Laurence Tribe

Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe criticized the attempt made by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to name the alleged whistleblower who exposed the Ukraine scandal during President Donald Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate as a "shameful gambit" of "dubious legality." "Rand Paul's effort to name the whistleblower in the Senate trial was disgraceful. Doing so would have been of dubious legality and of no utility," Tribe told Salon by email Thursday. "The speech and debate clause would have shielded Senator Paul from concrete adverse consequences, but the harm his shameful gambit could've done not just to the whistleblower but to the important public service that whistleblowers perform would've been incalculable."

The debate over impeachment from two of Harvard Law School’s most well-known faculty continued on Wednesday as senators asked questions during President Donald Trump’s trial. Harvard Law constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe has been publicly debating Trump defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, who is a professor emeritus at the school.

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe urged the GOP-controlled Senate to allow witnesses to testify in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump ― or risk setting a “terrible” precedent for the country. On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” Tribe argued the only way to hold a fair trial was for lawmakers to vote to hear from Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton “and other witnesses and the evidence.” Bolton reportedly confirms the Democrats’ case for impeachment in his forthcoming book “The Room Where It Happened,” in which he writes Trump tied military aid for Ukraine to its announcement of a probe into Joe Biden. Tribe described the defense argument being made by Trump impeachment lawyer Alan Dershowitz as “remarkably absurd and extreme and dangerous.” “Namely, it doesn’t matter if a president uses the vast powers of his office to shake down an ally and help an adversary in order to get dirt on an enemy and corrupt an election,” he said, summarizing Dershowitz’s argument.

Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence O’Donnell that senators must vote for witnesses to ensure a fair trial, and that to acquit Trump on the Dershowitz defense would set a terrible precedent for future presidents and the country.

He’s the Harvard law professor advising Democrats on their impeachment playbook. There’s just one problem: His adventures in the extremely online world of the anti-Trump “Resistance” took him a little off the deep end for a while. Laurence Tribe has spent decades as a respected constitutional law scholar, but the Trump era saw him buddy up for a bit with the fringiest of fringey #Resistance conspiracists online in amplifying far-fetched theories about how President Trump and his crew might finally meet justice, some of which Tribe now regrets partaking in. And in another sign of the divisiveness of the Trump era, Tribe and his more MAGA-friendly Harvard Law colleague Alan Dershowitz—who is defending the president in his impeachment trial—have descended into a bitter feud, with Dershowitz accusing Tribe of harboring a “vendetta” against him for supporting Trump throughout his various legal woes. Tribe has been pushing for Trump’s impeachment and removal from office from the day former FBI Director James Comey was sacked. Since then, he’s urged House Democrats to take the impeachment plunge and, when they finally got there, counseled top lawmakers on how to handle it, even huddling with them personally ahead of key hearings.

As the U.S. Senate continues the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, a meme is circulating claiming that if the Senate does not convict, Trump can run for president two more times. The grammatically challenged post reads: "Want to blow a snowflakes mind? Remind them if Trump is impeached in the house and not senate, he can run 2 more times. The U.S. Constitution states that if a president is impeached by the House but not convicted by the Senate, that person’s first term is nullified and they are eligible to run for office two more times." The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed... "It’s totally false. Ludicrous. Wholly made up," said Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, co-author of "To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment." It’s as simple as the beginning of  Section 1 of the 22nd Amendment, University of Missouri law professor and impeachment expert Frank Bowman told us. It reads: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once."

MSNBC's Chris Hayes with Neal Katyal and Laurence Tribe about Bolton's new information and how Chief Justice Roberts can make rulings.

Stephen Colbert tore into the arguments used by President Donald Trump’s defenders, who claim abuse of power isn’t impeachable because it’s not a crime. “You don’t have to break the law to get fired,” the “Late Show” host said on Monday. “It may not be against the law for you to dunk your junk in my cappuccino, but I still want you fired. America does not run on junk-dunking.” Then, Colbert cited Harvard constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe, who said the idea that only criminal acts are impeachable has “died a thousand deaths” in legal writings, yet “staggers on like a vengeful zombie.”

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.