Laurence Tribe

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., questioned former lawyer Michael Cohen about his knowledge of President Donald Trump's financial history, she may have laid the groundwork for future prosecution of the president. ...According to Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, "it appears that Donald Trump made a practice of wildly exaggerating his wealth and the supposed business acumen that enabled him to amass it." Tribe told Salon, "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."

In a groundbreaking announcement, the House Judiciary Committee has opened a far-reaching investigation into President Trump and his associates ...“Of all the scandals that have enveloped the Trump administration, the one theme that keeps returning time and again is his attempt to politicize law enforcement,” says former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller. “This is just another example of how he sees DOJ as his personal enforcement agent, there to punish his enemies and reward his friends, and it is the grossest abuse of power possible.” Constitutional scholar Larry Tribe agrees, telling me, “If Trump did order Cohn to take that action, it would’ve been a clear abuse of presidential power in violation of the First Amendment.”

Michael Cohen raised a litany of allegations against his former boss, Donald Trump, in explosive testimony before Congress this week, implicating the president and his inner circle in potential criminal wrongdoing on multiple accounts. ...Donald Jr and Weisselberg are also of interest for their role in hush money payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, who was paid $130,000 by Cohen to prevent her from speaking out ahead of the 2016 election about her alleged affair with Trump a decade prior. “Don Jr and Allan Weisselberg are both in deep trouble,” said Lawrence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. “Cohen’s testimony opened the door to a plethora of questions.”

The crowd that gathered in a Fifth Avenue apartment to hear Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe was as deep blue as the ocean.  John Heilemann, who was filming the event for his Showtime program, “The Circus,” asked the audience to raise their hands if they had voted for Hillary Clinton. Nearly everyone raised their hand. “Now raise your hand if you voted for Donald Trump.” One hand went up. ...  Tribe disappointed the faithful at the event, organized by Patricia Duff for the Common Good, when he predicted that President Trump would not be indicted. The lawyer, who has argued 35 cases before the US Supreme Court, also said, “The public is obsessed with impeachment.” He compared the Never Trumpers to children on a long car ride who keep asking, “Are we there yet?”

Joshua Matz and Larry Tribe, authors of “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” recently wrote: Over time, a focus on impeachment can flatten and distort our politics. Many of [President] Trump’s worst policies can’t properly be squeezed into an impeachment framework. The same might be said about many of Trump’s scariest foreign-policy judgments and public statements. The Muslim ban, family separation, erratic negotiations with North Korea, and inaction on climate change—these are abhorrent policies, but they are not impeachable offenses. When the only worthwhile end game is Trump’s removal from office, justifiable outrage over these issues too quickly recedes into the background, even as we are treated to an endless diet of speculative headlines about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s secret files. And if impeachment were to unfold, with the Senate almost certainly unable to reach a two-thirds majority for removal, what would all of this have accomplished?

As Donald Trump faces mounting court trouble over his decision to declare a national emergency at the southern border, one attorney involved in suing the administration ridiculed the president’s legal team. “Honestly, I have never had an opponent who was quite as helpful,” Laurence Tribe said during a Thursday appearance on MSNBC’s The Last Word. “And I find it odd to say, 'Thank you, Mr. Trump!'” Tribe, a constitutional law expert from Harvard Law School, has argued more than 30 cases in front of the Supreme Court. His latest case is against the White House: He is representing El Paso County, Texas, in a lawsuit to block Trump’s national emergency declaration. Tribe called the county "ground zero" in Trump's attack on the border.

An essay by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz: Calls to impeach President Donald Trump—and denunciations of those calls—have run rampant in American public discourse since Election Day 2016.  Although support for ending Trump’s tenure has never exceeded 50 percent, it’s no exaggeration to say that talk of impeachment is now a defining feature of our politics. But major implications of that fact remain underappreciated. Over the past two years, hardly any development in the federal government has escaped the inevitable think piece opining that Trump’s presidency has finally been doomed or saved. By November 2018, the word impeachment had already been uttered on cable news 12,000 times that year. New books and articles on the topic arrive weekly. Commentators including Elizabeth Holtzmanand The Atlantic’s Yoni Appelbaum have championed the cause. Tom Steyer has poured millions of dollars into Need to Impeach, and many liberals have rallied to his banner. These calls for Trump’s removal echo widely in #resistance circles—and also on Fox and Breitbart, which gleefully feature this “proof” of a liberal conspiracy.

A new lawsuit filed on behalf of the county of El Paso, Texas argues that Trump's national emergency declaration to build a wall is unconstitutional with the most high-powered legal team that has joined this fight. Co-counsel Laurence Tribe says he's never had an opponent quite as helpful as Trump, whose public statements undermine his case for a national emergency. Lawrence also discusses with co-counsel Stuart Gerson.

El Paso County in Texas has joined forces with the Border Network for Human Rights to file a federal lawsuit against President Donald Trump over his decision to declare a national emergency in order to build his US-Mexico border wall. "The injunction requested by the county of El Paso and the Border Network for Human Rights is amply justified by the complaint filed today," Harvard law professor Laurence J. Tribe said in a statement. Tribe is one of America's foremost experts on constitutional law and is famous for representing former Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore. He added, "President Trump’s effort to usurp Congress’s powers and abuse the U.S. Military manifestly subverts the Constitution and inflicts grievous harm on the 800,000 residents of a successful community that the President has shamelessly used as a poster child for his political posturing.

President Trump has a peculiar view of government in general, and of the Justice Department, specifically. He views himself as having unlimited authority over the executive branch — without regard to either constitutional or statutory obligations. It’s the “unitary executive” on steroids. Combine this with his mob-based worldview, in which he imagines that his wiseguys (e.g., Roger Stone, Michael Cohen) “fix” things just like others did for other presidents. Trump demands to know, “Where is my Roy Cohn?” The result is a reflexive, constant demand from Trump to make his troubles go away — not by cooperating, but by eliminating the key person atop the investigation. ... “As part of Trump’s ongoing corrupt pattern of efforts to deflect the federal investigation from his own criminal conduct in winning the presidency, his attempt to put a conflicted and thus legally ineligible person in charge of the [Southern District of New York-Cohen] prosecution solely to protect himself could well constitute the crime of obstruction under 18 U.S.C. Section 1505,” says constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe.

It’s now being widely reported that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is set to wrap up his investigation and deliver a report to Attorney General William Barr as soon as next week. Which has raised a big question: How much will Barr disclose about Mueller’s findings to Congress? ...  “The special counsel regulations in no way restrict the fullest possible public disclosure by the attorney general of Mueller’s findings and the evidence backing them up,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told me. Tribe also noted that if Mueller has chosen not to indict Trump because of Justice Department policy protecting a sitting president, that would argue in favor of transmitting as much information as possible to Congress “for consideration in the context of possible impeachment.”

The human body generates antibodies when it senses invasion from a harmful source. So, too, in our body politic, when a malign force such as an authoritarian executive attacks the foundation of a democracy, a healthy democracy will respond. That process of fighting a dangerous executive — President Trump — began on Friday when he declared an national emergency to justify spending that Congress had declined to authorize (a funding bill the president had signed, by the way). ...Many of these suits, as well as any brought by landowners whose property is taken to build the wall, are likely to make it past the first skirmishes on “standing.” Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “The House has standing to challenge the circumvention of its appropriations power under the district court’s holding in House v. Burwell [challenging Obamacare].” He adds, “Others with standing are those concretely injured by either the impending withdrawal of funds (as with states like California), the threatened uses of eminent domain (as with ranchers on the border) or the defamatory lies about their safety as communities (as with El Paso).”

A CNN legal analyst rebuked President Donald Trump's response to recent remarks from Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, calling prominent public officials critiqued by Trump "patriotic." ... Other legal scholars criticized Trump's tweets. Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, also called McCabe a patriot. "By Donald Trump’s ignorant and constitutionally illiterate definition of 'treason,' it’s he and not Rosenstein or McCabe who’s committing it almost daily. They are patriots. He’s the one betraying our country," Tribe tweeted.

Harvard Law School Professor, Laurence Tribe, joins MSNBC's Katy Tur to discuss the legal process surrounding declaring a national emergency and what could happen next.

“What does Larry want to hear?” Anthony Scaramucci once asked himself. He was explaining to me his final exam strategy that led to an A- in Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe’s Constitutional Law class. “He wants to hear left-leaning judicial activism. So I wrote left-leaning judicial activism and tons of pablum and liberal shibboleths.” Tribe shared his thoughts on this, below. ... "An exam filled with what Anthony Scaramucci told you was ‘left-leaning judicial activism and tons of pablum and liberal shibboleths’ wouldn’t have received a grade as high as an A-, and exams that did a good job explicating an originalist position would’ve received very high grades."

... Much as “Hamilton” gave America’s founding a progressive cool factor and became the quintessential Obama-era musical, “What the Constitution Means to Me” captures the mood of a time when institutional protections feel shockingly vulnerable and the country is getting an unwelcome crash course in constitutional arcana. ... The constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who was Barack Obama’s legal mentor at Harvard Law School, heard about the show from his eleven-year-old granddaughter and went with his family in December. “I thought, This is something that needs a huge audience,” he told me.

Despite the years that have since passed, many of Elizabeth Warren’s former students at Harvard Law School share the same distinct memory: it was their very first day at the prestigious institution, and for many, their very first class. ...Years later, when clips of Warren grilling corporate CEOs and cabinet officials from the US Senate went viral, her former students would fire off emails and texts to one another joking about what it was like to be at the receiving end. “We could all empathize with the witness in the hot seat,” said Andrew Crespo, a former student of Warren’s who is an associate professor at Harvard. ... Her research in bankruptcy law – and the impact on the average person’s medical bills, mortgage payments and other installments – led Warren to become a leading expert on the subject and rise in the academia world. “These are the issues she still cares about,” said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School who helped recruit Warren to its faculty. “I think she is extraordinary for this reason, that she got into politics because she cared about some issues. ... “When we brought her to Harvard, no one had a clue that she thought of herself as Native American,” said Laurence Tribe, the school’s professor of constitutional law.“I think she’s had an unfair rap,” he added. “I don’t think it’s the case that she ever exploited her family’s background or ancestry in a way that some people seem to think she did.”

Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker was slammed in The Washington Poston Thursday for abruptly threatening to not attend his scheduled testimony before the House Judiciary Committee. Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin described Whitaker’s actions as a “stunt.” “The real issue here is Whitaker’s fear of appearing and being forced to answer questions under threat of congressional contempt, which could occur if he is under subpoena,” Rubin explained. She interviewed constitutional expert Laurence Tribe, who has taught at Harvard Law for 50 years and has argued three-dozen cases before the United States Supreme Court. “This is outrageous,” Tribe said. “Whitaker seems to think he is entitled to dictate the terms on which he is invited to testify. He is not.”

"If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation." When all is said and done, this is the line people will remember. Beyond the teleprompter calls for unity and the predictable fears over immigration, this is the one line in President Trump's State of the Unionlast night that most stirred people. It has a nice poetic ring ring to it but a tragically flawed logic underlying it.  Too much form over content is always a dangerous tradeoff. Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, among others, wasted not a moment attacking it on Twitter. "One line stuck out like a sore thumb in Trump's State of the Union," Tribe tweeted. "'If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.' That's a ridiculous threat. It equates the search for truth with war. That's deeply wrong. And it's unAmerican."

House Democrats want to begin requiring presidential contenders to release their tax returns, which has some wondering: Can they do that? Some watching the debate unfold question whether the plan to require candidates to release a decade’s worth of tax returns would be constitutional. The Constitution lays out the qualifications for becoming president (being a natural born citizen; being at least 35 years old; being a resident for 14 years) and Congress cannot amend that list merely by passing a bill. But Laurence Tribe, a prominent constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School, says he doesn’t see a problem with Democrats’ plan. “If Congress were to add a substantive requirement that only some presidential candidates could possibly meet, such as a requirement of a particular level of education or prior officeholding, that would be unconstitutional,” he said in an email. “But a rule mandating financial disclosure of each candidate's tax returns would facilitate the operation of the electoral process without filtering out any political candidate.”

President Trump hinted Friday that there’s “a good chance” he’ll declare a national emergency if Congress refuses to bankroll his long-promised border wall with Mexico, marking the strongest indication yet that he’s willing to make the legally dubious maneuver. ... Legal experts disagreed vehemently and questioned whether Trump foresees a court loss as a way to dodge blame from his right-wing base. “There’s no case for an emergency. Period,” tweeted Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University. “If Trump pretends there’s a ‘national emergency’ and provokes the courts just so he can blame judges for his failure to build his stupid vanity wall, that’ll be one more abuse of power for Congress to consider.”