Laurence Tribe

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.

President Donald Trump, by his simultaneous existence as a real estate tycoon and President, continues to test the US Constitution in ways that the founding fathers didn't anticipate and for which the current legal and political systems are completely unprepared. The founders didn't specifically anticipate a hotelier President pushing his golf resort as the ideal location for an international meeting of heads of state. ... Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe, who thinks Trump should be impeached, tried to give Trump a lesson Twitter about emoluments recently. "Memo to POTUS: There are TWO Emoluments Clauses. The one you're violating when you line your pocket by having Pence stay at your resort & commute is the Domestic EC. The one you're planning to violate by having the G7 stay at the Doral w/out Congress's consent is the Foreign EC."

Representative Jamie Raskin slammed President Donald Trump, accusing him of violating the emoluments clauses of the Constitution by directing "hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars" to his personal businesses. Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, made the remark during an interview with CNN on Monday, saying that the president's actions were "absolutely impeachable." ... Constitutional legal scholar Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard University, slammed Trump over both issues in a series of tweets last week. He, like Raskin, pointed out that these were clear violations of the Constitution's emoluments clauses. "The Foreign Emoluments Clause is the core anti-corruption clause of Art I. The Domestic Emoluments Clause is the core anti-profiteering clause of Art II," Tribe explained. "Congress' consent (or lack of it) is key to the first. It's irrelevant to the second. Trump is violating both."

A former New York Court of Appeals judge who is a conservative Republican and a professor who is a liberal Democrat are teaching a new course at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law that examines the impact President Donald Trump is having on the Constitution. ... It is not the only law school course that examines the issues through the lens of the Trump presidency. University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law is offering “Law and Lawlessness in the Age of Trump” this semester. Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe taught “Constitutional Law 3.0: The Trump Trajectory” in the spring of 2018. And the University of Washington School of Law was one of the first to offer a Trump course shortly after his election, “Executive Power and Its Limits.”

Joseph R. Biden Jr. was on the brink of victory, but he was unsatisfied. Mr. Biden, the 44-year-old chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was poised to watch his colleagues reject President Ronald Reagan’s formidable nominee to the Supreme Court, Robert H. Bork. ... Mr. Biden was seated behind a desk in a spacious living room adjoining his study at his Wilmington, Del., home. A few aides sat or stood around the room, where pizza was in generous supply. Squared off against Mr. Biden was Robert H. Bork — or rather, a convincing simulacrum played by the constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. Mr. Tribe and Mr. Biden would spar for hours in a series of sessions that August, joined occasionally by other legal experts who would help Mr. Biden hone his queries on subjects from antitrust regulation to sexual privacy. “Biden’s questions were really smart, and they also needed some sharpening,” Mr. Tribe said in an interview, citing Mr. Biden’s tendency to “ask one thing and mean something slightly different.”

While in Ireland this week to attend meetings in Dublin, Vice President Mike Pence is staying at the Trump International Golf Links and Hotel in Doonbeg, approximately 180 miles away from Dublin. Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short said the VP was staying at the President’s property due to logistical and security reasons, though he also admitted Trump “suggested” he stay at the resort. In the wake of President Donald Trump indicating that he planned to hold next year’s Group of Seven (G-7) summit at his Doral golf resort in Miami, constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe on Tuesday decried both decisions, saying each violated a separate clause of the U.S. Constitution. “Memo to POTUS: There are TWO Emoluments Clauses,” Tribe wrote. “The one you’re violating when you line your pocket by having Pence stay at your resort & commute is the Domestic [Emoluments Clause]. The one you’re planning to violate by having the G7 stay at the Doral w/out Congress’s consent is the Foreign [Emoluments Clause].”

Who would have thought a play title as prosaic as “What the Constitution Means to Me” would in 2019 resound with such passion and urgency? But that’s been the intense reaction to Heidi Schreck’s celebrated performance piece, a Broadway hit this past season and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama...Laurence Tribe, professor at Harvard Law School: "To me, the Constitution is more verb than noun. Less a bequest from a few inspired but flawed white men than a challenge to build 'a more perfect Union,' a fairer and more equal nation, from their hopes and ideals — and from the dreams of those who marched and fought and died to make those ideals real."

Attorney General William P. Barr has booked a ballroom in President Trump’s hotel for his annual holiday party, an event that he could spend tens of thousands of dollars on and that drew criticism from ethics experts. ...Ethics experts said that Mr. Barr had not crossed the sort of ethical bright line that he would have if he were to be given a steep discount to rent space at the Trump hotel. Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and a vocal critic of the Trump administration, said he did consider the contract a “tasteless” decision that would harm Mr. Barr’s reputation, but not an impeachable offense.

Every single day, Donald Trump offers up a fragrant, colorful, teeming bouquet of reasons to believe he is unfit to hold the office of president. And every single day, the nation shrugs and waits for something to be done about it. (Really, congressional Democrats take a long summer break and largely shrug, and hope that the election will take care of this specific problem for them.) ... Larry Tribe of Harvard Law School puts it this way in an email to me: "The case for impeaching and removing Trump to protect our republic from the irreversible injury likely to be inflicted by his ongoing “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is now so compelling that only the delusional—or those utterly ignorant of our Constitution’s sole mechanism for defending the country from a lawless tyrant—could fail to agree. The only real question is whether attempting to remove Trump by impeachment is so certain to fail, and to backfire by increasing the odds of his remaining in office for a second term, that the effort would be self-defeating. But that excuse for not doing what’s obviously right as a constitutional matter is no longer tenable even if it might once have been: An impeached Trump who escapes conviction in the Senate after the evidence is laid out in public House hearings will be weaker in 2020 than a Trump who can brag that not even a Democratically controlled House could bring itself to impeach him. And GOP Senators who give him a pass will be easier to defeat than ones who’re spared any need to be counted."

The Russia report compiled by Robert S. Mueller III regarding Russian interference and obstruction details 10 categories of conduct that are more than sufficient grounds for impeaching President Trump. However, quite apart from the acts listed in the report, Trump has gone on a tear committing additional acts that betray his oath of office and should be included in any impeachment hearing. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe observes, “The president’s post-Mueller report stonewalling of Congress by directing all present and former White House employees to defy congressional subpoenas appears to be impeachable conduct under the Nixon Article III standard.” He adds, “Beyond that, the president’s deliberate ongoing defiance of the foreign emoluments clause by accepting financial benefits from foreign governments — and by inviting further such benefits — without congressional consent is impeachable, as is his dereliction of duty vis-a-vis Russia’s continuing attacks on our electoral sovereignty.”