Laurence Tribe

Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence O’Donnell that if Trump tried to pardon himself, his argument would not hold up in court because it goes against the principle that no one is above the law: “If that were the case, then the president would not be below the law, he’d be above it.”

President Donald Trump has talked with advisers about granting preemptive pardons to his children, to his son-in-law, and to his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and talked with Giuliani about pardoning him as recently as last week, according to media reports. Given the scandals that have plagued Trump’s tenure in office and his past granting of pardons to close associates, observers believe the possibility of more pardons is real. Some believe Trump might even try to pardon himself. Here’s a quick roundup of what you need to know...A pardon is also not a get-out-of-jail-free card forever. It covers only crimes committed up to the point of pardon, Bowman said. Any crimes subsequent to that moment are fair game for law enforcement. “It can’t be used to avoid state and local prosecutions. It can’t be used to avoid civil liability, and it can’t be used to license future crime,” said constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School...Trump has raised the possibility that he might try to pardon himself. In 2018, he tweeted, “As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?” Bowman and Tribe both said he was wrong about the law...Tribe said the idea of a self-pardon was “unprecedented” and went against a backdrop of 400 years of legal tradition that “you can’t be your own judge and jury.”

One of the nation’s leading legal experts has decried an alleged White House pardon bribery scheme as “an extreme abuse” of power in the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency amid new reports of the potential crime. Speaking to CNN on Tuesday night, Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor and constitutional expert, broke down the laws surrounding presidential pardons — and explained why a “preemptive pardon” like the one discussed in news reports would be impossible for Mr Trump to grant one of his allies. “Everybody agrees that you can’t pardon someone ahead of the time that they actually commit a crime,” the professor said. “That kind of preemptive pardon is impossible, and yet when you are engaged in bargaining with somebody about a possible pardon at a time when they are still engaged in all kinds of shenanigans, you are essentially saying go ahead, commit crimes if you want, and retrospective I’ll give you the kind of sweeping pardon that I have now given Michael Flynn.” Mr Tribe spoke amid explosive reports based on newly-unsealed court records that indicated the Justice Department was probing the potentially criminal bribery scheme. The heavily redacted documents appeared to show prosecutors working to uncover a secret lobbying effort over "a substantial political contribution in exchange for a presidential pardon or reprieve of sentence.”

The Justice Department is investigating a potential crime related to funneling money to the White House or related political committee in exchange for a presidential pardon, according to court records. CNN's Erin Burnett and Harvard Constitutional Law Professor Laurence Tribe discuss.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe and Michael C. Dorf: Balancing public health against the right to free exercise of religion poses a difficult challenge amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Accordingly, when cases from Californiaand Nevada reached the Supreme Court earlier this year, the justices deferred to the judgment of their governors, who are, after all, accountable to the people. But those cases were decided by narrow 5-4 margins before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September. The court changed its tune late Wednesday night, when her replacement — Amy Coney Barrett — and the four earlier dissenters formed a new 5-4 conservative majority that invalidated restrictions on worship services in hot zones designated by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The ruling in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, brought by Catholic and Orthodox Jewish congregations, was especially notable because it was unnecessary. As Chief Justice John Roberts explained in his dissent, by the time the court ruled, the New York houses of worship were no longer “subject to any fixed numerical restrictions.” The opinion, then, did nothing more than admonish New York to stop doing something it had already stopped doing. Even if the case wasn’t technically moot, there was no reason for the highest court in the land to intervene, without an oral argument or deliberation, to grant extraordinary relief.

A video and social media post claim that Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison “helped” US president-elect Joe Biden violate the Logan Act when he made a congratulatory phone call to the Democratic leader. The video was posted to the Facebook page of Riccardo Bosi, a former Army special forces lieutenant-colonel and serial election candidate, who unsuccessfully contested the 2019 federal election for the Australian Conservatives and the 2020 Eden Monaro by-election as an independent. In October, he ran for the Sunshine Coast seat of Nicklin in the Queensland state election, finishing second last of the six candidates. The Faceook post includes a caption which reads, “SCOMO HELPED BIDEN VIOLATE THE LOGAN ACT” and a video with the same title as its cover image...Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, agreed, telling AAP FactCheck in an email the suggestion Mr Biden violated the Logan Act by speaking with Mr Morrison was without foundation. “(The Act) is in no respect applicable to this kind of entirely routine interchange between a president-elect and a foreign prime minister or head of state,” he said. “It is such a vague and nebulous restriction on discussions by private American citizens with foreign leaders that most constitutional scholars (including me) believe its application would be barred by the first amendment to our constitution.” It’s not the first time a US political figure has been accused of breaching the Logan Act due to their interactions with Australian representatives.

President-elect Joe Biden in January will begin an effort to recalibrate the federal judiciary with more liberal appointees who embrace a robust judicial role in addressing national problems and protecting an evolving spectrum of individual rights, a shift from the conservative appointees under President Trump...Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, an informal Biden adviser since the 1980s, said Mr. Biden believes in strong “national governmental power to deal with emerging problems,” a liberal constitutional approach that the Supreme Court embraced during the New Deal and that underpins federal initiatives from Social Security to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At the same time, Mr. Biden sees the Constitution protecting individuals not through “a laundry list of rights, but a set of fundamental values and principles,” Mr. Tribe said. That approach has led to Supreme Court decisions that invalidated bans on contraceptives, recognized abortion rights and entitled same-sex couples to marry, which Mr. Biden endorsed before President Barack Obama, Mr. Tribe noted.

On Monday’s edition of CNN’s “OutFront,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe argued that President Donald Trump’s legal case to overturn the presidential election results was doomed to fail — even if he had had more knowledgeable and skilled legal counsel. “Let me ask you about the breaking news from the GSA,” said anchor Erin Burnett. “Emily Murphy, Trump appointee, said she was not pressured to do anything. Trump obviously seems to be clearly taking credit, I recommended she do this, I am the one calling the shots. You have been very clear that this withholding of a transition from the GSA and Emily Murphy, as the chief, could have been in violation of federal law. Do you believe any laws were broken in this delay?” “I do think that laws were broken in this delay, but I think the important thing now is to move forward,” said Tribe. “Whether it is her decision or Trump’s decision doesn’t matter. The fact is that we’re now fully into the transition and all of the harm she has done, which cannot be undone, a lot of people, I think, will die because she dragged her feet as much as she did.” “Now it’s without the slightest doubt, that Joe Biden is the president-elect,” said Tribe. “He will be the president of the United States. He’s forming his cabinet. He’s governing more from outside the government than our pathetic president is from within the government. And it’s very clear that there are no options left. And I do want to say that we shouldn’t simply focus on the ineptitude of his lawyers. It’s not as though if he had a better legal team, he could have done anything. When you don’t have a case, no facts, no law, even get the best lawyers in the world, you’re not going to win.”

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe and Joseph R. Grodin: President Trump’s cynical effort to enlist the courts in his attempt to retain power has failed miserably. Claims of voter fraud and other theories advanced on his behalf have consistently been rebuffed by judges of all political backgrounds, including judges with conservative reputations and federal judges appointed by Republican presidents — including Trump himself. While there are still a handful of cases pending, it is the consensus among lawyers and legal scholars that they are at best on tenuous life support. Trump’s apparent scheme to get a case to the US Supreme Court, with the all but explicit expectation that the justices that he has appointed will somehow join in supporting his fanciful claim of victory in the November election out of loyalty to him or his political cause, is almost certainly destined to defeat. At this time, there are no cases on their way to the Supreme Court that are likely to be heard or to matter. Nor is there any indication that the justices would do anything but follow the law, which is entirely clear on all the issues thus far raised in the dozens of lawsuits that Trump’s rapidly changing team of attorneyshas brought and, in virtually every instance, lost. On Jan. 20, Joe Biden will be sworn in as our next president, and this phase of Trump’s assault on the rule of law, on the peaceful transfer of power that has characterized our nation ever since John Adams passed the torch to Thomas Jefferson in 1801, and on our constitutional republic will be history.

President Donald Trump’s campaign filed notice that it was appealing the dismissal of a federal lawsuit that aimed to block Pennsylvania from certifying its election results unless the state invalidated tens of thousands of mail-in ballots. The campaign’s filing on Sunday, with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, had been expected. Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani has said the case should be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority. The move is unlikely to stop Pennsylvania from certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state as soon as Monday. Trump has said his goal is to “decertify” the state’s results one way or another...Brann ruled both that the Trump campaign lacked standing to sue, and that it had not raised a valid equal-protection claim since Pennsylvania counties were not prohibited under state law from letting voters fix minor ballot errors. “It’s not law, it’s theater and it’s not very good theater,” Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe, a frequent critic of Trump, said in a telephone interview. “It’s dangerous and damaging theater because it undermines the confidence of millions of people in our electoral system and legal system” for the president to be “bouncing in and out of court making outlandish claims,” he said. Tribe also said he doesn’t believes the Supreme Court would overturn Brann’s decision, even if it were to agree to hear the case.

President Donald Trump is trying to steal a free and fair election that he lost by a wide margin to President-elect Joe Biden by tearing at the most basic principle of American democracy: He's trying to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes. Trump's latest escalation of his attempt to subvert the result of the election followed a string of knock-backs in the courts and after a statewide audit in Georgia confirmed Biden's victory in the crucial swing state. He asked state Republican leaders in Michigan to visit him Friday, hinting at a possible attempt to convince them to ignore Biden's big win in the state and send a slate of electors to the Electoral College that backs him and not the President-elect... Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said Michigan lawmakers visiting the White House on Friday could be walking into an illegal meeting. "I am worried that any lawmakers who attend this ridiculous meet and greet are really attending a conspiratorial meeting to steal the election," Tribe told CNN's Erin Burnett. "There's no question that the meeting that is being held is illegal. There is no question that it really is designed quite corruptly to take away people's right to vote." Tribe says the Trump campaign has lost more than two dozen lawsuits. "It's quite clear that Republican, as well as Democratic judges, are going to follow the law when there is no ambiguity," Tribe said. "The only guy who seems to be uninterested in the law is Rudy Giuliani, and God knows what he is auditioning for."

And I thought I knew con law: Pigeons, corn pellets, and the transformative effect of Larry Tribe’s teaching The first lesson Larry Tribe taught me…

President Trump fired the nation’s top election security official, Chris Krebs, Tuesday over his agency's recent statement that called the 2020 election "the most secure in American history" — a statement that undermined Trump’s political attempts to falsely spin his election loss into a story about election fraud. To discuss this and other attempts by the Trump administration to undermine the legitimate results of the election, Jim Braude was joined by Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe.

Kenneth Starr, former Whitewater independent counsel, and Laurence Tribe, constitutional law professor at Harvard, weigh in on 'Fox News Sunday.'

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Imagine raiding Versailles with a herd of bulls. You probably won’t make it past the gates, and you certainly won’t wind up King of France, but you would irreparably trample the gardens and might well erode the foundation. That’s more or less how I view Donald Trump’s current assault on the election. Let’s begin with the obvious: Joe Biden will become the 46th president of the United States on 20 January 2021. As Benjamin Wittes recently explained, “It is exceedingly difficult to steal an election in the United States.” I encourage interested readers to look through his analysis, which I believe is spot on. I’ll quickly sum up the legal arguments. Trump’s lawsuits will not award him the presidency. To win, Mr Trump must prove systemic fraud, with illegal votes in the tens of thousands. There is no evidence of that so far, and evidence of widespread fraud is unlikely to arise in an election that Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security just labeled “the most secure in American history”. His lawsuits are, as one commentator aptly put it, “too absurd to be even dignified as frivolous”. As of this writing, he is 0-12 in court, a batting average that would shame even a little league baseball player. His lawsuits are also mathematically useless. He has focused on 2,000 ballots in Michigan where, at the time of this writing, Biden leads by 148,645 votes. He’s challenging a whopping 180 ballots in Arizona, a state recently called for Biden with a lead of 11,434. Georgia’s short-lived lawsuit sought to shave 53 ballots off a 14,057-vote lead. Elsewhere, the math is much the same.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. took aim at legal interpretations of a historic Massachusetts lawsuit, appeared to mock Cambridge, and slammed two New England senators as he offered an unusually blunt critique of coronavirus lockdowns and other measures in a speech to a conservative legal group. Alito’s Thursday address to the Federalist Society, which held its annual convention virtually due to the pandemic, overstepped the usual boundaries for a Supreme Court jurist and could undermine the public’s faith in the court, legal observers said. “This is a conservative justice’s grievance speech. … It’s the Federalist Society manifesto through the mouth of a Supreme Court judge,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School. “I was stunned when I listened to it,” Gertner said of the livestreamed speech, in which Alito criticized the high court’s rulings in both recent and historic cases, including some on matters such as contraception access and coronavirus emergency orders that could come before the court again. Alito criticized the use of a 1905 Supreme Court decision in a Massachusetts case to justify COVID-19 restrictions — while taking a dig at Cambridge...Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor emeritus, said Alito’s remarks were “extremely unusual” and that it was “injudicious and highly inappropriate” for a Supreme Court justice to comment “on issues that are bound to return to the Court, like same-sex marriage and religious exemptions and restrictions on personal liberty designed to control the spread of COVID-19.” “He seriously compromised the integrity and independence of his role as a Supreme Court Justice by offering hints and intimations and sometimes all but explicit forecasts of how he would approach matters not yet briefed and argued before him in the context of a specific case or controversy,” Tribe said in an e-mail.

Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe spoke with MSNBC’s Joy Reid Friday about the lawyers defending President Donald J. Trump, saying they have “an ethical obligation” and should be “ashamed” for “frivolous” lawsuits of this kind. Tribe said, “They are supposed to be officers of the court. There’s an ethical obligation. It’s true you can defend somebody who might be guilty, but helping someone undermine democracy and delegitimize the transfer of power, something we have done ever since John Adams handed the presidency over to Thomas Jefferson, is way beyond that. I think any lawyer worthy of the name would be ashamed to be involved in a frivolous lawsuits of this kind.” Tribe has an impressive 50 years under his belt at Harvard Law and has argued 36 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He is co-founder of the American Constitution Society.

On Thursday’s edition of CNN’s “OutFront,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe suggested that President Donald Trump could face criminal charges if he reveals national security secrets after leaving office. “One former White House official said Trump asked about self-pardons, as well as pardons for his family,” said anchor Erin Burnett. “Could he do that, pardon himself and anyone he wanted to for any unknown criminal acts found subsequently before he leaves office?” “He can certainly pardon his family, but pardoning himself would be an extraordinary and unprecedented act,” said Tribe. “Hundreds of years ago, Lord Cook in England established a principle that has been accepted in American law for centuries, and that is you cannot be a judge in your own case. If he tries to pardon himself, I think in the end that pardon would not hold up. But predicting what a court would do with such an unprecedented exercise of power is hard.” “One thing we do know, he certainly cannot pardon himself vis-a-vis New York prosecution, either by Letitia James on behalf of the State of New York or by Cyrus Vance on behalf of Manhattan,” said Tribe. “State and local crimes, serious crimes, often punishable by years in prison, are not subject to the president’s pardon power. Another thing, we know he can’t pardon himself from the possible espionage he might commit after leaving office when he leaks secrets for his own benefit, classified information from his own government. He’s not good at keeping silent. Those future crimes are beyond the reach of the pardon power, vis-a-vis both the state and federal government.”

On Tuesday’s edition of CNN’s “OutFront,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe suggested that lame-duck President Donald Trump could be guilty of a federal crime if he continues to refuse the peaceful transition of power following his election loss. “There’s nothing that Pompeo or Trump or any of those guys can do to prevent Biden from becoming the president,” said Tribe. “On January 20, at high noon, he becomes the president of the United States when he takes the oath. And any Trump administration official, including the president himself, who pretends to have power under the executive branch after that point is committing a federal felony, punishable by imprisonment, in addition to any other crimes they might have committed. It’s as though he’s going to build an alternative White House in Mar-a-Lago, and he will pretend to be president even though he’s not.” “When you look through all the cases they’re mounting, every challenge out there, do you see any legal challenge that the president could pursue right now that would change the outcome of this election?” asked anchor Erin Burnett. “Absolutely not,” said Tribe. “And to say that he hasn’t succeeded is an understatement. He’s 0 for 12 in the cases that I’ve counted. I’ve read the complaints. There’s nothing there.”

One rare political arena with bipartisan support is the movement to break up and curb the power of tech giants, particularly those operating in search and social media. Early reports indicate that President-elect Joe Biden is aware of this, and that his upcoming policy agenda may reflect that. Some of these reports come directly from the Biden campaign itself, with former head of press Bill Russo retweeting "Hell yes" to a Sacha Baron Cohen post that depicted outgoing President Donald Trump alongside Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg paired with the caption, "One down, one to go." There are also reports from reputable outlets like The New York Times, which on Tuesday revealed that Biden is not only expected to pursue an antitrust lawsuit filed against Google last month, but may pursue additional antitrust cases against Amazon, Apple and Facebook...One key difference between Trump and Biden is that the current president has made it clear he views his policies toward Big Tech as ways of inflicting punishment. In May, after threatening to "close down" social media platforms that fact-check him, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email that "the threat by Donald Trump to shut down social media platforms that he finds objectionable is a dangerous overreaction by a thin-skinned president. Any such move would be blatantly unconstitutional under the First Amendment." He added, "That doesn't make the threat harmless, however, because the president has many ways in which he can hurt individual companies, and his threat to do so as a way of silencing dissent is likely to chill freedom of expression and will undermine constitutional democracy in the long run."

President Donald Trump's campaign launched its broadest challenge yet to the results of the election that appears destined to push him from office, accusing Pennsylvania officials of running a "two-tiered” voting system – in-person and mail – that violates the U.S. Constitution. Legal experts said the case has little chance of succeeding, for a variety of reasons: Courts are wary of invalidating legally cast ballots. The issues raised, even if true, don't represent a constitutional question. And mail voting, used in many states, is both common and constitutional...Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at Harvard Law School, said the lawsuit "fails to allege facts sufficient to support a conclusion that the relief sought would alter the election's result – a key difference between this complaint and the submission leading the Supreme Court to intervene in the state recount in Bush v. Gore" in 2000. As of Monday, Biden led in Pennsylvania by more than 45,000 votes – greater than Trump’s lead when he won Pennsylvania in 2016.