Jack Goldsmith

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.

Chuckie O’Brien should not be confused with Robert O’Brien, the new national security adviser to President Trump whom I wrote about last week. In fact, finding two Americans more different in upbringings and career paths is hard to imagine. There’s a new book out this week about the first O’Brien, and it is the unlikeliest riveting read of the year: “In Hoffa’s Shadow” by Jack Goldsmith — Harvard Law professor, national security law maven and former assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel. It was Goldsmith who, while in the last role, played Samson in the temple to the Stellarwind surveillance program and its demise during the George W. Bush administration.

If a secret whistleblower complaint covers President Donald Trump's dealings with the president of Ukraine, as two major newspapers have reported, it raises profound constitutional questions about whether Congress can police the president's conversations with foreign leaders, legal experts say. ... Some legal scholars, such as Harvard's Jack Goldsmith, are making an even broader argument: that the president can say and do anything he wants in the conduct of foreign relations, which is purely an executive branch function. ... "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," Goldsmith, a former Bush Administration lawyer, said on Twitter. "That is a very dangerous discretion, to be sure, but has long been thought worth it on balance."

Democratic presidential candidates broadly agree that President Trump has shaken the presidency loose from its constitutional limits and say that the White House needs major new legal curbs, foreshadowing a potential era of reform akin to the post-Watergate period if any of them wins next year’s election. ... But though the candidates “seem committed to reforming the presidency,” they might have second thoughts from the vantage point of the Oval Office, said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and former senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration who reviewed their responses. “The next Democratic president will happily accept new rules on tax releases, but will have a harder time accepting constraints on security clearances and emergency or war powers,” he said. “Institutional prerogative often defeats prior reformist pledges.”

“In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth,” Jack Goldsmith (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor and former assistant attorney general, reunites with his estranged stepfather, a one-time Jimmy Hoffa associate, to find out more about the labor leader and his famously unexplained 1975 disappearance. Out September 24.

Mary Ann Glendon is the chair of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, announced by Secretary Pompeo on July 8, 2019, to great controversy. The commission was charged with examining the bases of human rights claims and the extent to which they are or are not rooted in the American rights tradition. The response of the human rights community was swift and fierce, with a lot of skepticism, a lot of anger, and a lot of criticism. Mary Ann Glendon, the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, sat down with Jack Goldsmith to discuss the commission, what it is and isn't looking at, and why examining the root bases of human rights claims is a worthwhile endeavor for a State Department commission.

Jimmy Hoffa disappeared July 30, 1975...During the coming months, watch for more excellent reporting on the Hoffa case...And get ready for the upcoming, highly anticipated book—In Hoffa's Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth—by Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor, which will be released in September.  Goldsmith is the stepson of Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien, whom many believe had driven the car that took Hoffa to the scene of his murder.

Particular moments in history and strategic breaks with unwritten rules have helped many presidents expand their powers incrementally, leading some to wonder how wide-ranging presidential powers can be. [With comments from Noah Feldman, Mark Tushnet, Michael Klarman, Jack Goldsmith, Daphna Renan, and Neil Eggleston].

In public remarks and classified briefings, Trump administration officials keep emphasizing purported ties between Iran and Al Qaeda. Some lawmakers suspect that the executive branch is toying with claiming that it already has congressional authorization to attack Iran based on the nearly 18-year-old law approving a war over the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks...“If Iran has, in fact, been harboring Al Qaeda operatives, especially recently, then the A.U.M.F. by its terms plausibly authorizes the president to use force against Iran,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who ran the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel for a year under President George W. Bush. He cautioned that even if the Sept. 11 war law could be invoked, it would satisfy only the domestic law requirements for an attack and leave open a separate international law problem: The United States would also seem to need permission from the United Nations Security Council or a self-defense rationale to attack Iran. But once the two countries were engaged in an armed conflict, Mr. Goldsmith said, the United States could lawfully strike nuclear installations with a military dimension. Still, he said, if that is the only sort of attack the Trump administration has in mind, that would mean any invocation of purported Qaeda links to justify the conflict would seem “pretextual.”

Not long before Attorney General William P. Barr released the special counsel’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, he strategized with Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, about one of his next moves: investigating the investigators...Less than two months later, Mr. Barr began his cleanup with the most powerful of brooms: a presidential order commanding intelligence agencies to cooperate with his inquiry, and sweeping power to declassify and make public their secrets — even if they objected...Given the president’s threat to indiscriminately declassify every document related to the Russia investigation, Mr. Barr’s ability to persuade Mr. Trump to outsource those judgments to him is comforting, said Jack Goldsmith, a conservative former senior Justice Department official who has repeatedly criticized Mr. Trump. “There is no way to know now what Barr will find in his investigation or whether or how he will use this power,” said Mr. Goldsmith, who is also a Harvard Law School professor. “But Barr is not someone inclined to harm our national security bureaucracy.”

An article by Jack Goldsmith: President Trump’s delegation of a narrowly defined declassification authority to Attorney General Bill Barr has attracted criticism, notably on this site by my colleagues David Kris and Benjamin Wittes. I think these criticisms tell only one side of the story, and that the matter is more complicated than they let on.

An article by Jack Goldsmith: Jan Crawford’s extraordinary CBS interview with Attorney General William Barr was released on Friday, May 31. In it Barr said some good things about why his investigation of the Trump campaign investigation is needed. He also said some bad things about his attitude toward his investigation that reveal the depressingly ugly state of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement institutions.

If a Supreme Court vacancy opens up during next year’s election cycle, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he would take a markedly different approach than he did in 2016. “Oh, we’d fill it,” McConnell said on Tuesday at a lunch talk in Paducah, Kentucky, that was streamed online by WPSD. CNN first called attention to the remarks. In 2016, within hours of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, McConnell issued a statement saying that “this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.” McConnell went on to successfully block President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland from receiving a hearing. ... “The stakes are enormous because if you replace Scalia with an Obama appointee, then you probably have five justices on the court that are going to move the court in a much more progressive direction,” Jack Goldsmith, U.S. assistant attorney general during the George W. Bush administration, told FRONTLINE.

If and when journalists read the best analysis to date of the second part of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report, they’ll be in for a shock. ... Enter Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith, widely regarded as a leading expert — perhaps the leading expert working today — on national security law. Formerly the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel (where Justice’s brightest minds gather), Goldsmith now teaches at Harvard and writes for the website Lawfare, which he co-founded.Two weeks ago, Goldsmith issued an assessment of the second part of the special counsel’s report; on Thursday, he posted a follow-up to that assessment. In both pieces, with logic and detail, Goldsmith destroys claims of obstruction of justice by those unwilling to come to grips with the fact that the Mueller investigation is over. His analysis is tough, slogging through statutes, opinions and high principles of constitutional law, but at the end of the second essay, Goldsmith bluntly concludes that “the talented lawyers in the special counsel’s office ... include[d] at the center of the legal analysis in Volume II a transparently weak argument — so weak that it has no defenders.”

An article by Jack Goldsmith: I argued earlier this month that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report misapplied the presidential clear statement rule and improperly exposed many of President Trump’s actions in response to the Russia investigation to potential criminal liability. The argument drew disagreement from Benjamin Wittes, Andrew Kent and Marty Lederman, which in turn provoked a response by Josh Blackman, who holds views similar to mine. Here I offer my final thoughts on this issue. I am more convinced than ever that the Mueller report misapplied the governing clear statement rule.

President Trump’s escalating demands for investigations into his political opponents have intensified debate over whether his often-transparent calls for action by the Justice Department amount to abusing his power to bolster his re-election prospects. ... “It’s a terrible breach of norms for the president to publicly advocate prosecutions of his opponents,” said Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School who was an assistant attorney general during President George W. Bush’s first term. Mr. Goldsmith pointed out that this was not the first time Mr. Trump has intimated he might intervene in the functions of the criminal justice system. But Mr. Goldsmith said that, to date, “his White House and Justice Department subordinates have basically ignored him. Trump has violated norms, but his executive branch officials thus far have not.”

An article by Jack Goldsmith: Someone on Twitter recently asked: “What is your most [fire emoji] take that absolutely infuriates people and you know deep down in your heart is 100% true”? I was inclined to respond: “The statutory interpretation analysis in the Mueller report is one-sided and weak.” I instead decided to try to explain why I believe this, knowing full well that it will infuriate the vast majority of legal elites who are convinced that the only things preventing President Trump from going to trial today are the Office of Legal Counsel’s ruling that a sitting president cannot be indicted and Attorney General William Barr’s “lack of inner strength.”