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Jul 31, 2019
GRAHAM: Is there a body of law that’s called the basic criminal law?
KAVANAUGH: Yes, Senator.
GRAHAM: Are there differences between those two bodies of law?
KAVANAUGH: Yes, Senator.
GRAHAM: From an American citizen’s point of view, do your constitutional rights follow you? If you’re in Paris, does the Fourth Amendment protect you as an American from your own government?
KAVANAUGH: From your own government, yes.
GRAHAM: OK. So if you’re in Afghanistan, do your constitutional rights protect you against your own government?
KAVANAUGH: If you’re an American if Afghanistan, you have constitutional rights against the U.S. government.
GRAHAM: Is there a long-standing…
KAVANAUGH: That’s – that’s long-settled law.
GRAHAM: Isn’t there also a long-settled law that – it goes back to Eisentrager case, I can’t remember the name of it.
KAVANAUGH: Yes, Johnson vs. Eisentrager.
GRAHAM: Right – that American citizens who collaborate with the enemy have considered enemy combatants?
KAVANAUGH: They can be.
GRAHAM: Can be.
KAVANAUGH: They can be. They’re often – some – they’re sometimes criminally prosecuted, sometimes treated in the military sense.
GRAHAM: Well let’s talk about can be. I think the …
KAVANAUGH: Under a Supreme Court precedent …
GRAHAM: Right.
KAVANAUGH: Just want to make – yeah.
GRAHAM: There’s a Supreme Court decision that said that American citizens who collaborated with Nazi saboteurs were tried by the military. Is that correct?
KAVANAUGH: That is correct.
GRAHAM: I think a couple of them were executed.
KAVANAUGH: Yeah.
GRAHAM: So if anybody doubts there’s a long-standing history in this country that your constitutional rights follow you wherever you go, but you don’t have a constitutional right to turn on your own government and collaborate with the enemy of the nation.
You’ll be treated differently. What’s the name of the case, if you can recall, that reaffirmed the concept that you could hold one of our own as an enemy combatant if they were engaged in terrorist activities in Afghanistan? Are you familiar with that case?
KAVANAUGH: Yeah, Hamdi.
GRAHAM: OK. So the bottom line is on every American citizen, though you have constitutional rights but you do not have a constitutional right to collaborate with the enemy. There’s a body of law well developed long before 9/11 that understood the difference between basic criminal law and the law of armed conflict.