The big issue is this incremental whittling away of our constitutional rights, our most important constitutional rights, including freedom of speech. This is something that we really have to put our foot down on, and we have to fight it at every step of the way.

The big issue is this incremental whittling away of our constitutional rights, our most important constitutional rights, including freedom of speech. This is something that we really have to put our foot down on, and we have to fight it at every step of the way.

You can't just blurt the information out to the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador. What happens is, the information goes back to the CIA, to the originating office. The CIA will pull the relevant information out of the report, put it on a new blank sheet of paper and then type at the top, "Secret releasable to Russia." That way, nobody gets in trouble, no sources and methods are revealed, everybody's happy, and we can establish something of a liaison relationship to the Russians. That's not what the president did.

I had never really given any thought to working for the CIA, but graduation was upon me; I was getting married just a week or two after graduation; I had no job, no prospects for a job. And so I said sure, I'd be interested in working for the CIA.

I've never heard a White House staff say that the president was too stupid or too ill-informed to have broken the law. And that's really what it comes down to. The truth is, he leaked highly classified information that he shouldn't have leaked. It's one thing to say, "Hey, I'm the president. Nobody can punish me for that." It's another thing entirely to just deny that he did it. We know that he did it. And he really ought to own up to it.

It's not up to Google, it's not up to Apple to turn over our personal communications in order to save the country. It's up to the CIA and it's up to the FBI to recruit foreign - I mean to recruit human sources, rather, to penetrate these groups.

Even if torture works, it cannot be tolerated -- not in one case or a thousand or a million. If their efficacy becomes the measure of abhorrent acts, all sorts of unspeakable crimes somehow become acceptable. I may have found myself on the wrong side of government on torture. But I'm on the right side of history. There are things we should not do, even in the name of national security. One of them, I now firmly believe, is torture.