undermined "democratic accountability and respect for the law". Yet, Yoo has defended President Clinton, for his decision to use force abroad without congressional authorization. He wrote in The Wall Street Journal on March 15, 1999, that Clinton's decision to attack Serbia was constitutional. He then criticized Democrats in Congress for not suing Clinton as they had sued presidents Bush and Reagan to stop the use of force abroad. Trump administration In 2019, on Fox News, Yoo made the comment "Some might call that espionage" when discussing Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council. Vindman was set to testify in front of Congress the next day about Trump requesting that the Ukrainian president start an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden. Yoo subsequently said "I really regret the choice of words" and that he had been referring to Ukrainian officials rather than Vindman. In 2020, Yoo praised Trump as a "constitutional conservative". He wrote a 2020 book about Trump titled Defender in Chief: Donald Trump's Fight for Presidential Power. During an interview on CSPAN in August 2020, Yoo defended the use of enhanced executive privilege within the Trump administration. He stated in a concurrent interview on CBS with Ted Koppel that his support for Trump may be guided by his possible reading of PEADs (Presidential Emergency Action Documents) as further supplementing his support for enhanced executive privilege during wartime and other national emergencies. After Trump lost his bid for re-election in the 2020 United States presidential election, Yoo stated in an opinion piece that the Supreme Court could decide the outcome of the election. Weeks later, Yoo and J. Michael Luttig advised Vice President Mike Pence that he had no constitutional authority to interfere with the certification of Electoral College votes in Congress on January 6, 2021, as has been proposed to Pence by Trump attorney John Eastman. Federal tort suit On January 4, 2008, José Padilla, a U.S. citizen convicted of terrorism, and his mother sued John Yoo in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (Case Number 08-cv-00035-JSW), known as Padilla v. Yoo. The complaint sought $1 in damages based on the alleged torture of Padilla, attributed to the authorization by Yoo's torture memoranda. Judge Jeffrey White allowed the suit to proceed, rejecting all but one of Yoo's immunity claims. Padilla's lawyer says White's ruling could have a broad effect for