Laurence Tribe

As President Trump readies his Oval Office address on the Government shutdown, the Russian lawyer who met with Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. at the 2016 Trump Tower meeting, is indicted by Federal Prosecutors. MSNBC Chief Legal Correspondent Ari Melber breaks down how we are now at the point where two people from the Trump Tower meeting have been indicted by the feds – one on the Trump side and one on the Russia side. Harvard Law Professor, Laurence Tribe, tells Melber that the Russian lawyer, Natalya Veselnitskaya, has been “clearly exposed as an agent of the Kremlin”.

Americans can expect to get tax refunds during the partial government shutdown after all, following a decision by the White House Office of Management and Budget. ... Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, has requested a briefing on whether Treasury and the IRS can process refunds during a shutdown and has not yet received a response, a spokeswoman told MarketWatch. Over Twitter, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe said the Supreme Court has held such responses unconstitutional. "This is just a line-item veto in drag. SCOTUS held such cut-and-paste presidential responses to congressional spending flatly unconstitutional in Clinton v. NY (1998)."

Hours before the 116th Congress began, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made clear she’s prepared to respect, even defend, the rule of law. In an interview broadcast Thursday morning on the “Today” show, Pelosi was asked whether she believed special counsel Robert S. Mueller III should honor decades-old Justice Department guidance, which suggests a president should not be indicted while in office. “I think that that is an open discussion in terms of the law,” said Pelosi, who became House speaker later in the day. She is now the highest-ranking government official to openly state what many experts have discussed for months. ... "There are some experts who continue to believe the Constitution might at least require postponing any criminal trial until the president is out of office,” Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe told The Washington Post. So some have suggested alternatives. Tribe, for instance, said that if indicted, a president’s criminal trial could be postponed until the end of his term.

Two disturbing incidents involving acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker came to light at the end of an already chaotic week. First, it became clear that ethics officers told him to recuse himself from the Russia probe. Second, President Trump, in what appears to be yet another instance of obstruction of justice, leaned on Whitaker to rein in prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe bluntly says, “The president is totally out of control.” He explains, “Such brazen efforts to rein in career prosecutors for doing their jobs in a professional way just because their legal filings implicate him in evidently criminal behavior is part of a persistent pattern of obstructing justice.”

In 1995, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared, “Sometime in the next century the United States is going to have to address the question of apportionment in the Senate.” Perhaps that time has come. ... Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School has recommended that when an earlier constitutional text conflicts with later textual amendments, we should follow “time’s arrow.” We should keep in mind that the original one-state, two-senators rule was written and ratified by property-owning white men, almost half of whom owned slaves, and that the voting-rights amendments were adopted after a war to end slavery.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner and Laurence H. Tribe: Michael Flynn’s sentencing on Tuesday took a turn that no one expected—not the special counsel, not the defense lawyers, not the public. Judge Emmet Sullivan—who was initially appointed as a judge by President Ronald Reagan and promoted by Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush—announced that he would not give Flynn the sentence the parties agreed upon. Flynn’s cooperation, which special counsel Robert Mueller said deserved probation, would not outweigh the seriousness of his crimes, both charged and uncharged, which the judge believed required prison. The judge even asked whether Flynn’s actions might have amounted to treason, a question many found perplexing. It was a question that could take on a different complexion in light of the redacted material available to the judge but not to the public, given Flynn’s role as Turkey’s secret agent during the Trump transition.

Much has been made of the Justice Department’s standing opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted while in office. That’s an opinion, not settled law, and one that is the subject of lively debate among legal scholars. ... Likewise, constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe posits, “Nothing in the Constitution supports treating amenability to the criminal process as something that kicks in only after a civil officer has been impeached and removed.” He argues, “To treat a sitting president as immune to that process until his presidency ends is to superimpose upon the impeachment framework—a framework designed as the way to remove a president who commits an impeachable offense that might or might not also be a federal crime—something quite extraordinary in a system priding itself on the axiom that no one is above the law.”

Within the world inhabited by President Donald Trump's strongest critics lives an audacious idea—annulment of his presidency. ... Laurence Tribe, a constitutional scholar and the Carl M. Loeb professor at Harvard Law School, noted in his book To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment, that although there is no provision for annulment of a presidency, the Constitution “does provide a rough approximation: Stripping the treacherous candidate of his ill-gotten gains."

... What is clear, however, is that to the extent the president has a safe harbor for prosecution during his time in office, that protection is personal to him. His relatives and his business empire don’t get that benefit. ... “Unless the Office of Special Counsel or the Southern District of New York [prosecution team] intends to indict Trump personally (or has already indicted him under seal), no claim could be made that indicting any of the Trump organizations would somehow be an abusive circumvention of what ought to be an indictment of Mr. Trump as the real party in interest and the real ‘brains,’ if you’ll pardon the expression in this context, behind those entities,” says constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe.

While Republicans like President Donald Trump lauded a Texas judge's decision last week that the Affordable Care Act — colloquially known as Obamacare — needed to be repealed, not everyone in the party is certain that this issue will redound to their political benefit. ... Another dimension of the controversial case is the fact that Judge O'Connor is widely perceived as a partisan judge, raising questions about his reasoning for deciding that Obamacare must be overturned. "Judge O’Connor’s opinion was legally indefensible from start to finish," Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, told Salon by email. "I rarely reach this conclusion, but only a results-driven policy agenda could begin to explain his absurd conclusion that Congress’s 2017 decision to zero out the penalty for not buying the insurance mandated by the ACA while retaining the rest of the ACA somehow rendered the entire ACA unconstitutional. People who castigate judges as ‘activists’ whenever they reach liberal results had better step up to the plate and join those across the spectrum who are condemning this latest ruling as way outside the legal ballpark."

A Harvard Law School professor, who also was a President Barack Obama appointee, says recent Michigan Republican moves to strip Democrats’ authority may be unconstitutional. Laurence Tribe is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard who helped write the constitutions of South Africa, the Czech Republic and Marshall Islands. He told the Michigan Advance that a GOP plan to move campaign finance oversight from the secretary of state’s office to a proposed commission and another that would allow the Legislature to name itself as an intervening party in court cases might violate the state Constitution. “I think a compelling argument can be made that the attempt by the Michigan Legislature to restructure the State’s system of government in response to the Democratic victories in the elections for executive branch officials violates the letter and spirit of that bedrock provision of the Michigan Constitution,” Tribe wrote in an email.

While Republicans like President Donald Trump lauded a Texas judge's decision last week that the Affordable Care Act—colloquially known as Obamacare—needed to be repealed, not everyone in the party is certain that this issue will redound to their political benefit. ... "Judge O’Connor’s opinion was legally indefensible from start to finish," Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, told Salon by email. "I rarely reach this conclusion, but only a results-driven policy agenda could begin to explain his absurd conclusion that Congress’s 2017 decision to zero out the penalty for not buying the insurance mandated by the ACA while retaining the rest of the ACA somehow rendered the entire ACA unconstitutional."

Now that Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and confidant is headed to prison for crimes related to paying off two of the president’s paramours, a vexing question takes on new salience. What happens if prosecutors think that Mr Trump may have broken campaign-finance laws by directing Michael Cohen and American Media Inc (publisher of the "National Enquirer") to send hush-money cheques in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election?  ...Saying otherwise is to put presidents “above the law”. Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, agrees. It is “crazy”, Mr Tribe writes, that “even the most criminally corrupt president” may be immune from indictments while in office. The OLC position is not just bad policy, he argues, it’s unconstitutional.

...We're also going to go deep on the main question facing the Mueller probe. Is it true that a sitting President cannot be indicted? Fair statement? I would argue the answer is yes, you can. But a way better mind than mine says I have it wrong. Professor Larry Tribe has an op-ed racing around the internet and he's here to make the case. ... TRIBE: I think he doesn't know what he's talking about and he's desperate. He's obviously flailing around because he feels the walls closing in. The fact is that the constitution makes very clear that the President of the United States shall be removed from office if he is impeached and convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors, including treason and bribery.

Trump might think that he has immunity from prosecution, but Laurence Tribe explains there's nothing in the Constitution that prevents the indictment of a sitting president.

To facetiously paraphrase a line that I often hear from global warming deniers: Don't be offended, I'm just asking questions. It’s conventional wisdom that the right to free speech does not permit you to shout “fire!” in a crowded theater – but does that mean you have the right to claim there is no fire when a theater is ablaze? ... “Tempting though the idea is, I would not favor modifying Western legal systems to permit the imposition of financial liability on any individual or organization that is found to have ‘spread incorrect information about man-made climate change,’” Laurence Tribe, an author and constitutional law professor at Harvard, told Salon by email. “The key to my reason for resisting such a modification is in the word ‘found.’ If I ask myself: Whom would I trust to make an authoritative ‘finding’ about which information about a topic as complex as man-made climate change is ‘incorrect,’ I must answer: Nobody. Certainly not any public official or governmental agency or any government-designated private group. I trust the process of open uncensored dialogue among experts and lay persons to generate truthful understandings over time, especially if we enact and enforce requirements of transparency and disclosure about who is funding which assertions. But I would be deeply concerned about anything resembling the identification and empowerment of a Commissar of Truth.”

President Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen was sentenced Wednesday to three years in prison for tax fraud and campaign finance violations for helping to orchestrate hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal. It was also announced Wednesday that prosecutors will not charge AMI, the parent company of the National Enquirer, for the paper's role in silencing McDougal, because the company agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. ...Jim Braude was joined by Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe, who made such an argument this week in a Boston Globe op-ed, and who is also the author of "To End A Presidency: The Power of Impeachment."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Suppose that within the next few months, it becomes clear that President Donald Trump has committed impeachable offenses. Does the House of Representatives have discretion to decide whether to impeach him? Or does the Constitution require it to do so? The simplest answer, and the best, is that the Constitution requires the House to do so.

Friday’s filings by federal prosecutors painted President Donald Trump as aiding in and conspiring to commit a federal crime. ... The harsh reality is that any supposed “immunity” a president has from indictment while in office expires when his time is over. For Trump, that could be on January 20, 2021, if the statute of limitations — the deadline by which prosecutors must bring criminal charges — has not yet expired. “People recite the mantra, ‘No one is above the law’ yet fail to acknowledge the tension between the principle and the idea that a president could be immune from indictment until he’s out of office,” said Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard.

Trump might think that he has immunity from prosecution, but Laurence Tribe explains there's nothing in the Constitution that prevents the indictment of a sitting president.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. Only President Trump seems not to have noticed — or at least refuses to acknowledge — that the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in his Dec. 7 memo regarding Michael Cohen’s sentencing, has laid the predicate for indicting the president for feloniously “directing” a scheme to defraud the public into voting for him under false pretenses. Trump’s lawyers may well have advised him not to worry about that minor matter because the Justice Department policy of not indicting a sitting president will presumably be followed by all Justice Department prosecutors, including both special counsel Robert Mueller and the prosecutors of the Southern District. But what nobody seems to have noticed is that the policy in question is probably unconstitutional.