Jack Goldsmith

The revelation that Donald Trump allegedly urged former FBI Director James Comey to drop a probe into former adviser Michael Flynn fueled speculation the president may have obstructed justice, but any penalty would likely come from Congress and not the criminal justice system, lawyers said Tuesday..."It's the longstanding position of the executive branch that the president cannot be indicted while in office," said Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, a top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush. "The remedy for a criminal violation would be impeachment."

An interview with Jack Goldsmith. The executive has a lot of legal power vested by the Constitution and Congress but what happens when the executive is careless with information, overreaches that authority or no longer has the full trust of the rest of the government?

...Legal and national security experts, including Harvard Professor Jack Goldsmith, say violating this oath of office alone is grounds for impeachment...Impeachment is a constitutional process by which Congress removes a president from office for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanours". "It's very hard to argue that carelessly giving away highly sensitive material to an adversary foreign power constitutes a faithful execution of the office of President," they wrote on the blog Lawfare. "Legally speaking, the matter could be very grave for Trump even though there is no criminal exposure." They suggested Mr Trump could feasibly face "a hybrid impeachment article alleging a violation of the oath in service of a hostile foreign power".

About a week ago, FBI Director James Comey went before the Senate Intelligence Committee to testify on two FBI investigations: one of Hillary Clinton and her emails, and another of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and any connections the Trump campaign may have had to the Russians. The former investigation was conducted and closed amid much public scrutiny and controversy. The second, no less controversial investigation is ongoing, but Comey refused to go into it in detail. And this Tuesday, Comey was fired, having never wrapped up the second investigation. So what happens to that still unfinished Russia investigation?...“The investigation will go forward in the short run,” said Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School and an assistant attorney general under George W. Bush. “The question is how vigorous it will be.”

A member of the Navy SEALs was killed and two other American service members were wounded in a raid in Somalia on Friday, the first American combat fatality there since the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” battle...As a result, the military is reviewing all its potential targets, examining updated intelligence reports on flows of displaced civilians, and confirming with aid organizations where they are operating in Somalia, as first reported by The Intercept last week...“D.O.D. has more cover to act aggressively when the president has a reputation for restraint and less cover when the president has a reputation for aggressiveness, because everything D.O.D. does will be judged through that lens,” said Jack Goldsmith, referring to the Department of Defense. Mr. Goldsmith is a Harvard law professor who dealt with counterterrorism legal policy as a senior Bush administration official.

President Trump ordered the military on Thursday to carry out a missile attack on Syrian forces for using chemical weapons against civilians. The unilateral attack lacked authorization from Congress or from the United Nations Security Council, raising the question of whether he had legal authority to commit the act of war...On Thursday, Mr. Trump said, “It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.” He also invoked the Syrian refugee crisis and continuing regional instability. Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who led the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department in the Bush administration, wrote that this criteria for what is sufficient to constitute a national interest was even thinner than previous precedents and would seemingly justify almost any unilateral use of force.

...The 2011 bombing of Libya, initially meant to prevent a feared imminent massacre by Qaddafi’s forces in Benghazi, was authorized by a Security Council resolution and conducted under the auspices of NATO, but as Jack Goldsmith pointed out on Lawfare last night, Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel also argued at the time that the president has the right to act unilaterally in defense of the “national interest,” which in the Libya case was “preserving regional stability and supporting the UNSC’s credibility and effectiveness”—language not all that unlike what Trump used last night.

Taking a step back from the particulars of the Susan Rice story and the investigation into Russian collusion, Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes explain the broader implications of an eroding public trust in the nonpartisanship of American intelligence agencies. After decades of misbehavior, including spying on American citizens for political ends, the intelligence agencies had lost credibility with the American public. In the 1970s, Mr. Wittes and Mr. Goldsmith write, the intelligence community entered a “grand bargain” with Congress that limited its power but restored its integrity. That “grand bargain” is now in peril.

A little over a year ago, Benjamin Wittes, the editor in chief of the blog Lawfare, made the case that Donald Trump, as a Republican presidential candidate, represented nothing less than a national-security threat...The warning was an early sign of the opposition to Trump that has since hardened among the national-security professionals and observers for whom Lawfare serves as a kind of bulletin board...Lawfare observes rules that most publications don’t, including a pledge never to publish classified information. Contributors generally tend to be hawkish and “more sympathetic to the executive, and more accepting of the seriousness of the counterterrorism threat and the need for tools like targeting and surveillance, than a lot of writers in the national-security space,” [Jack] Goldsmith says.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. Many critics of President Trump, including a sizable number of Democrats in the Republican-controlled Congress, are wary about the incipient congressional investigations of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and the possibly related Russian entanglements with the Trump administration and campaign. They suspect that an independent investigation from outside the government is the only hope for checking a president who seems oblivious to press criticism, whose party controls Congress and who has the executive branch under his thumb. These worries are understandable but misplaced.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s possibly criminal failure to register last year as a foreign agent is but the latest of many White House ethics lapses in the first seven weeks of the Trump presidency. Responsibility for this problem—like so many others in the young Trump presidency—lies at the feet of White House Counsel Donald McGahn.

Less than a month into his presidency, Donald Trump has faced no shortage of controversies. Donald McGahn — the fiery lawyer who has represented the president since before his election — has been at the center of virtually every one....Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and co-founder of the Lawfare blog, said that part of McGahn’s job is “ensuring that the president avoids legal controversy or related political controversy.” “The White House counsel’s responsibilities go far beyond technical legal compliance,” said Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general heading the Office of Legal Counsel. “He is supposed to ensure compliance with ethics rules. And he is supposed to anticipate political problems related to legal issues that might adversely affect the president and take steps to protect the president. That McGahn clearly did not do.”

An article by Dahlia Lithwick and Jack Goldsmith. One of the central questions animating Jeff Sessions’ bid to be the attorney general of the United States was an abiding sense that—having worked closely with the Trump campaign and having given legal cover to some of Donald Trump’s most radical ideas—he could not be truly independent of the president. Before he was confirmed, Senate Democrats questioned Sessions repeatedly on whether he was capable of acting as an independent check on the executive branch, and Sessions repeated over and over again that he believed he could be. In some sense this debate obscured a deeper truth: The attorney general has a dual and complicated role with respect to the president, and it’s always been a fraught proposition to demand perfect independence. In 2007, Dahlia Lithwick and Jack Goldsmith, responding to a very different attorney general and very different questions about independence, attempted to explain why the relationship isn’t a simple one and how cures nevertheless exist. The original is below.

The Trump White House is nearing completion of an order that would direct the Pentagon to bring future Islamic State detainees to the Guantánamo Bay prison, despite warnings from national security officials and legal scholars that doing so risks undermining the effort to combat the group, according to administration officials and a draft executive order obtained by The New York Times...“It raises huge legal risks,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former senior Justice Department official in the Bush administration. “If a judge says the Sept. 11 authorization does not cover such a detention, it would not only make that detention unlawful, it would weaken the legal basis for the entire war against the Islamic State.”

...for more than two weeks, President Donald Trump and his top White House aides have been obsessed with highlighting a threat that does not exist: jihadist refugees and immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. It’s true that both worldwide terrorist attacks and terrorism-related cases against plotters in the United States have spiked since 2013, an increase largely attributed to the fallout from the Syrian civil war and the rise of the Islamic State...Jack Goldsmith, a former senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush Administration, who helped design the post-9/11 anti-terror legal architecture, recently suggested that Trump might actually want his travel ban to be overturned. That way, in the wake of an attack, he can use the judiciary as a bogeyman and justify any new efforts to push through more extreme measures. I asked Goldsmith and others what the menu of options might be for a President Trump empowered by the justifiable fears Americans would have in the aftermath of a serious attack. “If it is a large and grim attack, he might ask for more surveillance powers inside the U.S. (including fewer restrictions on data mingling and storage and queries), more immigration control power at the border, an exception to Posse Comitatus (which prohibits the military from law enforcement in the homeland), and perhaps more immigration-related detention powers,” Goldsmith wrote in an e-mail. “In the extreme scenario Trump could ask Congress to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which would cut off the kind of access to courts you are seeing right now for everyone (or for every class of persons for which the writ is suspended).”

Even before Donald Trump entered the White House, many were predicting federal courts would serve as an important check on his use of presidential power, particularly given his aggressive style and a GOP-led Congress that has so far been loath to confront him. But few expected the first constitutional clash would occur in Trump’s third week on the job...Jack Goldsmith, a national security lawyer in the Bush administration and professor at Harvard Law School, predicted Trump’s tweets “will certainly backfire” against him. “The tweets will make it very, very hard for courts in the short term to read immigration and constitutional law, as they normally would, with significant deference to the president’s broad delegated powers from Congress and to the president’s broad discretion in foreign relations,” Goldsmith wrote Monday on the Lawfare blog.

...The 45th president, Donald Trump, might pose the gravest threat to the constitutional order since the 37th. Of course, he might not...“Civil society had a huge and unprecedented impact during the Bush administration,” [Jack] Goldsmith told me. The networks that constrained Bush are still there, and Trump has put them on red alert. “Every single thing he does will be scrutinized with an uncharitable eye,” Goldsmith said. “That’s true of most presidents, but it’s true to an even greater degree with Trump.”

President Donald Trump's personal attack on the federal judge who blocked his controversial travel executive order could undermine public confidence in an institution capable checking his power, say legal experts...Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith said on his blog that Trump's order actually has a "surprisingly strong basis in law but was issued in haste, without proper inter agency coordination, without proper notice, without adequate consideration of its implications." But, Goldsmith added, Trump's aggressive tweets "will certainly backfire." "The tweets will make it very, very hard for courts in the short term to read immigration and constitutional law, as they normally would, with the significant deference to the President's broad delegated powers," he wrote. And yet, having a judge strike down the executive order might have been exactly what Trump was aiming for, Goldsmith wrote — "assuming that he is acting with knowledge and purpose." "The only reason I can think of is that Trump is setting the scene to blame judges after an attack that has any conceivable connection to immigration," Goldsmith wrote.

President Trump is barreling into a confrontation with the courts barely two weeks after taking office, foreshadowing years of legal battles as an administration determined to disrupt the existing order presses the boundaries of executive power....Charles Fried, solicitor general under Ronald Reagan, said the ruling by a Federal District Court in Washington State blocking Mr. Trump’s order resembled a ruling by a Texas district court stopping Mr. Obama from proceeding with his own immigration order. But rarely, if ever, has a president this early in his tenure, and with such personal invective, battled the courts. Mr. Trump, Mr. Fried said, is turning everything into “a soap opera” with overheated attacks on the judge. “There are no lines for him,” said Mr. Fried, who teaches at Harvard Law School and voted against Mr. Trump. “There is no notion of, this is inappropriate, this is indecent, this is unpresidential.”...Jack Goldsmith, who as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under Mr. Bush argued that some of the initial orders went too far and forced them to be rolled back, said on Sunday that there were similarities. “But Bush’s legal directives were not as sloppy as Trump’s,” he said. “And Trump’s serial attacks on judges and the judiciary take us into new territory. The sloppiness and aggressiveness of the directives, combined with the attacks on judges, put extra pressure on judges to rule against Trump.”

Donald Trump has had a fixation on Iraq’s oil—and America’s right to seize it—for at least six years...But the legal scholars I consulted challenged this interpretation. “The issue is complicated in its details, but basically what Trump has in mind—pillaging during occupation—is prohibited,” Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who served in the Bush Administration’s Justice Department, told me.