Laurence Tribe

On Cuomo Prime Time, Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who consulted with the Democrats on drafting the articles of impeachment against President Trump, explains why they did not include bribery and extortion in the articles.

In the days before articles of impeachment were unveiled against President Donald Trump, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot claimed that a Trump impeachment would be the first of its kind. ..."Every scholar concedes that the presence or absence of a federal crime is beside the point when it comes to constitutional high crimes and misdemeanors," said Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, co-author of "To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment. "

It has often been observed that one of President Trump’s biggest allies in the impeachment battle is Fox News — that if Richard Nixon had enjoyed the benefit of such a powerful purveyor of propaganda, he wouldn’t have been driven from office. ... It’s not. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz write, the framers designated the Senate for impeachment trials to create an “extraordinary court” composed of “the nation’s leading statesmen,” one up to the gravity of weighing “great offenses against the people.” The Senate would not be prone to factional pressure (senators have six-year terms) and would be independent of the president.

When you say someone has “no case,” it is usually meant figuratively, as in “they have a weak legal or factual position.” In the case of President Trump, Senate Republicans are making it clear that he literally has no case, no defense. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who has provided advice to House Democrats, tells me, “In a manner of speaking, perhaps this witness-free drama would be a ‘trial,’ but it wouldn’t be a trial as any ordinary speaker of English would use that word.” He adds, “True, under Nixon v. U.S., the Supreme Court wouldn’t interfere with the Senate’s determination, in its ‘sole power to try’ impeachments, that such an evidence-free proceeding constitutes a ‘trial.’ But reasonable people would surely know better.” He concludes, “The undeniable fact that the Supreme Court would let the Senate get away with such a fake ‘trial’ does not mean that it would actually comply with the genuine sense and basic purpose of the Constitution.”

Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe discusses the theory of the case against Donald Trump amid the House’s consideration of the articles of impeachment.

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe on Wednesday took apart a key Republican argument against the impeachment of President Donald Trump over the Ukraine scandal. Tribe, appearing on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes” said some Republicans were “missing the point” by claiming abuse of power (one of two articles of impeachment that House Democrats have released against Trump, the other being obstruction of Congress) is “not a crime.” “It is the highest crime against the Constitution,” said Tribe. “And in this case the impeachment articles are carefully written to show the aggregating circumstances.” “This isn’t just using the president’s power to benefit himself,” Tribe added. “But it’s doing that in a way that endangers our national security and that corrupts the electoral process by inviting foreign involvement.” Tribe, who advised the House Judiciary Committee on how to draft the articles of impeachment, earlier explained why the articles were “the classic high crimes and misdemeanors.”

On Tuesday, Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives announced that they would move forward with two articles of impeachment — involving abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — against President Donald Trump...Those two articles, in the words of Laurence Tribe, the eminent Harvard Law professor and constitutional expert, “charge President Trump with massive crimes against the Constitution and against the American people.” Tribe shared his thoughts on the House Judiciary Committee’s proposed articles with Salon by email on Tuesday morning, saying they lay out the most serious abuses of power ever alleged against a sitting president. "The abuses of power they charge, including unforgivable and ongoing obstruction of congressional efforts to invoke the impeachment power to hold the President accountable to his Oath of Office, with ‘actions . . . consistent with [his] previous efforts to undermine United States Government investigations into foreign interference with United States elections’ in 2016, are the most serious ever charged against any sitting president. And the evidence supporting the two charges, which the Articles clearly and unambiguously summarize, is so overwhelming that only an unwillingness or inability to face the facts could lead anyone to conclude that President Trump is innocent of the accusations soberly leveled in the Articles."

Days after three out of four prominent legal scholars agreed at a congressional hearing that it’s been shown that President Donald Trump committed impeachable offenses, hundreds of legal scholars–and counting–have signed their names on an open letter to Congress. The letter was published Friday on Medium by the Protect Democracy Project, which styles itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit group “dedicated to fighting attacks, from at home and abroad, on our right to free, fair, and fully informed self-government.” It’s reminiscent of a letter signed by hundreds of former federal prosecutors months ago, which said that Trump would have been charged for obstructing the Mueller Probe if he wasn’t the president. ... Many of the 500-plus names signed on this letter are familiar: Harvard Law Prof. Laurence Tribe, Vermont Law Professor Jennifer Taub, Associate Professor of Law at Fordham University Zephyr Teachout, Fordham Professor of Law Jed Shugerman, UC Berkeley’s Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law Erwin Chemerinsky, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School Prof. J.W. Verret, and University of Alabama School of Law Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law Joyce Vance, to name a few.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Of particular interest to me in this week’s House impeachment hearing was a moment when the chief counsel for the Republicans read aloud a quote about the dangers of a purely partisan, policy-based impeachment of a sitting president. This was from page 140 of my book with Joshua Matz, “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment.” The passage continued by describing the even greater dangers posed by a purely partisan, personality-driven refusal to impeach and remove a president who has clearly committed “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But the Republican counsel left out that part. After weeks of House impeachment hearings that resume Monday, Republican defenders of President Donald Trump have contented themselves with pointless, time-wasting calls for roll call votes; baseless complaints about the process, which was the most protective of a sitting president in the nation’s history; and deliberate distortions of what others had written or said. It all amounted to nonsense in the face of a deadly serious matter.

In a somber six minute address to the nation, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives would begin drafting impeachment articles against the President of the United States because he violated his oath of office, and compromised US national security. In interview on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Laurence Tribe discussesTrump dismantling checks and balances.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: As the House of Representatives moves toward formulating articles of impeachment, it is vital that the options on the table not be misframed. It’s a dangerously false choice to think that the House Judiciary Committee must either adopt a broad, kitchen-sink approach or take a narrow, laser-focused perspective. Yes, narrow is better than broad for the purposes of focus and public understanding. But narrow mustn’t mean myopic. What makes President Trump uniquely dangerous is not that he has committed a single terrible act that meets the Constitution’s definition of an impeachable offense. Neither Russia-gate nor Ukraine-gate was a one-night stand, and the obstruction of justice that enabled Trump to get away with asking for and benefiting from Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election is of a piece with his defiance of congressional investigations that might enable him to get away with demanding Ukraine’s intervention in 2020.

Law professor Jonathan Turley, Republicans’ witness testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, did not make an impressive case against impeachment. He blatantly contradicted his position pre-President Trump that a criminal violation was not required for impeachment. Moreover, his main argument, namely that the House was moving too fast, leaves open the question as to whether in a few weeks or a month he might support impeachment. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe gave Turley poor marks, commenting on Twitter that Turley’s “call for solid evidence was a truism. He gave no reason at all to regard the evidence gathered by [Rep. Adam B. Schiff] as insufficient to establish impeachable offenses.” Tribe also tweeted that Turley made a fatal error in pointing out a “French mistress” would be a “thing of value” in a bribery case. Tribe observed, “Fake dirt on Biden was of way more value to Trump than any number of French (or Russian) mistresses. [Turley] has cooked Trump’s French goose.”

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.