Laurence Tribe

... On Wednesday, the House judiciary committee voted to hold the president’s attorney general, William Barr, in contempt of Congress. It was a seminal moment in Democrats’ legal battle with the White House over access to the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on how Russia helped Trump win the 2016 election. ... Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, says: “This is more than minor fireworks. It’s a fundamental challenge to the structure of checks and balances. In particular, the president’s wholesale, blunderbuss assertion of executive privilege over the entirety of the Mueller report is legally groundless to the point of being preposterous.”

Harvard professor and constitutional law scholar, Laurence Tribe, joined us by phone to give us the latest in the fight for the unredacted Mueller Report, and for Trump’s tax records.

Law professors explain what it would mean for Congress to hold Trump attorney general William Barr in contempt—and what House Democrats are likely to do next. ... An across-the-board stonewalling strategy places what is supposed to be a basic element of American tripartite democracy—the checks and balances each branch imposes on the others—in serious jeopardy. "The Trump administration's refusal to cooperate represents a challenge to the very idea that Congress provides oversight of the president," Harvard Law School constitutional law professor Noah Feldman told me. "Anyone elected president, by definition, has a lot of power. Unless someone is in a position to provide oversight, the president functions as above the law." ... In the alternative, Congress can enforce its own contempt findings by ordering the House sergeant-at-arms to arrest an uncooperative witness who, as the Supreme Court put it in a landmark 1935 opinion, "obstruct[s] the performance of the duties of the legislature." Lawmakers haven't invoked this "inherent contempt power" in nearly a century, notes Larry Tribe, Feldman's colleague at Harvard Law School, which can make it sound a little outlandish to modern ears. "But you have to realize we are not living in normal times," he says. "In confronting this kind of unrestrained White House occupant, Congress might have to reach back into its toolbox."

The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote Wednesday to hold Attorney General Barr in contempt for refusing to release the full unredacted Mueller report to Congress as Democrats threaten to hold former White House Counsel Don McGahn in contempt. Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence O'Donnell that impeachment proceedings should begin: "There is a point when caution becomes cowardice and a point when cowardice becomes betrayal of the Constitution."

Attorney General William P. Barr refused to play it straight with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report. Instead of presenting the report objectively, he substituted his own view of the facts. Instead of adhering to the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo, he made up a new rule: A prosecutor can opine on indictment of a president even if he cannot indict him. Instead of looking at the mound of evidence of obstruction, he denied that there was a basis for bringing a case and went still further in parroting President Trump’s insistence that he had been cleared. Instead of responding dispassionately that no, there was no evidence of improper surveillance of Trump’s campaign, he invoked the ominous word “spying” and doubled down when asked about it under oath. ...Barr and Trump’s problem doesn’t end there. If Barr (and Mueller) can offer their views on Trump’s criminal liability, so can the Southern District of New York prosecutors investigating Trump’s possible financial wrongdoing. “I think they could,” former prosecutor Mimi Rocah, a signatory to the prosecutors’ letter, tells me. “I don’t know if they will.” Other legal experts, including former prosecutor Joyce White Vance (who also signed the letter) and constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe, agree. “They clearly should,” Tribe says. “I see no legal, ethical, or political downside. And these days it’s really rare to encounter a way forward that yields no minuses, but some distinct pluses.”

President Trump has a superpower. With just a few taps to the screen of his iPhone, he can transform his staunchest adversaries into . . . Donald Trump. No one loves a good conspiracy theory as much as the man in the Oval Office. Indeed, that is how he launched his political career. He was the chief propagator for a shameful lie that the nation’s first African American president was not born in this country. ... No less a figure than Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe wrote, “This is as loud a warning as anyone could ask for: Trump has no intention of leaving his sinecure and exposing himself to jail time.” But Tribe also acknowledged: “If he plans to stage his own coup, I’d count on the judiciary, the military, and, ultimately, a popular uprising to stop him. Best = landslide.”

On the question of impeaching President Trump, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe said that “We might lose our souls and our constitutional democracy if we do nothing."

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi predicted this weekend that President Donald Trump may not step down from power if he is defeated in the 2020 election. .. Lichtman's concerns were also echoed by Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb university professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard University. "President Trump has sent troubling signals that he might well contest the results of any presidential election he fails to win — and any House or Senate election his preferred candidate fails to win," Tribe told Salon by email. "Trump has even retweeted his agreement with the absurd and indeed radically anti-constitutional claim by Jerry Falwell Jr. that Trump’s first two years as president were 'stolen' from him by the supposedly illegitimate Mueller probe into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election. The 'argument,' though I hesitate to call it that, claims that Trump is 'owed' an extra two years as 'reparations' for the distraction of the investigations into what went awry in 2016."

First it was the former White House counsel. Now it is special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. In both cases, President Trump — seemingly petrified of witnesses concerning a report in which he claims to have been exonerated — has tried to suppress testimony from those with the most damning evidence of Trump’s obstruction of justice. ...So can he stop Mueller from testifying? “Of course there is no way Trump can stop Bob Mueller from testifying,” constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe tells me. “There is no executive privilege between them, and obviously no attorney-client privilege, and Mueller doesn’t even work for Trump.” Tribe continues, “Until he leaves [the Justice Department], he works for Barr. And Barr has no conceivable basis to stop Mueller from testifying.” In any event, Tribe explains, “Mueller is free to leave [Justice] at any time and will then be simply a private citizen.”

In personal style as in haberdashery, U.S. Attorney-General William Barr is conservative in an old-school way: quiet, dutiful, not given to showy demonstrations of emotion except the occasional flash of anger at Democrats and reporters he considers insolent for their probing questions. He walks with the air of a schoolmaster, which his father was, and with the discipline of that often-cheerless trade. ...“In a strictly pragmatic sense, his calculation might prove sound,” Laurence Tribe, the renowned Harvard legal scholar, said. “But the price he will pay in the court of America’s moral accounting will be immense. Sadly, Barr seems indifferent to history’s all-but-certain verdict that he has compromised his integrity, his oath and his sacred honour for no noble purpose.”

No wonder President Trump thinks he can defy Congress, tell his aides and former aides to defy Congress, threaten to fire the special counsel and mislead the American people: Attorney General William P. Barr told him (and us) that a president can end any criminal inquiry if he thinks it is unjustified. (Financial fraud? Witness tampering?) The Founders might be surprised to find out that the term of a U.S. president is the equivalent of a “stay out of jail” card, good until he leaves office — but not before pardoning himself, presumably. ... Constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe tells me, “Trump has no legal authority whatsoever to prevent McGahn from complying with Congress’s demand for his testimony, nor can McGahn invoke Trump’s gag order as a defense to a subpoena from Congress.” Tribe explains, “Former White House Counsel Don McGahn was never Trump’s personal attorney, and what he told Mueller about what transpired between him and the President with the latter’s public blessing cannot be shielded by whatever executive privilege might have been available at the time.” Moreover, “McGahn’s statements to Mueller are now part of the public record. Any executive privilege arguably attaching to those statements and their contents has been waived and cannot be unwaived.”

William Barr is facing impeachment calls from Democrats over his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia investigation, but experts warn that removing an attorney general is just as difficult as removing the president. In fact, it’s never been done before. ...But Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Newsweek that while Barr’s behavior “might in theory” warrant calls for removal, it “seems exceedingly unlikely.” "Barr’s manifestly misleading and obfuscatory testimony, whether or not impeachable, is certainly disqualifying for any attorney general. He really needs to resign," Tribe added.

There are growing calls for US Attorney General William Barr to resign or be impeached over his handling of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia report. It's been revealed that Robert Mueller was dissatisfied with William Barr's four page summary of the report in which he concluded that President Donald Trump did not collude with Russia to win the 2016 election and did not commit obstruction of justice. In the bombshell revelation, Robert Mueller said the Attorney General's summary "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of his work. ...It comes as William Barr today testified on Capitol Hill about the Mueller investigation. Guest: Laurence Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard University Producer:Linda Lopresti

The Post reports: Democrats in Congress can move ahead with their lawsuit against President Trump alleging that his private business violates the Constitution’s ban on gifts or payments from foreign governments, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. ...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who consulted on the case, told me the ruling is “very gratifying but not surprising. It’s the president’s corrupt financial entanglements with foreign governments that I’ve always believed would bring him down in the end. The Constitution told us to follow the money — and that’s exactly what we’re doing."

President Donald Trump's 2017 pardon of ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio should be found invalid, a bipartisan collection of advocacy groups and legal experts told the Ninth Circuit, calling Arpaio "one of the nation's most notorious civil rights violators" and saying his exoneration would be "corrosive of the rule of law." ...In a statement Tuesday, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, who took part in the groups' and experts' brief, said the pardon was "a license to violate the civil rights of refugees and immigrants." "The courts should strike down this blatant abuse of pardon power, which the framers designed as a way to temper justice with mercy — not as a way to destroy the very foundations of justice itself," Tribe said.

After special counsel Robert Mueller’s letter to William Barr complaining about his summary of the Russia investigation was revealed on Tuesday, top legal scholars — including a longtime Harvard law professor — condemned the Attorney General for allegedly misrepresenting the special counsel’s findings, with some calling on him to resign or be impeached. ... Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, a constitutional legal expert who has taught at the leading academic institution for almost half a century, condemned Barr for misleading public opinion in a statement posted to Twitter, and called for the attorney general to be impeached for his actions. “Mueller says AG Barr misrepresented the ‘context, nature & substance’ of his probe. What else is there? Barr is a total disgrace and a phony,” Tribe wrote. “He must now testify under Rep. Jerry Nadler’s rules, then resign.” “Mueller must now testify as well. This is a new ballgame,” the professor continued. “AG Barr flat-out lied to the American people about the Mueller report’s incrimination of President Trump. He’s been outed as a total fraud. We can’t let Barr — or Trump — get away with such gross abuse of power.” “Barr must be impeached if he doesn’t resign first,” Tribe added.

The Post reports on Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein’s resignation letter submitted Monday, effective May 11. No one in the saga of the Mueller report has gone through so many shifts in public perception or gone through such wild swings in his professional reputation. For a time he was the darling of Democrats, seeming to hold back the tide against interference with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe. Republicans such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) raked him over the coals regarding failure to produce documents (ah, those were the days when Republicans cared about the House’s investigative powers!) and even tried to impeach Rosenstein. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe describes Rosenstein’s tenure: “Self-serving. Self-protective. Filled with ethical compromise. Not exactly disgraceful. But not graceful either. Anything but heroic.”

President Donald Trump is suing both Capital One and Deutsche Bank to prevent them from complying with congressional subpoenas into his financial records. ..."It appears that Donald Trump made a practice of wildly exaggerating his wealth and the supposed business acumen that enabled him to amass it," Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, told Salon last month. He added, "Although there are no legal and especially criminal consequences to that kind of exaggeration on reality television or in talking to journalists at places like Forbes in order to cheat one’s way onto various lists of the wealthiest people around, there are very serious criminal consequences indeed when such lies, in the form of fraudulent financial statements, are used either to extract loans from banks or to obtain insurance on favorable terms from various insurance companies."

US President Donald Trump is refusing to cooperate with several committees in the House of Representatives that have launched investigations of his presidency and business dealings, setting the stage for a legal confrontation that is likely to land in the US Supreme Court. ... "Certainly, with respect to the most important of the witnesses that the House Judiciary Committee is trying to bring before the public, and that is Don McGahn, executive privilege was obviously waived and executive privilege has no application in most of the other instances," said Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School who has been a vocal critic of Trump.

A small but important trail of refugees fleeing the Nazis took an unusual detour through China. A new exhibit in Brooklyn marks the journey. ... Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor, a leading constitutional expert and an official in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department, also credited his direction in life partly to his years in Shanghai. These were very early years — he was born there in 1941 and left at age 6. His father, who as a young man had become an American citizen, was interned, he said, and young Larry recognized the injustice. “I thought, My father didn’t do anything wrong — why should he be in this place?”

Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe calls Trump's contempt of Congress an "astonishing exercise in arrogant obstruction of justice" and an impeachable offense. Tribe explains to Lawrence why Trump cannot fight impeachment in the Supreme Court as he claimed.