Patrick Leahy

I think it is important that we have a fully functioning board, and I welcome the President's nominees to this critical board.

We all want the same thing, to protect our privacy.

Government works only if you trust it, and if people feel they cannot be trusted with information, then we do have problems.

I hope we can move quickly.

I want our country to be protected, but I want our privacy to be protected, and I do not think those two concepts are contradictory.

I worry because sometimes with good intentions you have people who do not seem to use much sense.

It is hard to understand why it took the President nearly three and a half years of a four-year term to send up the nominees.

But we also have to have meaningful checks and balances. We are going to safeguard our fundamental values as we try to secure the Nation.

This is a project that I have supported for 10 years and am eager to see it built in the near future.

I have made GMNF land acquisition a priority during my entire time in the U.S. Senate

I think the prosecutor is in many ways the most important person in the whole criminal justice system.

I think it is wrong to hold those Department lawyers to a lower standard than workaday lawyers outside of the Department.

I never knew him to break his word. I never knew him to tell me something that was not accurate and true.

It was Attorney General Holder who decided, based upon his own review of the matter, to seek to dismiss the indictment.

I have great concerns about this case, as you can probably gather.

It is a constitutional duty. It is also common sense.

A criminal defendant's constitutional right to a fair trial, regardless of who he is, is fundamental to our criminal justice system.

Prosecutorial misconduct cannot be tolerated. I would not tolerate it when I was a prosecutor.

I share the President's heartfelt feelings and sense that there needs to be a thorough investigation that gets to the truth.

I have said many times and in a lot of different contexts that our criminal justice system is the envy of the world.

The Justice Department has also taken recent steps to improve its training of prosecutors.

Defendants have to be afforded vigorous and competent counsel.

The integrity of the whole criminal justice system in my belief is diminished.

I find this fact even more disturbing than the findings of this report, and we have an obligation to hold the Justice Department accountable for what went wrong here.

Prosecutors bear a very special responsibility in the system.