Shop all books by Judge Napolitano
About four years ago, I was browsing through one of Manhattan’s last remaining independent bookstores, when my cellphone rang. I didn’t recognize the incoming telephone number, with its 202 area code, but I assumed it was a Fox News colleague from our Washington bureau.
When I answered the phone, a somewhat familiar but somber voice said: “Judge Napolitano, your reward for what you did today will not come from your colleagues or viewers or even on earth but in heaven.”
What had I done to deserve this?
Earlier that day, Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California who was then the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had defied her own committee members, congressional leadership from both houses of Congress and from both political parties, officials of the CIA, and even the Obama White House when she released on the floor of the Senate a 6,000-plus-page report detailing the use of torture by CIA officials in the George W. Bush administration — all of it unlawful.
Suicide Pact: The Radi…
Best Price: $1.06
Buy New $1.85
(as of 08:55 EDT – Details)
She actually made the report public while physically standing on the floor of the Senate, where her speech is absolutely protected from government retaliation by the Speech and Debate Clause of the Constitution.
That clause recognizes and protects for members of Congress their complete freedom of speech while on the floor of the House or Senate, while doing congressional work and while traveling to Capitol Hill. Thus, even though she revealed top-secret materials in the report — which, if you or I had revealed them or if she had revealed them in Los Angeles rather than in Washington, would have constituted the…