Laurence Tribe

About four hours into yesterday’s marathon impeachment hearings, Republican lawyer for the Judiciary Committee Paul Taylor delivered a sharp rebuke to the Democrats’ case for bringing articles of impeachment. For nearly nine hours, the committee would hear from four experts in constitutional law, three of whom testified in favor of impeaching Donald Trump. But Taylor had a trick up his sleeve: damning passages that he said came from two influential books on impeachment, written by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe and Washington superlawyer Neal Katyal, respectively. The problem: Neither passage was correct.

Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe explained during an MSNBC appearance that the reason Democrats are so intent on a speedy trial is that President Donald Trump is trying to fix the election for 2020 right now. Speaking to Lawrence O’Donnell, Tribe said that one of the strongest reasons for impeaching Trump is that he continues to do what he did with Russia because special counsel Robert Mueller said that he couldn’t indict Trump. In the case of Russia, there was an argument that the Trump team didn’t know what they were doing. By now, they should know that it is illegal to work with a foreign government on a US election. Yet, that’s what they’re doing by trying to manipulate Ukraine.

Some observers of the impeachment hearings conducted under the auspices of the House Intelligence Committee bizarrely concluded that the proceedings lacked “pizzazz.” While that is a ridiculous metric for evaluating an inquiry into gross misconduct by the president, no one will find the report on those hearings and on other evidence boring. It’s got pizzazz to spare...Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe comments, “The evidence of those suspicious Giuliani phone calls with [Vladimir] Putin-linked thugs reinforces the overwhelming case that the American president was directing a criminal conspiracy to conscript US military aid and the august powers of his office to benefit himself and his own reelection at the expense of the national security.” He adds, “If this isn’t impeachable and removable conduct, we’re done as a constitutional republic.”

Republicans have decided that the most corrupt president in U.S. history is an international corruption fighter. Instead of grappling with evidence of Trump’s fixation on former vice president Joe Biden and bag man Rudolph W. Giuliani’s plotting to force Ukraine to smear Biden, the Republicans have decided to ignore uncontradicted evidence...The Republicans’ 123-page report asserts that Trump “has a deep-seated, genuine, and reasonable skepticism of Ukraine due to its history of pervasive corruption” and aversion to foreign aid, and that public criticism by Ukrainian officials justified his suspicion. The defense is ludicrous for a batch of reasons. First, for a guy so concerned about corruption, he never mentioned it. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe observes, “Trump never raised a concern with corruption as such on any call with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky or anyone else.” The Obama administration was interested in fighting corruption and deployed Biden to, for example, pressure Ukraine to oust a corrupt prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Trump thought this was awful and wanted to investigate Biden for doing this.

Federal court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson held that former White House counsel Donald McGahn must appear before Congress pursuant to a lawful subpoena, rejecting President Trump’s entirely unmeritorious claim of absolute immunity. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “Judge Jackson rightly and predictably rejected Trump’s extreme claim that McGahn is absolutely immune from having to testify in response to a valid House subpoena. The tough issues of executive privilege and national security secrets remain. She followed the precedent set by a respected conservative judge, John Bates. And she ruled in accord with basic principles of the rule of law.”

Gordon Sondland implicated Trump and other top administration officials refusing to testify in the plot to bribe Ukraine as Democrats weigh the next steps in the impeachment inquiry. Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence O’Donnell that Democrats should not delay the inquiry while they fight witness subpoenas because Trump's stonewalling can be used as obstruction: "The evidence is all there and there's nothing left to do but collate it into articles of impeachment."

U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland implicated numerous senior officials and President Trump in a plan to extort Ukraine: No White House meeting until the Ukrainians announced an investigation into nonexistent dirt on former vice president Joe Biden...Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to Sondland, played a key role in the plot and in obstruction of Congress. As such, Pompeo needs to appear as a witness or face impeachment himself... “The Sondland testimony puts Pompeo (as well as Trump, of course) squarely inside impeachment territory — and, under a normal Justice Department, in indictment territory as well,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. “There is no [Office of Legal Counsel] memo suggesting that a sitting secretary of state is immune from indictment and prosecution, and this one was deeply engaged, if Sondland is to be believed, in a conspiracy to commit bribery and extortion, to violate federal election law against foreign interference, and to obstruct justice, including obstructing congressional investigations.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was once very reluctant on impeachment, but has now used the term ‘bribery’ to describe communications between Donald Trump and Ukraine’s president, in discussion of possible impeachable offenses. Harvard constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe joins Joy Reid to discuss this and more regarding the impeachment inquiry of the president.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe: After just one week of public impeachment hearings, Donald Trump has unmistakably emerged as America's anti-president, the very model of the charlatan George Washington warned might be overtaken by "the insidious wiles of foreign influence." We have learned that Trump is so obsessed with the legitimacy of his 2016 election—and so terrified of becoming a private citizen (subject to indictment and imprisonment) after the 2020 election—that he embraces a conspiratorial myth of Ukrainian responsibility for Russian lawlessness hatched by an oligarch in Vladimir Putin's orbit. We have heard an official's first-hand account of a president so beholden to Putin that he blithely dismisses Russia's aggression as not "big stuff" compared with a public announcement by Ukraine's new president to the effect that, contrary to fact, its government is investigating (nonexistent) corruption by Trump's political rival.

Trump attacked ousted Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch during her testimony, leading Democrats to accuse Trump of witness intimidation that could create another article of impeachment. Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence O'Donnell that Trump's tweets shows he needs to be the center of attention: "It's the way he melts down in the process of being impeached that ultimately will lead to a president's downfall."

President Donald Trump inserted himself directly into Friday’s public impeachment hearing, attacking former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch on Twitter during her live televised testimony before congressional investigators. The series of ill-advised tweets shocked legal experts, many of whom pointed out that the president’s statements constituted witness tampering and would likely be added to the eventual Articles of Impeachment.... Daily Trump critic Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe also weighed in on Trump’s tweets, noting that his conduct will likely find its way to the House’s Articles of Impeachment. “This Trump tweet is criminal witness intimidation. Glad [Rep. Adam Schiff] called it out in real time. This vicious attack on a witness during her testimony may chill weaker souls, but he won’t get away with it. It’ll be part of an Article of Impeachment for obstructing Congress,” Tribe tweeted.

Laurence Tribe on impeachment: It’s about time we pay attention to constitution. Ambassador William Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent painted a sobering portrait of a president using the power of his office to advance his personal political agenda by withholding aid from a foreign power.

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe on Thursday dumped on Donald Trump’s political allies and defenders as he dissected the latest developments in the impeachment inquiry into the president. “I think it’s about time that people pay more attention to the Constitution and to the purposes of our democracy than to the trivial business of getting reelected,” Tribe told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews during a discussion on Trump’s pressuring of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his potential 2020 Democratic rival Joe Biden allegedly in exchange for withheld military aid. “If your office is so important to you that you’re going to violate your oath and vote for someone who violates his oath every day and who uses the office of the presidency to enrich himself and to enhance his power, then I really think you are a pathetic excuse for a human being,” Tribe added.

President Donald Trump is taking the fight to keep his financial records secret from congressional investigators to the Supreme Court. However, there is no guarantee it will pick up the case and it could take months before any decisions are made, legal scholars say. On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit knocked back Trump's appeal against the court's earlier decision that his accountants Mazars must release several years of his financial records, including tax returns, to honor a subpoena by the House Oversight Committee. A majority of the judges voted in favor of upholding the previous ruling. But three judges dissented against that majority decision. The president's personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, said he would now take the case up to the Supreme Court and petition for it to be heard there. "Sekulow and Trump's other private lawyers will have 90 days in which to file a petition for cert," Larry Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard, told Newsweek. "The Supreme Court typically takes several months to decide whether to grant or deny cert. In this case, I see very little reason to imagine the Court would want to grant a hearing, despite the dissents. But the exact timing and precise odds are anybody's guess."

In a last-minute move, Democrats are shifting their impeachment rhetoric and talking points just days before the first public hearings into President Trump’s handling of foreign policy in Ukraine. The televised hearings mark a crucial phase in an investigation conducted thus far behind closed doors, as Democrats seek to swing public opinion — and by extension, that of Republicans — behind the central inference of their impeachment inquiry: that Trump broke the law and should be removed from office...Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, suggested the Democrats’ references to a quid pro quo were a tactical mistake for a party hoping to sway public sentiment. And he welcomed the shift to more clearly defined terms. “It’s easier for the public to understand English-language concepts like ‘bribery’ and ‘extortion’ than it is for most people to plumb the meaning of the Latin phrase ‘quid pro quo,’ ” Tribe said Monday in an email, “and public comprehension is essential to the proper use of the impeachment power.” Tribe, a frequent Trump critic, rattled off a host of additional reasons he thinks the more explicit terms will prove more effective for Democrats taking their impeachment case public.

Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe explained that it has become obvious that President Donald Trump is using the Office of the Presidency for his own purposes. Speaking to MSNBC host Ari Melber on his impeachment special, Tribe explained that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) refused to authorize an impeachment inquiry until it became clear that Trump was using his office for political purposes. “He was taking hundreds of millions of dollars voted by Congress and withholding them from the Ukraine in an act of sheer extortion and soliciting what amounted to a bribe because he wanted Ukraine’s help, help against Joe Biden for 2020 and help in clearing him of colluding with Russia in 2016,” Tribe said.

White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s last-minute effort to join a lawsuit that could determine whether senior administration officials testify in the impeachment inquiry was an unwelcome surprise to former top national security aides, highlighting internal divisions among President Trump’s advisers in the face of the probe. ... Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at Harvard Law School, said Mulvaney’s last-minute move could be an attempt to give himself legal cover to put off the House demand. By attaching himself to the Kupperman case, Mulvaney could avoid having to testify in the House inquiry for months if the suit is appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. “I think he’s trying to be shielded from having to obey his legal duty to comply with an obviously valid subpoena,” Tribe said.

Professor Laurence Tribe speaks with Anderson Cooper.

According to several legal experts, the revised testimony on the Ukraine scandal by Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, is highly damaging to President Trump. In his new statement, Sondland admitted that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky knew he U.S. would withholding military aid until his country granted Trump’s request for an investigation of the company that employed Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden. This is a crucial piece of evidence suggesting that the U.S. president that committed a serious ethical violation, and perhaps a crime. Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email that Sondland's statement “contributes to the overwhelming evidence that President Trump abused his power and engaged in bribery and extortion by illegally conditioning the military aid Congress had voted for Ukraine upon President Zelensky‘s willingness to help him in the 2020 election by announcing an investigation into Hunter Biden."

The Post reports, “Former national security adviser John Bolton is willing to defy the White House and testify in the House impeachment inquiry about his alarm at the Ukraine pressure campaign if a federal court clears the way, according to people familiar with his views.” Nothing prevents Bolton from coming to testify about his knowledge of the Ukraine scandal. Other,current administration officials have been told not to testify based on a bogus absolute immunity theory. Nothing — other than Republican attacks — happens to them as a result of responding to a lawful subpoena. They face no “defiance of a ludicrous executive directive” jail...“It’s particularly ridiculous for Bolton to await some judicial ruling about his obligations to testify under oath to what he knows about a presidential abuse of power so grave that he described it to colleagues as akin to a ‘drug deal’ when other civil servants have risked their careers and endured presidential taunts and threats to speak truth to power in the face of an unprecedented White House order that they all clam up,”says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. He observes that Bolton’s "oath to support the U.S. Constitution should matter more to him than his loyalty to the person now occupying the White House and, frankly, his interest in maximizing the royalties from whatever tell-all book he plans to write."

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe on Thursday warned that “the United States of America is in real danger” as he broke down the latest developments in the ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. “We’ve got a president who is willing to compromise our national security by hurting a country that is a buffer zone between an expanding Russia and the NATO alliance by undermining the Ukraine,” Tribe told CNN’s Anderson Cooper about the ongoing fallout from Trump’s July phone call with Ukraine’s president. During the call, Trump had requested his counterpart to dig up dirt on his  potential Democratic 2020 rival Joe Biden allegedly in exchange for the release of military aid.