Jack Goldsmith

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.

Jimmy Hoffa, the brilliant but ruthless head of the Teamsters Union, had a taste for corruption and a knack for making powerful enemies, including his frequent business partners, the Mafia, and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. After President Nixon commuted his federal prison sentence, Hoffa planned to retake control of the Teamsters, much to the alarm of the mob. Then, one July day in 1975, Hoffa vanished without a trace from a restaurant parking lot outside of Detroit, a mystery that has inspired books, TV shows, movies (the most recent is Martin Scorsese’s film, “The Irishman”), and a raft of conspiracy theories. Jack L. Goldsmith, Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, was no Hoffa conspiracy buff, but he had good reason to think that Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien, Hoffa’s right-hand man and one of the FBI’s earliest suspects, had been falsely accused of driving Hoffa to his killers. First O’Brien’s alibi, although not airtight, eventually checked out enough that the FBI never charged him. And second, O’Brien is Goldsmith’s stepfather. In a new book, “In Hoffa’s Shadow,” Goldsmith dug through government and court records, FBI wiretap transcripts, and he spoke to dozens of FBI agents, prosecutors, and Hoffa experts to see whether, decades later, he could clear his stepdad’s name — and maybe even figure out what happened to Hoffa. The Gazette recently discussed his new book with Professor Goldsmith.

President Trump’s comments in a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July have prompted the House of Representatives to launch an impeachment inquiry. Trump reportedly pressured his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Joe Biden and the former vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, who served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. He also offered to enlist U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr and his personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in that effort. Trump’s action — far from the first controversy the president has created while interacting with a foreign counterpart — appears to be a flagrant abuse of power. But it is one enabled by a system that extends presidents enormous freedom in conducting personal diplomacy with limited transparency and few checks on their power...Similarly, Trump often abruptly shifts American policy with little consultation with his aides, U.S. allies or Congress. And legally, he’s free to do so. “Putting it brutally, Article II gives the president the authority to do, and say, and pledge, awful things in the secret conduct of U.S. foreign policy,” Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith tweeted. “That is a very dangerous discretion, to be sure, but has long been thought worth it on balance.”

If you've followed the vanishing Jimmy Hoffa caper over the years, you've likely heard of Chuckie O'Brien, a burly, confidant who was his driver, gofer and conduit to the mob. Hoffa considered him like a son. One theory is that O'Brien was instrumental in Hoffa's July 1975 disappearance. Others disagree, or say any role was unwitting. Whatever the case, the FBI refers to O'Brien in 1976 as a pathological liar. Many books explore the Hoffa case. But now comes one of the more unlikely Hoffa-book authors -- Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith -- a total opposite of O'Brien, his stepdad, who lives in the land of early bird specials, southern Florida.  Goldsmith's 368-page book, "In Hoffa's Shadow," came out this week and is about the former Teamsters union leader and O'Brien, now 84. Its subtitle is "A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth."

Jack Goldsmith, who is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law at Harvard University, couldn’t have chosen a more different career path than that of his stepfather, Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien. O’Brien was Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa’s confidante and he also had close ties to the organized crime figures suspected in Hoffa's still unsolved 1975 disappearance. O’Brien could never shake suspicions that he drove Hoffa to his abduction. It’s not surprising that Goldsmith distanced himself from his stepfather as he moved toward adulthood and aspired to an elite legal career. He changed his name and ultimately cut O’Brien out of his life altogether.

So much has been written about Jimmy Hoffa, the former Teamster boss who vanished from a Detroit suburb in 1975, but a new book about him still contains surprises — not least because of who wrote it. Jack Goldsmith, the author of “In Hoffa’s Shadow,” happens to have a personal connection to the material. Goldsmith is perhaps best known for his work in the George W. Bush administration as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, where he challenged the legality of “enhanced interrogation” and warrantless surveillance programs before resigning nine months after he started. In his 2007 book, “The Terror Presidency,” Goldsmith said he was hired in part because of his stalwart conservative worldview. But something came up in his vetting interview that gave White House officials pause. Asked whether anything embarrassing might emerge during his Senate confirmation hearing, Goldsmith replied: “My former stepfather is the leading suspect in Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance, and has long been associated with the Mafia.”

A new book penned by Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and the former U.S. assistant attorney general, claims the FBI knows who killed legendary labor leader Jimmy Hoffa, but it won't admit that it blamed the wrong man. In his new book, "In Hoffa's Shadow," Goldsmith lays out his case for why he believes federal investigators allowed Chuckie O'Brien, the labor boss's protege, to be known as the key suspect in Hoffa's mysterious disappearance in 1975, despite evidence proving otherwise. Hoffa served as the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters labor union until 1971, making him a hero to many blue-collar Americans. He also had powerful enemies and ties to organized crime. Goldsmith is also O'Brien's stepson.

For more than four decades, Chuckie O’Brien has been known as a key suspect in Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance. Now, the author of a new book, "In Hoffa's Shadow," says the feds were planning to clear O’Brien. He also says the feds know who’s responsible for one of the most notorious crimes in American history, but they’re not revealing any names. Author Jack Goldsmith has a unique connection to the case: He’s Chuckie O’Brien’s stepson.