Laurence Tribe

The third day of President Trump's Senate impeachment trial. Law experts share their take on the president’s case – and what’s at stake for the Constitution and the country. Guests: Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University Law School. Co-author of "To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment and the Constitution."

As President Trump’s impeachment trial opens, his lawyers have increasingly emphasized a striking argument: Even if he did abuse his powers in an attempt to bully Ukraine into interfering in the 2020 election on his behalf, it would not matter because the House never accused him of committing an ordinary crime...Mr. Dershowitz said he intended to model his presentation on an argument put forward at the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson by his chief defense counsel...Mr. Johnson was saved from conviction and removal when the vote fell one short of the necessary supermajority. Mr. Curtis had argued that Mr. Johnson was not accused of committing a legitimate crime, and that removing him absent one would subvert the constitutional structure and make impeachment a routine tool of political struggle. But other legal scholars, like Laurence Tribe, a constitutional specialist at Harvard Law School and an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump, have argued that Mr. Dershowitz is overreading and misrepresenting this aspect of the Johnson trial...In an opinion article in The Washington Post, Mr. Tribe accused Mr. Trump’s legal team of using “bogus legal arguments to mislead the American public or the senators weighing his fate.”

As President Donald Trump's impeachment trial gets underway on Tuesday, most Democrats will have already come to terms with the reality that the president will almost certainly be cleared of his alleged crimes...However, while Trump's acquittal may feel "inevitable," Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at the Harvard Law School of Harvard University, told Newsweek on Tuesday, for many voters across the country, the Senate's decision may never feel like a "genuine exoneration" for the president...As Tribe noted, with party lines becoming increasingly divided, expecting lawmakers to vote without party bias feels like wishful thinking for many. The only real hope of keeping the government in check, Tribe said, appears to lie with the American people. "I'm afraid that is very much the message," the scholar said. "That you better not elect a president who is a demagogue wannabe dictator because we don't have a good way of removing the president." Ultimately, Tribe said, the 2020 election may be the only way that Americans can see Trump removed for the crimes he has been accused of committing.

Forty years ago, when I was a student at Harvard Law School, I enrolled in Alan Dershowitz’s class on professional responsibility. “Everyone is entitled to a lawyer,” he told us. “But not everyone is entitled to me.” Any lawyer in private practice can generally say no when asked to take on a case. So why did Mr. Dershowitz say yes to Donald Trump and agree to represent him in his Senate impeachment trial?...Mr. Dershowitz said that he was defending Mr. Trump to protect the Constitution, but serious constitutional scholars didn’t buy his argument. Another of my former professors, the constitutional law expert Laurence H. Tribe, responded with an op-ed essay in The Washington Post. “The argument that only criminal offenses are impeachable has died a thousand deaths in the writings of all the experts on the subject,” he wrote. “There is no evidence that the phrase ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ was understood in the 1780s to mean indictable crimes.” Mr. Tribe likewise debunked Mr. Dershowitz’s argument that the president could not be impeached for “abuse of power,” noting, “No serious constitutional scholar has ever agreed with it.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s rules for the impeachment trial of President Trump earned him a new nickname Tuesday: Midnight Mitch. The moniker trended on Twitter to mock the organizing resolution the senator circulated late Monday, which allows each side 24 hours to make opening arguments and could result in testimony continuing past midnight...The memes continued even after McConnell’s resolution was changed to relax the timetable for arguments, stretching the 24 hours of testimony over three days instead of two. The nickname was apparently coined by Carl Bernstein, the former Washington Post reporter whose reporting on the Watergate scandal led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation...Laurence Tribe, a prominent Harvard Law professor, criticized McConnell’s first version of trial rules, saying they “aren’t rules for a real trial at all, much less a fair one.” “They’re rules for a rigged outcome, with #MidnightMitch making sure that as much of the so-called trial as possible takes place in the dark of night,” he said in a tweet.

Democrats accused Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of a "cover-up" after his plan to speed up President Donald Trump's impeachment trial was unveiled. McConnell submitted a resolution Monday that would limit opening arguments to 24 hours over just two days, meaning the trial could stretch past midnight. The plan also gives senators up to 16 hours for questions and four hours of debate. After that, senators would vote whether to allow witnesses and new evidence. Witnesses would be deposed privately and the Senate would then vote whether to allow them to testify publicly. The Senate is expected to vote Tuesday on the resolution. Republicans are expected to approve the rules down party lines, according to Politico. Democrats slammed the proposal, warning that the rules are likely to result in key evidence being presented at 2 to 3 am... "These aren't rules for a real trial at all, much less a fair one," Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe added. "They're rules for a rigged outcome, with #MidnightMitch making sure that as much of the so-called trial as possible takes place in the dark of night."

As President Trump’s impeachment trial opens, his lawyers have increasingly emphasized a striking argument: Even if he did abuse his powers in an attempt to bully Ukraine into interfering in the 2020 election on his behalf, it would not matter because the House never accused him of committing an ordinary crime. Their argument is widely disputed...Other legal scholars, like Laurence Tribe, a constitutional specialist at Harvard Law School and an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump, have argued that Mr. Dershowitz is overreading and misrepresenting this aspect of the Johnson trial, especially against the backdrop of other evidence about the original understanding of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and the range of factors that went into Mr. Johnson’s narrow acquittal. In an opinion article in The Washington Post, Mr. Tribe accused Mr. Trump’s legal team of using “bogus legal arguments to mislead the American public or the senators weighing his fate.”

On Monday’s edition of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe excoriated his former colleague Alan Dershowitz’s argument that President Donald Trump’s conduct cannot be impeachable without specific crimes. “We’ve got a president who was shaking down a foreign government for his own benefit, for his own re-election. He was using taxpayer money to do it,” said Tribe. “He is engaged in the kind of abuse that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, any of our framers would have said requires that we end the presidency, especially when the abuse goes to meddling in the next election. And when Alan Dershowitz or anybody, although I don’t know anybody else who really does it, comes up and says, well, it’s an abuse but it’s not a crime or crime-like, and therefore we can’t remove him for it. That really — that’s disgusting. There is no basis in the Constitution or in our history for that.”

As President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial moves along, much of the right-wing media will no doubt be echoing the arguments of the attorneys who are representing Trump during the trial — including Alan Dershowitz, Kenneth Starr and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. But attorney Laurence H. Tribe, an expert on constitutional law and co-author of the book, “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” emphasizes in a Washington Post op-ed that Trump’s attorneys are using “bogus” and wildly misleading arguments in his defense. The 78-year-old Tribe is especially critical of Dershowitz in his op-ed. Dershowitz, Tribe notes, has argued that the two articles of impeachment Trump has been indicted on — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — should be dismissed because neither “can count as impeachable offenses.” But in fact, Tribe asserts, both abuse of power and obstruction of Congress are quite impeachable.

Moments after Senate Majority Leader McConnell released his impeachment trial rules, Harvard constitutional law scholar, Laurence Tribe joins MSNBC’s Ari Melber warning Senate Republicans “they will be judged through history” for depriving the American people a fair trial, instead doing it in “the dark of night.” Tribe wonders whether Republicans will “go along with the McConnell cover-up” or “put the brakes on and insist on a real trial.” Alarmed by the accelerated pace of the trial, Tribe argues “justice compressed can be justice destroyed.”

On the eve of Trump’s historic impeachment trial, Harvard University’s Constitutional Law Scholar Laurence Tribe hammers his former Harvard colleague and Trump defense lawyer, Alan Dershowitz. Tribe says he is “very disappointed” in Dershowitz, adding he is taking a “Wizard of Oz” approach to impeachment by claiming his “client is the constitution of the United States.” Tribe calls for the attention to be taken off of the “Dersh-o-mania” of Trump’s defense arguments, and focus on the “solemn proceeding” of impeachment and Trump’s alleged “serious” crimes of “using his power to subvert the integrity of our elections.”

Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe looks at Alan Dershowitz’s likely defense of Trump ahead of the Senate impeachment trial: “Alan is completely wacko on this.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: The president’s lawyers have made the sweeping assertion that the articles of impeachment against President Trump must be dismissed because they fail to allege that he committed a crime — and are, therefore, as they said in a filing with the Senate, “constitutionally invalid on their face.” Another of his lawyers, my former Harvard Law School colleague Alan Dershowitz, claiming to represent the Constitution rather than the president as such, makes the backup argument that the articles must be dismissed because neither abuse of power nor obstruction of Congress can count as impeachable offenses. Both of these arguments are baseless. Senators weighing the articles of impeachment shouldn’t think that they offer an excuse for not performing their constitutional duty.

Ten years after O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder, one of his lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, admitted that “sometimes you lose sleep at night” while working as a defense attorney. ...After months of fiercely defending the president on Fox News, Dershowitz said he will argue constitutional issues on the Senate floor. Dershowitz said his goal is to “defend the integrity of the Constitution and to prevent the creation of a dangerous constitutional precedent” by removing the president from office. Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor who supports Trump’s impeachment, said Dershowitz is an “aggressive, persistent, fairly knowledgeable, quite imaginative and generally creative” lawyer who will bring “an unrealistic and unwarranted degree of self-certitude” to the trial. “He tends to be self-righteous in a way that convinces him, but not those whom he needs to persuade, that everyone but him is a hypocrite,” Tribe said.

Alan Dershowitz will be presenting oral arguments before the U.S. Senate at the impeachment trial for President Donald Trump. In a brief cell phone conversation Friday morning, Dershowitz said, “I can confirm that I’ll be presenting oral arguments.” Then he cut the conversation short and referred to his statement on Twitter. ...Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and a frequent Island visitor, also weighed in. “My former colleague Alan Dershowitz knows a lot about criminal law but not much about constitutional law. He’s flashy but not all that substantive. But flashiness isn’t exactly lacking on Team Trump,” Tribe wrote in an email to The Times. “So adding Dershowitz to the defense  team suggests that Trump intends to push the argument that impeachable offenses have to be statutory crimes like blackmail or robbery, but that’s definitely wrong and reflects serious ignorance about how the US Constitution works. For constitutional expertise and legal acumen, I’d pit my own former student Adam Schiff against Alan Dershowitz any day.”

Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence O’Donnell that after hearing the new evidence revealed by Lev Parnas, the Senate trial must have witnesses because senators are not “free to take a solemn oath to do impartial justice and then shut their eyes, shut their ears, refuse to listen to obviously relevant facts.”

Republicans have often said in the course of the impeachment process that President Trump has never been accused of breaking any laws. Beside the fact that Framers did not require a violation of statute for the grounds of impeachment, this is wrong. ...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “The GAO finding that President Trump’s decision to withhold from Ukraine the military aid appropriated by Congress was illegal under the Impoundment Control Act gives the lie to the claim that the Articles of Impeachment charge no illegal act.” As Tribe points out, “It was an irrelevant claim to boot, because a ‘high Crime and Misdemeanor’ needn’t be conduct that is illegal under any federal statute.”

An article by Laurence Tribe: The United States is living through a remarkably convulsive period in its history. Donald Trump has reshaped the American presidency, and his norm-shattering behavior has tested the US Constitution in profound ways. He has placed stress on points of constitutional vulnerability, particularly when it comes to judicially unenforceable norms of respect for fact-based reality, for orderly decision-making, and for investigatory and prosecutorial independence. Trump’s rise to power has also raised questions about some of the Constitution’s most solidly entrenched provisions. His victory in 2016 highlighted the dangers posed by the Electoral College in the face of changing demographic realities, and now his presidency is testing the viability of the impeachment process to cope with a demagogue who has captured the machinery of an entire political party and controls one chamber of Congress.

Three or four? It’s a question being hotly debated as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) prepares to transmit the articles of impeachment against President Trump to the Senate for trial. Will it take four Republican senators to buck Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and force the Senate to consider additional testimony and documents? Or could the votes of just three Republicans — bolstered by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — do the trick? The answer to the question hinges on the role of the chief justice, who the Constitution specifies shall “preside” over the trial...In any other setting besides the trial of the president, a 50-50 Senate tie would be broken by the vice president, who under Senate rules occupies the position of “presiding officer” in an impeachment trial. But the chief justice fills that role in the case of a presidential impeachment, which raises questions about whether he should behave any differently. Many have argued that the chief justice will play a strictly honorary role at the trial, with no substantive input whatsoever...Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe told me he “agree[s] strongly that the role is not solely honorific or purely decorative.”

Soon after a US drone strike killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Iraq earlier this month, President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign began touting the “swift actions of our Commander-in-Chief” in paid Facebook ads that cast the killing in a positive light. When it comes to posts that appear to support the dead general, however, it’s a different story: The company is employing some questionable legal reasoning about US sanctions law to justify deleting such content from its subsidiary, Instagram... “Facebook appears to be equating political or legal opposition to the Trump administration’s killing of Soleimani with indirect support for Soleimani himself and thus analogizing it to properly forbidden material assistance to non-state terrorist groups,” Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe wrote in an email. “Any such equation wades deep into clearly forbidden speech-suppressing territory, well beyond what even the majority in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project authorized as consistent with the First Amendment.”

One can only imagine what evidence we have yet to see during the impeachment proceedings against President Trump. With each new tranche of evidence — including emails regarding the hold on military aid to Ukraine and now documents from Lev Parnas, an associate of Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani’s — the conclusion that Trump abused power and obstructed the investigation becomes incontrovertible. The Post reports: “Three House committees sent dozens of pages of new evidence to the House Judiciary Committee ahead of Wednesday’s transmission of the articles of impeachment, ramping up pressure on Trump to provide Congress with additional documents related to his efforts to get Ukraine to announce an investigation into the Bidens"...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me the new evidence is " jaw-dropping" and “highly incriminating of both Giuliani and Trump.” Tribe says, “It’s bound to find its way into the Senate trial after Parnas is deposed by the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, as he’s bound to be.” Tribe continues, “The Giuliani letter presenting himself to Zelensky as representing Donald Trump in his private capacity at a time when Zelensky was the president-elect of Ukraine is remarkable in itself. It is a kind of hologram of the whole Ukraine-gate scandal.”