Justice & Law Quote by Ted Olson

The tight, lawyerly hedging is doing more work here than the timeline itself. Olson stacks qualifiers - "scheduled", "I believe", "Someone told me" - like sandbags against a flood. In ordinary speech, you might just say when the plane left and what you heard. In a post-9/11 context, especially coming from a senior government figure, certainty is political ammunition and legal liability at once. So the sentence becomes a controlled burn: enough narrative to place him in the story, enough distance to avoid owning any detail that could later be disputed.

The context matters: this is the kind of recollection that lives in hearings, commissions, taped interviews, the bureaucratic archive of catastrophe. "I had been in my office at the Department of Justice" isn’t casual scene-setting; it’s an alibi and a credential. He’s locating himself inside institutional authority at the moment the national script changed, asserting proximity to power while also signaling he wasn’t a direct witness. That distinction is crucial in the ecosystem of 9/11 memory, where secondhand knowledge quickly hardened into public fact.

Subtextually, the line captures how trauma gets processed through procedure. Even in describing an event that detonated normal life, Olson speaks in the grammar of schedules, offices, and reports. The emotional content is displaced into timing. It’s not coldness so much as a survival reflex of governance: when the world stops making sense, the state reaches for timestamps and provenance.