Laurence Tribe

Ann Coulter, an infamously estranged backer of President Donald Trump, is continuing to hammer the president over his inability to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. ...Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Tribe, however, immediately shot down Coulter’s claims that the president could order the wall built without congressional authorization. “Inherent presidential power as commander-in-chief doesn’t give Trump the power of the purse,” he wrote on Twitter. “We fought a revolution to end such power.”

This week we witnessed a jaw-dropping affront to the rule of law and a violation of the president’s oath of office. The New York Times reported: “Michael D. Cohen, the former personal lawyer and fixer for President Trump, indefinitely postponed his congressional testimony set for next month, his lawyer said on Wednesday, depriving House Democrats of one of their first big spectacles in their plans to aggressively investigate the Trump administration.” ...So why has this not caused a greater hullabaloo? Constitutional scholar and litigator Larry Tribe said, “It’s emblematic of a larger problem: Shouldn’t ‘high crimes’ (in the Impeachment sense) committed in plain view get at least as much attention as similar abuses committed in the dark and breathlessly unveiled in the form of ‘breaking news’?” He continued, “Many criminal law experts who should know better focus solely and obsessively on the precise language of U.S.C. §1512 (b) [the statute covering witness intimidation]. . . [and] the difficulties of proving the ‘intent’ element of that criminal prohibition beyond a reasonable doubt.” But of course special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in all likelihood will not indict a sitting president, so the real attention should be on whether such action is impeachable. The challenge, Tribe said, is how we “can protect ourselves from the seductively inoculating and anesthetizing effect of drip-by-drip disclosures — like those of Trump’s outrageous witness intimidation vis-a-vis his former fixer Michael Cohen — that generate more yawns than howls and seem unlikely to build up the bipartisan public outrage necessary for the impeachment power to be deployed successfully.”

For two years now we’ve heard, “No collusion!” and “Witch hunt!” Such disparagement of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s work was never viable (e.g. we knew about the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 for well over a year); now it’s simply wrong. Perhaps the new phrase, albeit not original, should be: What did President Trump know, and when did he know it? ...If Trump was directing campaign aides to intercede with Stone, and by extension, WikiLeaks, that “would plainly constitute another piece — a big one — in the mosaic of evidence showing that Trump was committing campaign-related crimes in coordination with Russia to rig the presidential election in his favor by knowingly weaponizing stolen information against his opponent,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. “That mosaic could certainly establish a high crime warranting Impeachment. But I still believe that an intense and public fact-finding process by the House, starting now, needs to precede any formal decision on impeachment, without which the essential public consensus favoring Trump’s removal won’t emerge.”

Michael Cohen is going to testify before Congress whether he wants to or not. A day after President Trump’s former attorney and “fixer” postponed plans to testify before Congress voluntarily on February 7th, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena that will effectively force Cohen to testify next month. ...As Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe points out on Twitter, it’s hard to argue that Trump’s threats toward Cohen are not in violation of federal law.@tribelaw Trump seems to have violated U.S.C. §1512 (b): “Whoever knowingly uses intimidation . . . with intent to (1) influence, delay, or prevent the testimony of any person in an official proceeding . . . shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”

Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe openly questioned why more attention hasn’t been given to what he’s described as “witness tampering” on the part of President Donald Trump toward his former “fixer” lawyer Michael Cohen. Referring to a BuzzFeed News article that suggested Trump had told Cohen to lie in front of Congress during testimony he had given, Tribe pondered over why Trump’s latest attacks against his former legal counsel didn’t garner more outrage or concern. “Why did Buzzfeed story about Trump’s subornation of perjury cause a Tsunami while his witness tampering in plain view causes only a ripple?” Tribe asked in a tweet he authored on Thursday morning.

The Supreme Court is not likely to review during its current term the program that shields young undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, leaving in place the Obama-era initiative that the Trump administration has tried to end. The justices on Tuesday took no action on the administration’s request that it review the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has protected nearly 700,000 people brought to this country as children, commonly known as “dreamers.” ...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “The absence of a circuit split would not have prevented the Court from agreeing to hear a case of this enormous national significance at the earliest possible opportunity unless it was reluctant to wade into so political a thicket at a time when doing so would clearly change the president’s bargaining leverage on the shutdown.”

“The talk of impeachment, all-but-taboo in Big Media’s coverage of Trump, [has] moved from the margins into the mainstream — across the journalism spectrum,” wrote Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post’s media critic, in her latest column. The topic was even part of this week’s episode of “Fox News Sunday,” as Sullivan pointed out. ... Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, and Joshua Matz also make this argument in a forthcoming epilogue to the paperback edition of “To End a Presidency,” their book about impeachment: “The president wins — and everyone else loses — when the main framework for evaluating his conduct is whether it will trigger impeachment. By battling on that terrain, [Trump] preemptively sets aside most standards by which a democracy should judge its leader. He also invigorates his base by turning every dispute into a referendum on his continued tenure in office.”

The practical realities of building new physical barriers along the US-Mexico border are bringing two cherished conservative principles into conflict — loyalty to Donald Trump and the sanctity of private property. ... Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, told me that when a private landowner is approached by a government agency that wants their land, that agency“typically gives them a deadline by which they must either sell the designated parcel of land to the federal government at the price offered by the government, or have it involuntarily taken by eminent domain at fair market value.”

Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe talks to Ari Melber about what Bill Barr must do as attorney general if he follows the 2000 OLC policy against indicting a sitting president.

The General Services Administration “ignored” concerns that President Trump’s lease on a government-owned building — the one that houses his Trump International Hotel in Washington — might violate the Constitution when it allowed Trump to keep the lease after he took office, according to a new report from the agency’s inspector general. . .  The report does not recommend that Trump’s lease be canceled. Instead, the inspector general recommends a new legal review of the deal. ... Constitutional scholar Larry Tribe finds that “It’s notable and admirable that GSA has recognized, however belatedly, that all public officials and agencies — from the president on down — are bound by Article VI to follow the U.S. Constitution.” He tells me: “That GSA should have addressed the constitutionality of the lease itself, given that the president was both landlord and tenant, is true, but I wouldn’t let the perfect be

... Larry Tribe, professor of Constitutional law at Harvard Law School, says that as long as Pelosi is opposed to the State of the Union happening, as scheduled, on Jan. 29, it won’t happen. “Pelosi was basically uninviting the President, but doing it diplomatically,” Tribe tells Fortune. “The form in which the State of the Union address is delivered isn’t constitutionally specified, but if it’s to be delivered as a Joint Session of Congress as has become the custom, the House and Senate must jointly adopt a resolution to schedule it. Without that, he can’t come. Neither chamber has adopted such a resolution yet, and as long as Pelosi opposes it, it’s DOA.”

Attorney general nominee William P. Barr generally acquitted himself well during the long day of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. He gave the impression of someone who is his own man, unlikely to comply with the president’s orders, if any, to interfere with investigations. He stood up for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, contradicting President Trump’s characterization of him and his investigation. However, in one regard, his answer was off-target and worrisome. ... “Bill Barr seemed to be channeling the awkward experience Justice Gorsuch had when he commented, as a not-yet-confirmed Supreme Court nominee, that the president’s attacks on ‘so-called judges’ were troubling to him,” says constitutional expert Larry Tribe. “Trump’s musings about pulling the Gorsuch nomination in the wake of that comment may have led Barr to avoid criticizing Trump’s intemperate and destructive attacks on the Department of Justice.”

President Donald Trump is set to face intense political opposition through the end of his term in 2021, under the cloud of an ongoing investigation into his ties to Russia — which has resulted in the indictments or pleas of several close aides — and with newly empowered Democrats in Congress. Even so, as history shows, a sitting commander-in-chief resigning or being ousted early is highly unlikely. “The framers of the Constitution realized that you couldn’t just get rid of a president because you disagree with him. That would change our whole system of government,” Larry Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, tells PEOPLE.

President Donald Trump might end one conflict with Congress over funding for his long-sought Mexican border wall by invoking national emergency powers, but he’s almost certain to ignite another, with repercussions Republicans may regret in the future. ... "Something that supposedly becomes a ‘national emergency’ only when Congress fails to give the president what he demands, but hasn’t been an emergency until that point, is obviously no emergency at all,” said Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, a frequent Trump critic. "The claim that there’s an immigration crisis at the border is totally fake -- apart from the humanitarian crisis created by President Trump himself."

QUESTION: Can Congress pass a spending bill to end the shutdown without the President? ANSWER: Yes. ... Under Article 1 Section 7 of the Constitution, the president can veto a bill, but Congress can override the president's veto with a two-thirds majority vote in both chambers. The clause is meant "to strike a balance between Congress and the Presidency," Laurence Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School explained.  "The Framers’ view was that they wanted a check on Congress," Amanda Frost, Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law, said. "The Framers were worried about Congress having too much power, though for the last 50 years I believe the problem is that the President has accrued too much power."

Two blockbuster stories have cast an entirely new light, and new urgency, on the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Muller III. ... Mueller inherited the FBI investigation, meaning whatever the FBI learned or concluded went into his bank of evidence in an investigation that was both a criminal and a counterintelligence inquiry. Constitutional scholar Larry Tribe tells me, “Under settled FBI protocol, no such investigation, whose purposes include protecting America from future attack, can be opened without a strong evidentiary basis and careful internal clearance or closed without either effectively ‘neutralizing’ its target — an impossibility with a sitting president as long as he remains in office — or clearing that target.”

House Democrats are aggressively exploring a possible legal challenge should President Trump declare a national emergency to build a U.S.-Mexico border wall, scouring federal law and court precedents — including a recent attempt by a Republican-controlled House to undermine the Obama-era health-care law. ... Laurence Tribe, a constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School, said in an email that the Burwell ruling “does indeed provide a strong argument the House could make to support its standing to sue President Trump if he were to carry out this threat to spend money pursuant to a declaration of national emergency.”

An op-ed by Jennifer Rubin: President Trump’s visit to Texas for a photo op at the southern border reminds us that the politics of the wall in Texas, a state that reelected Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) by less than 3 points and flipped 2 House seats from Republican to Democratic, is not what Republicans would have you believe. ... “I think the most difficult issue isn’t whether the House of Representatives, or a particular member (like Chairman Adam Smith of the [House] Armed Services Committee) would have standing to sue on the ground that the president is nullifying their right to vote on spending measures and usurping their role as holders of the power of the purse (they might well) but something else altogether,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. “It’s whether any lawsuit, even a suit brought by someone injured in a more conventional sense (the way the ranchers who might eventually be subject to eminent domain along the border would eventually be), would be deemed to present a ripe ‘case or controversy’ simply because the president, by making an emergency declaration under the 1976 Act, would arguably open up some statutory options — e.g., under 10 U.S.C. §2808 — not previously open to him.”

President Trump said today he is seriously considering declaring a national emergency to secure funding for a southern border wall. Harvard law school professor, Laurence Tribe and NBC news national security and justice reporter Julia Ainsley discuss questions surrounding the legality with Katy Tur. "Only an unforeseen crisis is a national emergency," says Tribe.

The current federal government shutdown, like all previous ones in the last century, was caused by an obscure law called the Anti-Deficiency Act. The law prohibits federal agencies from spending money that Congress hasn’t specifically appropriated and exists to prevent the president or agency heads from writing hot checks. The law was codified in 1905, but provisions of it date almost to the nation’s founding, as it developed from the long-running struggle between the executive branch and Congress over control of federal spending. ...One attempt to pursue a criminal complaint not only failed, but ended up creating a new loophole in the law. Professor Laurence Tribe agreed in 1987 to draft a legal memo for the special prosecutor looking into the Iran-Contra matter during the Reagan administration. Tribe did this for free, prompting three conservative groups active at the time, Citizens for Reagan, the Conservative Campaign Fund, and the the National Defense Council Foundation, to file charges with the Justice Department alleging that he was violating the Anti-Deficiency Act.

In an interview with MSNBC Chief Legal Correspondent Ari Melber on the government shutdown and the president's authority to build a wall without congressional approval, Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe said: "This is unlike any National Emergency we have seen, it's an attempt by the President to assume powers that belong to the other branches."