme Court advocates, hes argued 34 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States and one of those involved guantanamo detainees, so neil, if you could talk a little bit about that experience and how that illuminates the rule of law. Thank you, and thank you, sally for being here. So that was my very first case, and you know i come into the clinton administration, and i was National Security advisor to the Justice Department there and i just loved it and i thought my dream job to be one day to be National Security advisor to the president. And i taught constitutional law and my students would always tease me and say you think whatever the president does is constitutional, youre such a hawk on these issues, then on november 13, 2001, i was watching cnn a couple of months after the nation had been horribly attacked and i saw that news ticker at the bottom. And it says president issues military tribunal for prisoners at guantanamo bay. We tried to do that after the Embassy Bombings and it was declared unconstitutional. And i looked at this violation, and it had the same platte violations, no accountability, no president ial tribunal. The president was hand picking everyone for these tribunals, in essence creating a black hole in guantanamo. I had never litigated a Supreme Court case before. We created a test case and i respected bin ladens driver. And i had argued the case in the District Court and for 10 months i was trying to meet him, bin ladens driver, or try to go to gitmo. And at first the department of justice said, oh, you have no security clearances, i said look me up, i have more clearances than you ever heard of. They said, yeah, it looks like you do. So you have no need to know. You have the requisite level of determination. You can make these arguments and you dont have to actually meet your client, the theoretical constitutional requirements. I thought, no, wait a minute, hes the client, the driver, i should get to meet him. So i asked for that in writing, so i got to go to gitmo right away because they knew i would get a court order. If i go to gitmo, the pentagon was really savvy about it. They made it a 30hour trip for me. It takes three hours when the prosecutors do it. But eventually i get there, after 30 hours and i meet my client for the first time, mr. Hamdan. He looks at me, he kicks the military attorneys out of the room. He says everyone has to leave the room except my attorney and my translator. He had not seen a human face for 10 months. Food was passed through a slot. You do this to someone for three days and it causes permanent psychosis. I looked at him and he smiled and he said why are you doing . Why are you representing me . Your last client was al gore, and that didnt turn out so well. Why are you doing this . And i paused for like 40 seconds when he asked me that, and i remember in my head thinking about this, i thought this is why you cant be a law professor neil, because you cant answer a simple question. Justice ginsburg when you ask her a question, shell often pause up to a minute before answering it. And i thought about telling him that, and i thought, he doesnt know who the hell Justice Ginsburg ask. This is the answer to your question, jeff, sorry for the long leadup. I told him that my parents came here from india, they didnt come here for the quality of its sports team, they came here for a simple idea that they could land on these shores and their kids will be treated fairly. I told this driver that was always my experience, having the best schools, opportunities in the government, you know, to be in the Deputy Attorney generals office. All sorts of things, and that when the president issued this order, for the first time in American History, a president had said if you are one of the 5 billion foreigners, or the 12 million green card holders and you commit a crime, you get sense to gitmo. But if youre an american, you get the cadillac of justice, the american trial. I said thats why im doing this. I didnt tell him this, but ill say it to you, words of equal protection, the First Amendment is to all persons, not to all citizens. Because the writer of the the line in dregs scott versus sanford said that only citizens have constitutional rights. So to me, thats what the hallmark of the rule of law is, those things this jeff mentioned, but i would also add quality to that. And that is what i think we need to fight for in the days to come. [ applause ] if i can add just one thing to that, i actually wrote an ami in the japanese Supreme Court from almost 60 years earlier in which the Supreme Court upheld the internment of japanese americans. And brigham actually wanted to litigate the case. I think you have heard of sally yates. Sally has served for 13 years in the department of justice. First as United States attorney for the Northern District of georgia, in that capacity, she litigated a wide range of cases including issues involving cases of political corruption and terrorism. In 2013, president obama appointed sally to be Deputy Attorney general of the United States and during her confirmation hearings, then senator Jeff Sessions asked sally offensive she would refuse to enforce a president s unlawful order, to which she replied that she would have an obligation in all circumstances to follow the law and the constitution. A commitment that she later had an opportunity to fulfill. So, sally on this initial point, perhaps you can talk a bit about the historic independence of the department of justice. Jeff went through and outlined some of the principles for the rule of law. The core for the department of justice is the concept of the actual application of the laws, that the law is to be applied impartially. Thats why lady justice has the blindfold on, that it applies to the rich and the poor, the weak and the strong the same. And the department of justice should not be making decisions on outside influence, particularly not with political influence. The laws should not be use punish your political enemies or to protect your political friends. This is not law, this is not provided in the constitution per se, its not a statute, its really part of the fabric of the law thats developed over the years. Just shortly after i became u. S. Attorney, all of the u. S. Attorneys went to the white house for what was termed as the new president in the white house. The president comes in and one of his aides had given him talking points to read to us which he promptly tossed aside. He looked at us and he said, i appointed you, but you dont represent me, you represent the people of the United States. But the fact of the matter is, that wasnt a particularly of drawing a line between doj and the white house. And doj is really different than any of the other federal agencies. The department of justice is obviously part of an administration, but there obviously has to be an independence and a separation from that. And thats been a time honored concept through democratic and republican imageries at least going back to the post nixon world. I think the doj is the only agency that has a written memo that lays out what the rules are for compacts between the white house and the department of justice on specific cases. Not necessarily on policy, because the department of justice will be involved in policy decisions in specific cases, and the rules, according to eric holders memo of 2009, that there are really only two people at the department of justice that the person can contact and that is the attorney general or the Deputy Attorney general. And theres only three people youre supposed to be contacting at the white house, and that is the president , but this has been a tradition of the Department Going back administrations. I think its absolutely essential that that tradition be protected. Not just to be sure that decisions are not politically impacted. But theres merely the appearance of it. Because with the appearance of it i think that can destroy the publics confidence in the department of justice and if the public loses confidence in its own department of justice, thats a bad thing. I want to turn our attention to that. Neil by the way represents the state of hawaii in that case in the Supreme Court. And sally, of course, was involved in the department of justice there. So sally, i would like to begin with you. How did you get involved in this. What were you views, why did you hold the views you did . Why did you do what you did and were you surprised by what happened . Yes to all of it. Ill try to make this brief because i dont want to hog the whole thing here. I got involved in this, it was friday evening, late afternoon, i was in the car on the way to the airport on friday january 27. I had actually just finished a meeting at the white house thats now known as the mike flynn situation, and i was in the car going back to a dinner honoring my husband. As acting attorney general, effort able to youre not going to believe this. But i was just on the New York Times website and it looks like the president instituted some sort of travel ban. Im on my way to the plane, ive got my ipad. Im seriously trying to figure out what it was. Im literally going online to try to find a copy of the executive order so we could get some sense of what this was. And so over the course of that weekend, it was a whole lot of trying to figure out what the heck is this thing and to whom does it apply. Because at the time i made my decision, it was the First Executive order, not the second one that neil is litigating now. At that time we were getting conflicting signals, but when the music stopped, we were getting mixed signals, but at the time we were told that people that had green cards, they would not be allowed to come back into the country, it would apply to people with visas. So we spent the weekend trying to figure out what is this and what are they trying to accomplish here. And by the next morning, we had to go to court and file actions on behalf of states. You can defend on procedural grounds, meaning if a case is muted out, you can continue on procedural grounds. We have to actually figure out if this is constitutional. Come monday morning, i learned that the next day, we are going to have to take a position on whether its constitutional. So we gathered all the folks that were involved in this in the Justice Department in my conference room. And that included the Trump Administration appointees, as well as the doj career people. Civil people and otherwise that were involved in this litigation and i had gone through, i mean this is all happening so fast, im willing to go along with the briefs and challenges to see what the challenges are to the travel ban. So we went around the table asking them, tell me why this is lawful, how are we going to defend this . And without revealing sort of our internal discussions here, at the end of that, i was not comfortable that it was in fact lawful or constitutional and kept the senior trump appointee back to tell him that i was very uneasy with where we were and i wasnt sure what i was going to go. So i went back to the office and talked to some people. And they said lawyers in the department of justice in the court to say that this ban had nothing to do with religion. It was all based on National Security, had nothing to do with religion. I do not believe that to be a defense thats grounded in truth. I couldnt say the department of justice lawyers in to defend something based on a defense that i did not believe was grounded in truth. Which then left the dilemma of, okay, so do you just resign at this point then or do you direct the department not to defend the travel ban. And this is all happening in a very compressed time. This is monday afternoon now. Some people think i should have just resigned. But sort of the bottom line on that was is that i didnt feel like i would be doing my job if i just essentially said, im out of here. You guys figure this out, its up to you to go in there and to make a defense that at least we were not comfortable its grounded in truth, but at least i wouldnt be part of it. That would have protected my personal integrity. But i didnt believe it would protect the integrity of the department of justice and it wouldnt have been doing my job, so i issued a directive to the department of justice, unless and until i was convinced it was lawful that the department of justice would not defend the travel ban. That was late in the afternoon, and not surprisingly, i got a memo, or actually a letter got 9 00 that night firing me. So that was that. Are you aware of other situations where an attorney general or acting attorney general refused to obey the orders of the president . Im not, but this was a very unusual situation, in that i have learned in the course of this, that our office of Legal Counsel had been instructed not to tell me about the work on the travel ban until after it was over, until after the president had executed it. So normally, what you would have would be a process in this kind of situation, where its a National Security reason to do something, you would confer with the National Security agencies before doing it. And you would also confer with the National Security experts at the department of justice that are going to have to defend it and that would apply to our civil securities division. So im not aware of another situation like where the attorney general has done that, but im also not aware of a factual situation as before. Of course in the nixon administration, it was referred attorney general or Deputy Attorney general. Both refused to comply to president nixons order that they hire a special prosecutor archibald cox. And they of course took the choice of resigning and rather than simply disobeying and waiting to be fired, which of course they would have been. Neil as i mentioned is representing the state of hawaii in this case, in the Supreme Court. Why dont you talk about your experience in the case, and whats happening and whats going to happen and all that cool stuff. Okay, sure, i just want to situate sallys remarks within the role of the Justice Department. When youre the solicitor general, you have two kinds of traditions that are not about zealously advocating for winning cases but just to do justice. Those two cases are being willing to every solicitor general, i did this and my democratic and republican predecessors did. They go to the Supreme Court and say, that case that we won, we should have lost, so hear this case and rule against the Justice Department. I dont think theres a better way of underscoring what sallys remarks are, about being the publics lawyer, not the administrations lawyer. So i think sally, when she did what she did on monday, she was harkining back to the best traditions of what the department is about. And resignation doesnt deserve that set of rejections. It didnt explain the reasons, so im glad you wrote the letter that you did. After that letter was written, there is folks that have these lawsuits after they won in the District Court, President Trump called them a socalled judge, the judge who ruled against it and so on, and if it went to the court of appeals and was unanimously struck down there as well. The president then pulled back, issued a new executive order a month later, and that new executive order is very much like the new executive order. Instead of 7, it has a more extensive description of when someone can apply for a waiver and it says in there that green card holders are not covered. It tried to provide some facts, because in the court of appeals in the First Executive order, the administration was constantly being asked by the judges, what National Security justification do you have, and it was as you said, as sally said, nothing in the First Executive order. They spent a month and they came up with two things, one that two citizens of the United States had come to the United States and a engaged in terrorism. They forgot that they exempted iraq. And second that one of those was so plus the idea that somali child had come at the a