Laurence Tribe

Constitutional experts say that President Donald Trump got a fundamental fact about impeachment wrong in his latest complaint about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. ... Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard who has co-authored a book on impeachment, called Trump’s argument “idiocy,” saying the Supreme Court would want nothing to do with a legal challenge like that. “The court is very good at slapping down attempts to drag things out by bringing it into a dispute where it has no jurisdiction,” he told TIME.

President Trump has embarked on a strategy of stonewalling, defiance and constitutional nihilism. With stunts such as blocking former White House counsel Donald McGahn’s testimony, he has announced that Congress is not entitled to hear from witnesses relevant to the already substantial mound of evidence of obstruction of justice nor get tax returns that the law says “shall” be turned over to Congress. “Defying congressional subpoenas as a strategy — especially without even a colorable legal argument, and Trump has none that I can see — is surely yet another act of obstruction,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe.

The Mueller report included substantial evidence that Trump committed the crime of obstruction. Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, who warned earlier in 2019 that impeachment proceedings ahead of the 2020 election would be “pointless” tells MSNBC Chief Legal Correspondent Ari Melber that the conduct evidenced in Mueller’s report, is “impeachable if anything is”.

Conventional wisdom suggested that the report from Robert S. Mueller III on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and President Trump’s efforts to to interfere with Mueller’s investigation would be underwhelming. Didn’t we know most of what was going on? The question, by the way, properly credits the press with getting the key facts right. And yet the overwhelming reaction—even from a few brave Republicans—is one of stunned amazement at the extent of President Trump’s duplicity. ... Laurence Tribe makes a compelling case that even if removal is virtually impossible, “it seems to me an abdication of constitutional responsibility for the House of Representatives to do anything less than impeach him and put him on trial in the Senate, whatever the predicted result.” Tribe advises, “Make every member of the House and Senate stand up and be counted. Who among them take their fidelity to the nation and its Constitution and laws seriously enough to risk losing their perks as senators or representatives? Who among them should be retired by the voters as sellouts?”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Despite Attorney General William Barr’s assurances and President Donald Trump’s boasts, the Mueller report doesn’t come close to exonerating the president of wrongdoing. Instead, it invites Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings. It’s time for Congress to heed that invitation. In its extensive discussion of the constitutional issues implicated by special counsel Robert Mueller's 22-month investigation, the report asserts that Congress has the authority to apply law “to all persons – including the President.” Specifically, Congress may “protect its own legislative functions against corrupt efforts designed to impede legitimate fact-gathering and lawmaking efforts.” The authority to prohibit a president’s corrupt use of power, the report finds, is essential to “our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

Legal experts Larry Tribe and Robert Bennett debate whether impeachment proceedings should be brought against Trump after the release of the Mueller report.

In the coming days and weeks, reporters and legal analysts will comprehensively analyze Robert S. Muller III’s report laying out in excruciating detail Russia’s attempt to interfere with our election, President Trump’s team’s willingness to benefit from such interference and even obtain Hillary Clinton’s purloined emails, and Trump’s systematic, continual efforts to thwart the investigation.  ...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “Volume II provides a perfect roadmap for impeaching this president for obstruction of justice if the House opts to pursue that path.” He continues, “Although Attorney General Barr did his darnedest to get in the way, and may have succeeded in creating a narrative that will protect the president, he had no way to erase or scrub that roadmap into oblivion.” Tribe points out that “it’s not just that the Mueller Report on p. 8 of the second volume says the Special Counsel’s Office is ‘unable to reach [the] judgment’ that ‘the President clearly did not commit [the crime of] obstruction of justice’ but that the Report elaborates numerous shocking instances of what any objective observer would have to describe as such obstruction.”

For 21 minutes on Thursday morning, with the nation watching, President Trump had the loyal attorney general he had always longed for. ... Mr. Barr’s untrammeled view of executive power goes back to the Bush administration, when he counseled Mr. Bush that he had the right to start a major war in the Persian Gulf without the authorization of Congress. Mr. Bush, more cautious than his deputy attorney general at the time, asked Congress for a vote to support the war. “Bill Barr is arguably going back to his worst instincts,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School and an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump. “He is bending over backward to serve as an advocate for the president and the presidency.”

President Donald Trump's attorneys have reportedly warned an accounting firm not to consent to a subpoena directing it to turn over the president's financial information to the House Oversight Committee. ..."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."

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg officially launched his 2020 presidential campaign on Sunday and immediately drew comparisons to a young Barack Obama. “The announcement of Pete Buttigieg was the most inspiring I’ve seen since Barack Obama’s,” wrote Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor and judicial adviser to Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. “His is a campaign not just for an office but for an era.”

A normal president confronted with a news story suggesting he ordered underlings to illegally transport asylum seekers to so-called sanctuary cities in order to retaliate against political enemies would deny knowledge of such a heinous plot. If need be, he’d make light of it, portray it as if it were idle chatter or a joke. That’s what President Trump’s devoted prevaricators (White Houses staffers) did following The Post account. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe tells me, “If carried out, this offer to pardon high immigration officials if they will break the law on his behalf is the most obviously impeachable action President Trump has taken to date: It would mean this president has seized the power to put not just himself but all who do his bidding beyond the reach of law." He continues, "That doing so is a high crime and misdemeanor is beyond dispute. Any president guilty of such conduct cannot be permitted to remain in office.”

Last fall, Laurence Tribe fell headlong into love. Legalistic love, that is. It was a platonic affair of the mind at the New York Theatre Workshop in the East Village, where he had secured a ticket to Heidi Schreck’s whip-smart piece about the framers’ masterpiece: “What the Constitution Means to Me.” So smitten was Tribe — a renowned constitutional scholar who has taught at Harvard Law School since 1968 — that he decided he had to meet Schreck. A journey through Google and other related searches led to an email exchange and a get-together, where the academician and the artist exchanged ideas and vowed to meet again, sometime soon.

The Post reports: Attorney General William P. Barr said Wednesday he thought “spying” on a political campaign occurred in the course of intelligence agencies’ investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election — a startling assertion by the nation’s top law enforcement official. ... This is the language of a PR spinner, not the attorney general of the United States. As my colleague Aaron Blakepoints out, “spying” is a loaded phrase and a political accusation. ... Constitutional lawyer Laurence H. Tribe tells me, “Attorney General Barr is surely among the ‘civil Officers of the United States’ subject to removal pursuant to the impeachment clause, Art. II, §4, and I don’t doubt based on his March 24 letter, his subsequent shifting and shifty pronouncements, and his disgraceful testimony yesterday and today (including his wild and unsubstantiated accusations against the Obama Justice Department) that, whatever highly redacted document he releases as Mueller’s report next week, Barr has been gravely abusing the powers of his office, possibly (although not, in my view, certainly) to the degree of committing ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors.’”

On Aug. 29, 1991, William Barr had a decision to make. Cuban inmates had seized hostages inside an Alabama prison in a bid to avoid deportation, and now they were threatening to kill them. Only 19 days into his job as acting attorney general, Barr ordered the FBI to mount a rescue mission. ... Barr, now 68, is “not afraid to make decisions that fall into his areas of responsibility,” said George Terwilliger, who served as Barr’s deputy during his first stint as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush. ... “It is like fundamentally rigging the game before we know what the actual score is,” said Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, who worked with Barr on a telecommunications case in the 1990s. “His integrity, his history, his reputation is shattered by what he has done. I have no idea what could have motivated him.”

With the Monday Morning Massacre at the Department of Homeland Security, President Trump has created one more “acting” Cabinet secretary, left open a number of high-level posts and created further chaos at the agency charged with securing the border. One would think someone would point out to him how counterproductive is his purge. ... First, as a constitutional matter. Trump is effectively diminishing the role of the Senate in its advice and consent role. Constitutional scholar Larry Tribe says he is worried about “a president who cares more about being able to bully his Cabinet members than about having Cabinet members with the Senate-backed clout to get anything done.” He adds, “It’s a symptom of Trump’s obsession with the appearance of power and his indifference to the policies that power can potentially implement.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Philip Allen Lacovara: The uncertain prospect that the House Judiciary Committee will receive the raw, unredacted report generated by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III got even less certain Friday. A decision by the federal court of appeals in Washington now confronts the House leadership and Attorney General William P. Barr with some difficult political choices. In a 2-to-1 decision in McKeever v. Barr, the court reaffirmed the principle of grand jury secrecy and concluded that a court has no “inherent power” to release grand jury information. This decision will give Barr a plausible basis to resist the Judiciary Committee’s subpoena of the entire Mueller report, even if the committee goes to court to enforce it. But both the House and the attorney general have ways to cope with this obstacle, if they have the political will and the professional judgment to do so.

The new Broadway play "What The Constitution Means To Me" examines the limits of the nation’s founding document, probing legal history and U.S. Supreme Court rulings to make a sobering case that the Constitution falls short of ensuring comprehensive rights for all Americans.  Playwright and star Heidi Schreck, who has written for TV shows like “Billions” and “Nurse Jackie,” paid her way through college by winning a series of speaking competitions that give the play its title. She recalls in the play that as a teenager, she was passionately committed to the virtues of the Constitution, hailing it in her speeches as a “living, warm-blooded, steaming document.”...The play garnered praise from theater critics and constitutional law scholars during an off-Broadway run last year. Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe told the New Yorker magazine after seeing the earlier incarnation that the show “is something that needs a huge audience” because “what she said is extremely on-target.”  

Lawrence Tribe, a constitutional law scholar at Harvard University, co-authored an op-ed calling on New York state Tuesday to move forward with a bill that would prevent President Donald Trump from using his pardon power to escape criminal responsibility. It noted that with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation having reached its conclusion, attention has now turned to the Southern District of New York — which is known to be pursuing cases surrounding Trump’s interests.“[It’s] easy to forget that the president, his company, his adult children and many of his close associates face potential criminal liability for business practices that trace back years,” Tribe wrote in an op-ed in the New York Daily News, co-authored by Ron Fein, the director of Free Speech for the People. “These are unlikely to be crimes of espionage or treason, but rather tax evasion, bank fraud and the like.”  

An op-ed by Laurence Tribeand Ron Fein: New York has a narrow window of time left to preempt potential corrupt pardons from President Trump. The state needs to act quickly — before Trump does. With Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report finished, and Trump proclaiming that he has been “totally exonerated,” it’s easy to forget that the president, his company, his adult children and many of his close associates face potential criminal liability for business practices that trace back years. These are unlikely to be crimes of espionage or treason, but rather tax evasion, bank fraud and the like. Can Trump pardon his way out of this thicket? When a criminal scheme violates both federal and state law (as white-collar crime often does), the possibility of state prosecution offers an important safeguard to limit the effectiveness of corrupt presidential pardons. At least it’s supposed to. Under longstanding Supreme Court doctrine, state and federal governments are considered “separate sovereigns,” and each sovereign may prosecute separately without running afoul of the Constitution’s double jeopardy clause.

For a week, criticism rained down on Attorney General William P. Barr. Why did his letter advising Congress of the end of the probe contain his own opinion on obstruction of justice? Why did he not lay out basic information such as the size of the report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III? On Friday, Barr seemed to concede that his critics had a point. A new letter was sent to Congress, a sign either that the criticism had personally stung or that Barr worried, once released, the actual report would demonstrate his initial letter was nothing more than political spin to defend his boss. ...“Barr has acted from the very beginning as Donald Trump‘s Roy Cohn,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, referring to Trump’s former fixer and attack dog. “He has served the president and not the country.” Tribe continues, “His initial letter was inexcusable in seizing from Congress, for as long as he could get away with it, the role of deciding on his own, in the inexplicable absence of a determination by Robert Mueller, whether Trump was guilty of obstruction and would be indictable but for the DOJ policy against prosecuting a sitting president.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Rarely have the demands of constitutional democracy and the rule of law been in greater tension with the imperatives of progressive politics. Fidelity to the constitution and the primacy of law over naked power call for a determined effort by Congress to unearth the full truth about Donald Trump’s actions leading up to the election, and since assuming office. Congress a duty to look into the president’s offenses in seizing the White House and whether, having arrived at the pinnacle of power, he obstructed efforts to uncover the details of his corrupt ascent and to disclose the many facets of his interference with investigations into those details. At the same time, one would have to be politically blind not to see that the vast majority of voters care far less about those matters than about kitchen table issues like health care and economic opportunity for this generation and the next.