Laurence Tribe

As the entire world now knows, last Friday special counsel Robert Mueller submitted the final version of his report to Attorney General William Barr. ... Why is impeaching Donald Trump viewed by many people -- including prominent Democrats -- as a near-term impossibility? Could impeachment succeed, and under what circumstances? Are congressional investigations and hearings a better way of holding Trump and his administration accountable for their misdeeds and general disregard for democracy? What would happen if Donald Trump were to be impeached and convicted, or if he loses the 2020 presidential election? Would he declare a national emergency in an effort to stay in office? In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Laurence Tribe, a leading scholar of constitutional law and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University.

... Mueller Twitter, for all its vexations and sideshows, has been a helpful resource to interpret the larger meaning of all the indictments, sentencings, bombshells, and reports that fizzled out. ... Below is a rough guide to the voices leading the conversation about the special counsel on Twitter, and who will be essential to pay attention to whenever the Mueller report finally goes public. ... Laurence Tribe: A Harvard law professor and member of the Al Gore legal team that contested the results of the Florida recount, Tribe’s feed consists of huge-if-true takes on all sorts of stories that paint Trump in a negative light.

Attorney General William Barr’s summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report is already being interpreted in conflicting ways. ... So, what should we believe now that we’ve gotten a glimpse into Mueller’s findings? Politico Magazine surveyed some of the smartest legal minds out there—prosecutors, professors and more—and asked: Is the president in the clear? Here’s what they told us. ... Laurence H. Tribe: As Barr’s summary itself conceded, the president hasn’t been “exonerated.” But that’s not how the nation is likely to see it. Although the House Judiciary Committee must nonetheless call Barr to testify, and must demand to see the full Mueller report including the underlying evidence, I think the focus—as Representative Adam Schiff has stressed for some time now—should be on whether Trump’s economic or other personal interests make him beholden, now and going forward, to Russia or Saudi Arabia or other foreign powers whose interests do not align with ours.

A hearing in the Fourth Circuit on appeal of a lower court ruling allowing the District of Columbia and Maryland to sue President Trump under the Constitution’s emoluments clause went, to put it mildly, poorly. All three judges are GOP appointees, one by Trump himself.  ... Constitutional scholar Larry Tribe conceded, “It’s always treacherous to read too much into the questions counsel are asked by appellate judges, but the questions the Fourth Circuit panel asked ... voicing skepticism — unwarranted, in my view — about harm to the State of Maryland and to DC suggest to me that these judges, unlike District Court Judge [Peter J.] Messitte, might have been readier to support standing for the competing hotels and restaurant workers like those who joined the CREW lawsuit that’s currently on review in the Second Circuit, where the district court failed to grant standing.” Tribe is co-counsel in the Second Circuit suit.

President Donald Trump continued his attacks on the late Arizona senator John McCain (R) today — this time complaining that he “didn’t get a thank you” for approving his state funeral. During an official White House event at an Ohio tank factory on Wednesday afternoon, Trump spent several minutes criticizing McCain, who passed away last August from brain cancer. The president’s comments marked the fourth time in less than a week that he’s lashed out at the former Republican senator. ...“Trump now claims credit for the McCain funeral! He says 'as president' he had to 'approve' it,” Harvard Law School professor Laurence H. Tribe tweeted. “BS! Lying in state at the Capitol was up to Congress, not POTUS. This despot has the gall to say a hero’s burial is within his control. What a putz.”

Democratic presidential candidates are beginning to coalesce around the idea of court-packing, that is, expanding the Supreme Court to “make up” for President Trump’s appointed judges. The theory goes that the seat now held by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch should have been filled by President Barack Obama’s pick, Merrick Garland, whom Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) unfairly denied a vote. ... Larry Tribe likewise argues against court-packing. “I’m not in favor of trying what FDR sought to do — and was rebuffed by the Democratic Senate for attempting," he tells me. "Obviously partisan Court-expansion to negate the votes of justices whose views a party detests and whose legitimacy the party doubts could trigger a tit-for-tat spiral that would endanger the Supreme Court’s vital role in stabilizing the national political and legal system.” He adds, “Besides, proponents of partisan Court-packing haven’t proposed a realistic way of handling the transition to a 15-Justice Court.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Joshua A. Geltzer: Constitutional democracies are under attack across the globe. As the tide of autocracy rises, not even our American republic is safe. Among the most alarming signals is President Donald Trump’s assault on truth and attack on dissent. He asserts, without a shred of evidence, that his 2016 opponent’s nearly 3 million popular vote margin had to reflect voter fraud. He dismisses as a hoax the mounting evidence that it was he who actually defrauded the American people by directing payments of hush money and deceiving voters about his continued pursuit of business interests in Russia. Our legal system provides no timely relief from such alarming mendacity even as it erodes the foundations of our republic. But when the president shores up this deception by silencing disagreement and dissent, he finally crosses a legal line that the courts thankfully can police. A landmark legal battle that will unfold later this month in federal court in New York represents a welcome chance for freedom of expression to triumph over falsehood. The two of us, together with other First Amendment experts, have filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting those who sued Trump for blocking their free expression. That brief urges the court to seize this vital opportunity to vindicate our Constitution’s promise that freedom of speech will pave the path to a society built on truth, not lies.

Rep. Steve King has civil war on his mind. The Iowa Republican broached the subject in a Saturday evening Facebook post - a bizarre meme of two fighting figures, one red and one blue, each an amalgamation of states based on their political leanings. "Folks keep talking about another civil war," the meme read. "One side has about 8 trillion bullets, while the other side doesn't know which bathroom to use." ... "This is treason," said Richard Painter, the Bush administration ethics chief, on Twitter. "Steve King should be expelled from the House immediately." Responding to Painter, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe modified his criticism: King "isn't actually COMMITTING treason, but he is fomenting and inciting it. Ample reason to expel him."

2020 presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke reminds Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe of a former student he once took under his wing. As O'Rourke, 46, embarks on his first trip as a candidate, Tribe said the former Texas congressman is showing the fast-paced development he also witnessed in former President Barack Obama. ".@BetoORourke appears to be absorbing information like a sponge on the campaign trail. He hears and processes everything, forgets nothing. Reminds me in that way, even apart from the charisma, of my brilliant former student, someone you may have heard of: President @BarackObama," he tweeted.

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe has raised concerns that President Donald Trump could go to extreme lengths to hold onto power after 2020. Tribe, a constitutional law scholar at Harvard Law School, appeared on MSNBC’s AM Joy with host Joy Reid on Sunday. During the interview, the legal expert warned that Trump, in his opinion, presents unique threats to the country and democracy. “Elections happen every four years,” Tribe explained. “And sometimes some leaders are much too dangerous to leave in power — and this may be such a case. The fact is by 2020, the amount of damage that will have been done to our rule of law, to constitutional norms will be very great and we can’t count on him [Trump] being out of office in 2020.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says that while Donald Trump is not fit to serve, impeachment would divide the country. Joy Reid and Harvard professor of constitutional law Laurence Tribe discuss if and when impeachment could serve America.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: The Senate has now joined the House in approving a resolution to terminate President Donald Trump's declaration of a "national emergency" to get billions of dollars that Congress refused to give him for a wall on the southern border. Even Republican Sen. Mike Lee, who led a last-ditch effort to strike a deal with the president, supported the 59-41 congressional rebuke. The resolution is less than a page long and does little to capture the full human stakes of Trump’s latest act of self-aggrandizement. The declaration itself is causing serious harm to our border communities — and that harm can't be undone if Trump vetoes the resolution, as he has vowed he will. Cities like El Paso, Texas, thrive as safe and successful communities precisely because of their cooperative relationship with the Mexican authorities and people.

After the skimpy sentence handed down by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis in Virginia last week, Wednesday proved satisfying for those straining to see some semblance of equal justice under the law. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told me that “the crimes charged appear to be very serious and distinct enough from the federal crimes for which Manafort has been sentenced to avoid any double jeopardy problem either as a matter of New York law or as a matter of federal constitutional law in the event that the Supreme Court were to jettison the separate sovereigns doctrine in Gamble v. United States, currently awaiting decision after the December 6 oral argument.”

With Nancy Pelosi's decision to essentially take impeachment off the table, are House Democrats setting the bar impossibly high for removing a President going forward? Harvard law Professor Laurence Tribe joins Katy Tur to discuss.

The Post reports on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) remarks during an interview about a potential impeachment of President Trump: “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.” ... The rub is if the evidence is truly compelling but Republicans remain his obstinate defenders. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe argues that in such a case you also have to consider “the danger of NOT impeaching a president whose guilt has become clear just because the Senate seems too beholden to the president to remove him.”

(Transcript) ANA CABRERA (CNN): You have been critical of President Trump. We laid out how unprecedented some of this is. Yet, you say now is not the time for impeachment. What is the threshold for impeachment, in your mind? LAURENCE TRIBE: The threshold has certainly been met in terms of the likely offenses that are emerging from the evidence. But there's no point in impeaching a president when the Senate is really very much in his hip pocket and will not remove him. We really need to investigate thoroughly. So much of what we know, we only know in dribs and drabs. A great deal has been unmasked by Robert Mueller. Much of it will become public, not all of it. Much is being learned in the Southern District of New York. But it's mostly the House of Representatives, the investigations in the Judiciary Committee, the Oversight Committee, the Intelligence Committee, that's going to reveal a great deal. Then we'll see. We'll see whether the time has come to pull the impeachment trigger.

Before Donald Trump was even confirmed as the Republican Party’s nominee for the White House in the summer of 2016, he was besieged with threats of impeachment for his rabble-rousing rhetoric on the campaign trail. Then he actually became president. ... But Harvard Law constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe wants people to know that impeachment can be a double-edged sword. ... Tribe spoke to Newsweek about his book, the way Democrats are handling impeachment talk and what might happen next.

Politicians and legal experts have poured scorn on the lenient treatment of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort after he was sentenced to 47 months in prison for bank and tax fraud.... Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, said he had “rarely been more disgusted by a judge’s transparently preferential treatment to a rich white guy who betrayed the law and the nation”.

Legal observers were surprised by the relatively light, 47-month sentence received Thursday by President Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was convicted in August on charges of tax and bank fraud. The 69-year-old, who appeared in the court in Virginia in a wheelchair and pleaded for compassion, could have been sentenced to up to 24 years in federal prison. ...Some of the negative reaction was aimed at the judge who set the sentence. Judge T.S. Ellis of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said the possible long sentence for Manafort under federal guidelines was "excessive" and said Manafort "has lived an otherwise blameless life." "Judge Ellis has inexcusably perverted justice and the guidelines," Harvard Law School professor and Trump critic Laurence Tribe tweeted.

Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chief, was sentenced to a mere 47 months for eight white-collar crime convictions. In handing down his sentence, Judge T.S. Ellis added insult to injury by stating Manafort had lived a “blameless” life before getting caught committing a host of crimes. Ellis seems to have been unaware that for a good deal of his adult life, Manafort made money — blood money, his own daughter called it — representing a rouges’ gallery of butchers. Newsweek recounted his non-Russian clientele. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tweeted, “Judge Ellis’s assessment that Manafort led an ‘otherwise blameless life’ was proof that he’s unfit to serve on the federal bench. I’ve rarely been more disgusted by a judge’s transparently preferential treatment to a rich white guy who betrayed the law and the nation.”