On whether Obama will reverse course on trying KSM in New York City:

The president is not going to admit error. He never does. He does in the abstract, but he will never admit he actually makes a human error on anything. So he won’t on this.
But he knows what’s going to happen, which is the Congress will rebel on this and it will pull the funding, [and] get him off the hook. And the issue [will] end up behind him even though he doesn’t do it himself.
But what is remarkable is he gives the State of the Union address a month after an attack that could have been utterly catastrophic, and after a year in which we have had three attacks — the Arkansas murder, the Fort Hood massacre, and then, of course, the attack on the airliner — and he has almost practically nothing in his State of the Union on terrorism.
In fact, because his two decisions — the KSM trial in Manhattan and the granting of Miranda rights to the guy who tried to blow up the airplane — are indefensible.

On President Obama vs. Justice Alito at the State of the Union:

The president attacked the Supreme Court at the State of the Union, which I believe is unprecedented. I thought [it] was a breach of etiquette.
The court actually is at that event not for pleasure and not even as a duty — it’s not required — but as a sign of respect for the other branches, for the presidency and the Congress. And to subject it to a direct attack in a setting in which it can’t respond, I thought, was a breach of etiquette which shouldn’t have happened.
On the substance, when the president said that it [the Court] was breaking a 100-year precedent, it was wrong. As even Linda Greenhouse, the liberal Supreme Court reporter of the New York Times pointed out, the ruling 100 years ago was the prohibition of a direct sending of money from corporations into the treasuries of candidates. That remains illegal. It was not touched in this decision. So there was no overturning of that precedent. What it dealt with is a question of corporations funding speech attacking a candidate.
And the court in its decision had said that it was not dealing with that issue [of foreign funding]. Which means: If it wasn’t, [then] the existing statute, which prohibits it [foreign funding], stands. So I think he was wrong on the substance as well as the precedent here.