Jack Goldsmith

For decades after Watergate, the White House treated the Justice Department with the softest of gloves, fearful that any appearance of political interference would resurrect the specter of Attorney General John Mitchell helping President Richard M. Nixon carry out a criminal conspiracy for political ends...For the most part, modern presidents have stayed away from cases involving their friends or associates, at least publicly...One notable exception was President Barack Obama, who during the 2016 presidential campaign said that he did not believe that Hillary Clinton had harmed national security by using a private email server but was guilty only of carelessness — remarks that Republicans immediately criticized as interference with an open F.B.I. investigation...But while Mr. Obama was guilty of a single lapse, said Jack L. Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush, Mr. Trump has continually injected himself into federal investigations and prosecutions involving his political friends and enemies. “Even assuming that Bill Barr is acting with integrity, it is impossible for people to believe that because the president is making him look like his political lap dog,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “Trump makes it impossible to have confidence in the department’s judgment.”

For both better and worse, Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa was one of the most consequential union leaders of the 20th century. Unlike his very few peers (the Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther and the Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis could both claim comparable historic impact), he also has become the subject of three Hollywood pictures—1978’s F.I.S.T., with Sylvester Stallone ineptly playing a character modeled on Hoffa; 1992’s Hoffa, with Jack Nicholson in the title role; and now Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, with Al Pacino as the Teamster president. ... In his new book In Hoffa’s Shadow, Jack Goldsmith writes that the FBI now believes Hoffa’s killer was a Detroit-based young mobster who died just last year. But whatever Sheeran’s tenuous claims to veracity, his is a tale that Scorsese couldn’t easily resist.

Last October, Attorney General William Barr appeared at Notre Dame Law School to make a case for ideological warfare. Before an assembly of students and faculty, Barr claimed that the “organized destruction” of religion was under way in the United States. “Secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives,’ have marshalled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values,” he said. ... Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, warned that Barr’s and Trump’s efforts could permanently alter the balance of power among the branches of American government. “If those views take hold, we will have lost what was won in the Revolution—we will have a Chief Executive who is more powerful than the king,” Tribe said. “That will be a disaster for the survival of the Republic.” ... But his ideology has not changed much, according to friends and former colleagues. “I don’t know why anyone is surprised by his views,” Jack Goldsmith, a law professor who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the George W. Bush Administration, told me. “He has always had a broad view of executive power.”

Let’s start this piece with two provocative claims. The first, which is hotly contested by legal experts, is that President Donald Trump broke the law when he ordered an airstrike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a powerful Iranian paramilitary leader. The second claim is that it doesn’t matter...There’s a great deal of disagreement among legal experts regarding when a president may lawfully target another nation. Some believe that, with rare exceptions, Congress must vote to permit such a strike. Others take a more permissive approach, arguing the president should be able to act to prevent sudden attacks on US personnel... One consequence of judicial deference is that there is fairly little case law explaining when the executive branch can and cannot take military action. Instead, most of the legal opinions in this space were drafted by executive branch officials. According to Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the second Bush administration, “Practically all of the law in this area has been developed by executive branch lawyers justifying unilateral presidential uses of force.” These lawyers, Goldsmith warned, “view unilateral presidential power very broadly.”

President Donald Trump's confrontation with Iran is posing a gut check for Congress, brazenly testing whether the House and Senate will exert their own authority over U.S. military strategy or cede more war powers to the White House. As tensions rise at home and abroad, Speaker Nancy Pelosi will hold House votes this week to limit Trump’s ability to engage Iran militarily after the surprise U.S. airstrike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani...Yet Congress has shown time and again it is unable to exert its ability to authorize — or halt — the use of military force. With their inaction, lawmakers have begrudgingly allowed the commander in chief to all but disregard Congress...Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School, said both parties in Congress have for years gone along with an expansion of presidential war powers, especially with regard to the conflicts in the Middle East. "In short, our country has — through presidential aggrandizement accompanied by congressional authorization, delegation, and acquiescence — given one person, the president, a sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war," Goldsmith said in an essay in Lawfare, an online newsletter he co-founded. “That is our system: One person decides.”

“Our country has, quite self-consciously, given one person, the President, an enormous sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war. That is our system: one person decides,” Jack Goldmith, a Harvard Law professor and Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, writing on Twitter.

An article by Jack Goldsmith: Depersonalization is a dissociative disorder characterized by a sense of observing one’s self from outside one’s body. Those with the condition often report an experience akin to watching yourself in a movie. My 86-year-old stepfather, Chuckie O’Brien, does not suffer from depersonalization. But for more than half his life, 44 years, he has watched himself portrayed in news articles, books and motion pictures — most recently, in Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” — as someone he is not. The effect on his life has been devastating.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about what actually happened to former criminal and labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa following the release of “The Irishman.” Jack Goldsmith, Harvard Law professor, former senior U. S. Department of Justice official and author of “In Hoffa's Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth,” joins host Ryan Wrecker to tell us what he knows about his family ties to the case. Next, we transition back to impeachment coverage featuring opinions from the listeners.

An article by Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer:  Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report last week told a complex story about extraordinary events related to the investigation of officials in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Its publication predictably ignited a contest between Democrats and Republicans to extract from the 429-page opus what was most serviceable in the construction of competing political “narratives.” But there is something much more important in the Horowitz report than evidence for political vindication. The report shows that serious reforms are vitally needed in how the FBI and the Department of Justice, of which it is a component, open and conduct investigations—especially those related to politicians and political campaigns. The report prompted concerns from both sides of the aisle, suggesting that there’s an opportunity for serious reflection and reform—if Congress and the executive branch can seize it.

Robert De Niro says he welcomes disagreement about whether The Irishman is accurate, but wasn’t “conned” into believing the firsthand accounts of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, the mob enforcer he plays in the film. ... But his account has been disputed by some Hoffa insiders. Harvard Law School professor Jack L. Goldsmith, the stepson of Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien (played by Jesse Plemons in The Irishman) told Vanity Fair that “there’s absolutely no basis for Sheeran’s claim and a lot of reasons to think it’s preposterous.” His new book, In Hoffa’s Shadow, offers a different account of the Jimmy Hoffa story than you’ll get from I Heard You Paint Houses or The Irishman.

Famed Teamster Union President Jimmy Hoffa, who had known ties to organized crime, vanished in 1975 and was later presumed dead, but the details of how and when he died remain a mystery. While no one was ever ultimately charged, the FBI did have a few suspects — most notably Hoffa's closest confidant, Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien. Now, O'Brien’s stepson, Jack Goldsmith, argues the intelligence agency had it all wrong in his new book, "In Hoffa's Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth." Goldsmith is also a Harvard law professor, former top lawyer at the Office of Legal Counsel and a former assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush Administration. Jim Braude was joined by Jack Goldsmith.

In early October, President Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, sent a defiant letter to four leaders of the House of Representatives. No one in the Trump administration, Cipollone declared, would participate in the impeachment inquiry that Speaker Nancy Pelosi opened in September after Trump’s phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine came to light. “Because participating in this inquiry under the current unconstitutional posture would inflict lasting institutional harm on the executive branch and lasting damage to the separation of powers, you have left the president no choice,” Cipollone concluded...But what if an increasingly conservative judiciary — Trump has had more than 150 judges confirmed — comes down definitively on the side of executive power? “Be careful what you wish for,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and alumnus of George W. Bush’s Justice Department. Congress has powers of its own that it has gotten out of the habit of using, he argued. “Literally everything the executive branch does requires funding,” Goldsmith said. “And of course the House controls spending.”

Jimmy Hoffa is back! No, the legendary labor leader has not risen from the end zone at the old Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.—or from any of the other sites where his body was rumored to have been deposited after he disappeared on July 30, 1975. But we are witnessing a boomlet of interest in the head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in the 1950s and ’60s. There is Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” a dramatization of “I Heard You Paint Houses,” the 2004 nonfiction account that presented mobster Frank Sheeran’s claim that he murdered Hoffa. And now we have “In Hoffa’s Shadow” by Jack Goldsmith. A top Justice Department official in the Bush-Cheney era, now a Harvard law professor, Mr. Goldsmith has produced an unusual hybrid of confessional memoir and investigative history. “In Hoffa’s Shadow” is compulsively readable, deeply affecting and truly groundbreaking in its re-examination of the Hoffa case. The FBI’s lead suspect was always the man who was erroneously described by reporters as Hoffa’s adopted son and who, as it happens, adopted Mr. Goldsmith as his own son.

Jack Goldsmith, a former top Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, thinks that President Trump deserves to be impeached, but the conservative legal scholar is also critical of how the Democrats are going about the process. President Trump’s actions in the Ukraine scandal appear to be “clearly” impeachable and are “probably the 300th thing Trump has done that’s an impeachable offense,” Goldsmith told Yahoo News in an interview on the “Long Game” podcast. But he also lamented the impact of a few Democratic mistakes, such as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s misleading answers on whether he or his staff had been in touch with the whistleblower whose complaint sparked the impeachment inquiry. “In the general scheme of things, what Schiff did doesn’t even compare to what the president did,” Goldsmith said. But, he said, it nonetheless “was deeply unfortunate.” “It’s significant because 40-some-odd percent of this country believes that the Democrats and the deep state have been violating norms and skirting norms to try to reverse the election [of 2016],” Goldsmith said. “I don’t think that’s the proper characterization, but when the president’s opponents cut corners, don’t tell the truth, seem like they’re in league with bureaucrats to try to bring down the president, it just fosters that narrative and I think it’s a very destructive narrative.”

An article by Jacques Singer-Emery JD '20 and Jack Goldsmith:  One of the most damning allegations in the whistleblower complaint is that President Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son by withholding congressionally approved military aid.  The amounts include $250 million from the Defense Department and $141 million from the State Department. As debates swirl over the existence and significance of a presidential quid pro quo, it is worth examining the underlying mechanics of how the White House might have withheld the money. The answer lies in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is responsible for overseeing all executive agency spending. That is why on Oct. 7 the chairmen of three House Committees—Oversight and Reform, Intelligence and Foreign Affairs—sent letters to subpoena documents from the acting director of OMB, Russell Vought, in addition to Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. The subpoena to Vought ordered him to produce “all documents and communications in your custody, possession, or control referring or relating to” various matters linked to the withholding or deferral of congressionally appropriated funds to Ukraine. The deadline to respond to the subpoena was Oct. 15, yesterday, and Vought made clear that he would not comply.

Breathtaking in scope, defiant in tone, the White House’s refusal to cooperate with the House impeachment inquiry amounts to an unabashed challenge to America’s longstanding constitutional order. In effect, President Trump is making the sweeping assertion that he can ignore Congress as it weighs his fate because he considers the impeachment effort unfair and the Democrats who initiated it biased against him, an argument that channeled his anger even as it failed to pass muster with many scholars on Wednesday. ... Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former senior Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, said Mr. Trump’s position was more political than constitutional. “The White House letter’s legal objections don’t have merit,” he said. “The letter, like the ‘official impeachment inquiry’ itself, is a hardball tactic designed to achieve maximum political advantage” before the public.

In 1975, labor union leader and American icon Jimmy Hoffa went missing. Forty-four years after Hoffa’s disappearance, the crime remains one of America's greatest unsolved mysteries. One of those frequently considered a suspect in Hoffa’s murder is Chuckie O’Brien, Hoffa’s longtime right-hand man. O’Brien also happens to be the step-father of Lawfare co-founder and Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith. In a new book, "In Hoffa’s Shadow," Goldsmith details his own rigorous investigation of Hoffa’s disappearance and explains why the long-held assumption of Chuckie’s role in Hoffa's death is misguided. Yet, the book is more than a murder mystery. Goldsmith also reflects on the evolution of his own relationship with his step-father.

An essay by Jack Goldsmith: On june 16, 1975, when I was 12 years old, my mother, Brenda, married Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien, who a few weeks later would become a leading suspect in the notorious disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, the former president of the Teamsters union. Chuckie had known Hoffa since he was a boy, loved him like a father, and was his closest aide in the 1950s and ’60s, when Hoffa was the nation’s best-known and most feared labor leader. Soon after Hoffa went missing, on July 30, 1975, the FBI zeroed in on Chuckie.