We must stand our ground to ensure that our laws reduce violence and take a hard look at laws that contribute to more violence than they prevent.

I'm not going to let people who work in the United States Department of Justice have their characters be assailed without any basis.

I think that what I'm doing is right. And election-year politics, which intensifies everything, is not going to drive me off that course.

I'm a hard headed lawyer.

One cannot understate the importance of eliminating Bin Laden. He was a symbolic head of the organisation and, as we now know, an operational head of the organisation.

Whether it is an attempt to bomb the New York City subway system, an attempt to bring down an airplane over Detroit, an attempt to set off a bomb in Times Square ... I think that gives us a sense of the breadth of the challenges that we face, and the kinds of things that our enemy is trying to do.

When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia - which was inappropriate, certainly that . . . to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all, for my people.