Laurence Tribe

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: There is now powerful evidence that President Trump committed impeachable offenses by soliciting (and all but coercing) Ukraine’s president to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has confirmed that the House will move swiftly to investigate this threat to democracy, national security, and the separation of powers. The first stages of that impeachment inquiry are already underway. It’s therefore important to think ahead about what should happen as the House inquiry unfolds — especially in the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, chaired respectively by Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler. If the House is going to impeach the president, it better have a plan.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: There is now powerful evidence that Donald Trump committed impeachable offenses by using his foreign policy and military powers to solicit (and all but coerce) Ukraine’s president to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, has confirmed that the House will move swiftly to investigate this threat to democracy, national security, and the separation of powers.  The first stages of that impeachment inquiry are already underway. It’s therefore important to think ahead about what should happen as the House inquiry unfolds – especially in the House intelligence and judiciary committees, chaired respectively by Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler. If the House is going to impeach the president, it better have a plan. This may seem obvious, but it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Each passing day brings new revelations about the depth of Trump’s abuses, and the involvement of senior officials in fomenting or concealing them. Trump and his allies have responded by seeking to daze and disorient the public; they apparently hope to gaslight their way past high crimes and misdemeanors. With so many fires being set, attention is focused on the latest breaking news.

Ever since the revelation in the summer of 2016 that Russia was hacking the Democratic National Committee to help elect Donald Trump, his critics have been searching for evidence that he is loyal to Russia. We still don’t know the full story of President Trump’s ties with Moscow; an FBI counterintelligence investigation is apparently still going on. But from what we know, it’s a mistake to imagine that Trump is loyal to any country — whether the United States or Russia. His only loyalty is to himself. His policy is not “America First.” It is Trump First. ... Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe tells me the current Supreme Court “wouldn’t regard U.S. v. Nixon as controlling,” both because the court is now more conservative and because (unlike in 1974) there is no ongoing criminal prosecution of presidential aides that requires the documents. But Tribe suggests that the transcripts may come out anyway: “Now that impeachment is all but inevitable, the sinking ship will spring one leak after another.”

President Donald Trump's tweets denouncing Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff were "terribly irresponsible thing" according to a military expert. On Sunday, Trump lashed out against Schiff, who heads up the House Intelligence Committee, accusing the Californian Congressman of "Fraud & Treason." ... Laurence Tribe, a legal scholar and Carl M. Loeb University Professor at the Harvard Law School, called it "a grave abuse of his bully pulpit," describing Trump as "a menace to our democracy."

The Democrats don’t have a stellar recent record of conducting congressional hearings. They couldn’t figure out how to respond effectively to Brett Kavanaugh’s righteous anger or to ask some of the probing follow-up questions that his testimony raised. Democrats also struggledthis year to turn hearings on the Russia scandal into the kind of compelling television that would move public opinion...I am glad to see that the party has given a central role to Adam Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He’s a much more effective questioner and speaker than most members of the judiciary or oversight committees...Schiff “is focused like a laser on national security. That’s at the heart of why Trump must be impeached. He endangers the nation for his own benefit,” Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School wrote this week.

President Donald Trump’s decision not to release his tax returns in 2016 has spurred battles coast-to-coast on the state and federal level. Two states have passed laws in response to his refusal, which he has said is because he is under IRS audit. And Congressional Democrats have requested and subpoenaed his returns, saying they need them to assess how the IRS audits presidents. Those efforts have brought unique legal battles, and the outcomes could determine whether lawmakers or the public are able to scrutinize the president’s financial activity...“The California law does not add an additional ‘qualification’ because any candidate can easily comply with it merely by disclosing readily available and obviously relevant information,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School who focuses on constitutional issues. A free speech question is whether California could be seen as forcing Trump and other candidates to speak, in a certain sense, by producing their returns, said Lawrence Lessig, also a professor at Harvard Law School...“The idea that it’s not constitutional because it doesn’t serve a legitimate legislative purpose is just crazy talk,” Lessig said. While politics will always play a role in the decisions of lawmakers, Congress “certainly has the right to police the integrity of the executive branch of the president,” he said. That assessment fits into the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, according to Howard Abrams, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School who focuses on tax issues. “Historically the Supreme Court has been reluctant to invalidate legislative action based on bad intent because if it could be done with good intent, they’ll just re-pass the law with a different record,” he said.

The Democrats don’t have a stellar recent record of conducting congressional hearings. They couldn’t figure out how to respond effectively to Brett Kavanaugh’s righteous anger or to ask some of the probing follow-up questions that his testimony raised. Democrats also struggled this year to turn hearings on the Russia scandal into the kind of compelling television that would move public opinion. ... Schiff “is focused like a laser on national security. That’s at the heart of why Trump must be impeached. He endangers the nation for his own benefit,” Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School wrote this week.

The White House memo reconstructing a July phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky landed on the internet on Wednesday like a dress that is either clearly blue and black or clearly white and gold, depending on the viewer. ...We asked a group of legal experts what to make of it all. ... "The phone call ‘clearly establishes high crimes and misdemeanors’ " Laurence H. Tribe is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. The White House’s reconstruction of the phone call clearly establishes high crimes and misdemeanors, even if no further evidence were available. It shows a president responding to a desperate request by an ally for military assistance that he is secretly withholding by indicating that he might be able to help but—and his use of the word “though” is telling—he would appreciate the ally’s help in going after the former vice president and his son. ... Trump revealed ‘his intent to use U.S. government resources and power to further his personal agenda’ Jennifer Taub is the Bruce W. Nichols visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School. Placed in its full context, this partial summary of this single 30-minute phone conversation between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky provides compelling evidence of an impeachable offense. Remember at the time of the call, President Trump was withholding $250 million in military aid to Ukraine. Furthermore, this document itself states it is not a literal transcript, but based on “notes and recollections.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Let us count the ways. The White House readout of President Donald Trump’s phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shows that the American president has committed a multitude of high crimes and misdemeanors, all of them impeachable. Even without considering the many prior offenses that were surfaced in the Mueller report and in the special counsel’s prosecutions of numerous Trump allies and associates, including in the Southern District of New York, this readout — which must be the least incriminating version the White House could compose despite its remarkable skills at shading the truth or falsifying it altogether — is utterly devastating. The “high crimes and misdemeanors” that the readout reveals — to use the Constitution’s term for impeachable offenses beyond “treason” and “bribery” (both of which the readout comes close to establishing) — begin with Trump abusing the foreign policy powers entrusted to the president by Article II in order to serve his own political interests rather than the interests of the American people.

Legal scholars who have studied impeachment say it was not intended as a means to remove a president who commits any crime or loses the support of other politicians. Rather, it was designed for removing from office a chief executive who grossly misuses his authority to benefit himself and sacrifices the public good. ...Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, who like Gerhardt, wrote a book on impeachment, stressed that the Constitution sets a high standard for impeachable offenses. If the president was shown to be a shoplifter or accused of disorderly conduct or even cheats on his taxes, those alone would not be grounds for impeachment, Sunstein said. “The idea of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ is not a political term. It was understood as a legal term which came with a history,” he said. ... Many scholars have tried to define those terms. In their book “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe and Washington lawyer Joshua Matz wrote last year that “impeachable offenses involve corruption, betrayal or an abuse of power that subverts core tenets of the U.S. governmental system. They require proof of intentional, evil deeds that risk grave injury to the nation.”

The president’s critics have found numerous justifications for impeachment throughout his tenure, including obstruction of justice during the Mueller investigation, violations of campaign finance laws in the payment of hush money to two women and what seems to be regular defiance of the Constitution’s emoluments clause...Impeachment is a process whose territory remains largely uncharted, since only two presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, have ever been impeached, and neither was convicted. “Because it has been used so rarely, and because it is a power entrusted to Congress, not the courts, impeachment as a legal process is poorly understood,” Noah Feldman and Jacob Weisberg have written in The New York Review of Books. “There are no judicial opinions that create precedents for how and when to proceed with it.”...But “not all crimes by federal officials have been seen as impeachable,” write Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, and Joshua Matz, an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law, in their book “To End a Presidency.” So where exactly does the line fall? During Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, Mr. Tribe argued that his conduct did not rise to the level of an impeachable offense because it related to his private life....The argument against this sort of ad hoc impeachment has its roots in Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis’s defense of President Andrew Johnson during his impeachment trial in 1868. As Nikolas Bowie, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School, writes in the Harvard Law Review, Curtis believed that retroactively criminalizing a president’s behavior — inflammatory, racist campaign speeches — would violate a fundamental principle of common law: “There must be some law,” Curtis argued, “otherwise there is no crime.” Mr. Bowie argues that the decision to impeach Mr. Trump without any statutory justification would set a dangerous precedent that “would apply not just to someone as unpopular as President Trump but also to future Presidents whose policies happen to misalign with a congressional majority.”

The last time he was accused of collaborating with a foreign power to influence an election, he denied it and traveled the country practically chanting, “No collusion!” This time, he is saying, in effect, so what if I did? Even for a leader who has audaciously disregarded many of the boundaries that restrained his predecessors, President Trump’s appeal to a foreign power for dirt on former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is an astonishing breach of the norms governing the American presidency...“I do regard this as a transgression by the president even more egregious and dangerous, and even more clearly calling for impeachment, than the many that have come before it,” said Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard law professor and an author of “To End a Presidency,” a book on impeachment. “It’s difficult to imagine a purer example, even on the president’s own account of his conduct, of why the Constitution’s framers thought it essential to include the impeachment power,” he added.

In response to reports that President Donald Trump repeatedly pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden, the President and his defenders have been quick to point out that there was never a mention of any kind of “quid pro quo” bribery deal. According to Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, despite reportedly urging Zelensky to initiate the inquiry eight times in one conversation, the lack an explicit tit-for-tat proposition rendered the entire interaction innocuous. ... Similarly, Harvard Law professor and author of the book “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” Laurence Tribe pointed out that Trump’s alleged actions unequivocally constitute a violation of his oath of office. “If Trump was pressing Ukraine to go after Biden’s family at the same time that Trump was withholding aid from Ukraine to defend itself from Russian aggression, that’s enough,” Tribe tweeted Sunday. “No explicit quid pro quo is needed to make this a betrayal of his oath and a ‘High Crime and Misdemeanor.’”

President Donald Trump faces renewed allegations of conflicts of interest between his official office and personal business after a letter from House Democrats revealed the Pentagon had spent more than $184,000 at his Scottish golf club. ... "It’s a clear violation of the Domestic Emoluments Clause of Article II, which flatly and unconditionally prohibits the president from receiving financial benefits from any state or any part of the federal government over and above his congressionally fixed compensation," Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, told Salon by email.

Trump's legal team filed a claim to stop a Manhattan D.A.'s subpoena of his tax returns that said the President cannot be prosecuted or investigated while in office. Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence why Trump's lawyers are wrong- and why the tax return subpoena cannot be stopped.

When liberals and progressives cite former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s best and worst rulings of the Barack Obama era, they typically praise his support for same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges while slamming him for his support for unlimited corporate donations in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission. The U.S. Supreme Court obviously isn’t going to be overturning Citizens United anytime soon given its swing to the right, but a group of 50 legal experts have another idea for ending that decision: a 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. ...The legal experts, according to the Law & Crime website, have signed a joint letter they plan to release on Constitution Day that calls for a constitutional amendment ending Citizens United. Those who have signed the letter range from former Federal Election Commission Chairman Trevor Potter to Zephyr Teachout (a law professor at Fordham University in New York City) to two professors at the Harvard Law School: Lawrence Lessig and Laurence Tribe. The letter states, “As attorneys, law professors and former judges with a wide variety of political beliefs and affiliations, we are convinced that our nation’s current election spending framework is a root cause of dysfunction in our political system and requires fundamental reform.”

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), in opening remarks before the testimony of Corey Lewandowski, said, “Today’s hearing is entitled ‘Presidential Obstruction of Justice and Abuse of Power.’ This hearing is the first one formally designated under the Committee’s procedures adopted last week in connection with our investigation to determine whether to recommend articles of impeachment with respect to President Trump.” ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe weighs in: “Communications by the president to a crony asking the latter to carry out a criminal act on the president’s behalf are covered by no privilege and subject to no immunity, and the president’s lawyers as well as the Justice Department lawyers must know as much.” He added, “Today’s spectacle was just another chapter in the ongoing criminal obstruction of justice in which this president has been engaged for well over a year, obstruction of justice designed to cover up the president’s illicit dealings with a hostile foreign power to help him acquire his office and to hold onto it.”

Elaine Chao, who serves as President Donald Trump's transportation secretary and is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, is being investigated by House Democrats over accusations of conflicts of interest involving her family's shipping company. ... Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, called Chao's potential conflicts of interest "extremely serious." ... "Secretary Elaine Chao’s potential conflicts of interest that the House Democrats’ letter targets are extremely serious, especially given Chao’s proximity to the center of Republican legislative power and Senate confirmation power in her husband, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell," Tribe told Salon by email.

CNN reports on the House Judiciary Committee’s vote on impeachment rules, “Thursday’s vote, which does not need to be approved by the full House, gives Nadler the ability to deem committee hearings as impeachment hearings. It allows staff to question witnesses at those hearings for an hour after members conclude, gives the President’s lawyers the ability to respond in writing to public testimony and allows the committee to collect information in a closed setting.” ...  After a period of quiet, the resolution signals impeachment is very much on the table. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe explains, “Today’s resolution marks an important milestone in the all-but-inexorable march toward President Trump’s eventual impeachment for ‘high Crimes’ against the United States — abuses of power that involve not only obstruction of justice and defiance of the rule of law but compromising entanglements with hostile foreign powers and, to put it simply, greedy and corrupt rip-offs of hard-working American taxpayers.” He adds, “Two particularly significant procedural features of the resolution are its provisions for direct participation by the president’s lawyers and by expert legal staff for the committee.”  

Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe said Donald Trump will have to "face the music" after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Friday revived a lawsuit alleging the president is violating the Constitution with his business entanglements. The three-judge panel ruled 2 to 1 to throw out a lower court ruling dismissing the lawsuit, sending the case back for further proceedings. The lawsuit argues that Trump failed to comply with the Constitution's emoluments clause by profiting from domestic and foreign officials who visit his hotels and restaurants. The plaintiffs in the case cite several examples of foreign government officials, like the Embassy of Kuwait, choosing to stay at Trump's properties over other venues while visiting the U.S. "It seems to me that now we're really cooking with gas in terms of holding the president's feet to the fire of the emoluments clause," Tribe told Newsweek on Friday shortly after the court's decision. Tribe is part of the legal team suing the president. The case was originally filed by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and other private groups.

In January, 2016, Donald Trump was seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency. He claimed that his principal rival, Ted Cruz, might be barred from election to the White House due to his having been born in Canada, albeit of American citizens. In support of his view, Trump noted that the renowned Harvard Constitutional law professor, Laurence Tribe had asserted that Cruz might be vulnerable to a legal challenge on this matter, Specifically, Tribe stated that this issue had not yet been legally resolved and was not “settled law.” Trump attempted to enhance Tribe’s credibility by referring to him as “…a constitutional expert, one of the best in the country,”. Last week, these words of ultimate obsequious approbation came back to haunt Trump.