Laurence Tribe

This is the tip of a very large iceberg -- the international Trump Organization with hotels, properties and licensing deals around the globe. How many other foreign countries engaged in similar conduct that would line the president’s pockets, or granted him things of value in their country...“The three emoluments clause lawsuits hit Trump where it hurts the most: in his insatiable greed,” constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe says. He predicts, “The evidence they produce will cement the case that Donald Trump, in violation of his Oath, has been abusing his office in ways calculated to corruptly compromise his decisions about Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China, and, of course, Russia and thereby giving ruthless foreign powers hidden leverage over him as president — something our Constitution was designed to prevent.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. While legal experts scramble to decipher what might be going on in the shady minds of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi — and the even more shadowy Roger Stone, a Trump confidant — too little attention has been paid to the more basic question of what President Trump and his team have been doing as part of an increasingly obvious conspiracy to obstruct the investigation into the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential election.

Disclosures over the past few days in the Russia investigation suggest that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has improved his case concerning obstruction of justice and collusion, both of which President Trump continues to deny...The arrangement between Manafort, his lawyers and Trump’s lawyers is unprecedented. “I have no doubt that serving as a mole or double agent inside the office charged with investigating the president, and feeding to the president and to witnesses like Corsi or Stone key information about the investigator’s plans — and about what others are telling the grand jury — after gaining the special counsel’s confidence by ‘flipping’ in order to get a better plea deal meets even the narrowest statutory definition of criminal obstruction of justice and could also constitute still more witness tampering on the part of practiced witness tamperer Paul Manafort,” says constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe.

The Justice Department vigorously defended the appointment of Matt Whitaker to serve as acting attorney general, saying Wednesday that the selection was entirely legal and that the White House was given that advice beforehand....Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe called the Maryland lawsuit entirely legitimate. "They're saying that since Jeff Sessions is no longer the attorney general, they can't be expected to engage in this battle against a kind of cloud that might just go pop the moment someone concludes, as they should, that Matt Whitaker is not constitutionally qualified to play that role," Tribe said. "If they're right about that, and I think they are, this is the way to have it declared."

The state of Maryland is asking a federal judge to block Matthew Whitaker form serving as acting Attorney General, claiming that the appointment violates the constitution. A panel of experts—Pete Williams, Philip Rucker, Laurence Tribe and Mimi Rocah join Katy Tur to discuss the potential outcome.

Trump is more afraid than ever about his future with the Russia probe after losing the midterms. His new acting A.G. is under fire his controversial comments about the probe. Lawrence discusses the constitutionality of his acting A.G.'s appointment with Laurence Tribe and Rep. Steve Cohen.

...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe counsels, “This rule-of-law crisis has been a slow-motion train wreck for a long time. Matt Whitaker is on record about the ways to clip Mueller’s wings and the alleged need to do so. And I suspect that too few ordinary people will care that this Wednesday afternoon massacre has quietly taken place.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. Perhaps the most alarming ― if not exactly surprising ― fallout from last Tuesday’s midterm elections was President Donald Trump’s immediate dismissal of his long-beleaguered attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and the subsequent appointment of Matthew Whitaker, a Trump toady and Sessions’ chief of staff, as his acting replacement. If the firing was, in part, an attempt to commandeer the nation’s post-election attention, it worked.

After Jeff Sessions' removal, Legal scholar Laurence Tribe warns of a constitutional crisis.

The acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, once espoused the view that the courts “are supposed to be the inferior branch” and criticized the Supreme Court’s power to review legislative and executive acts and declare them unconstitutional, the lifeblood of its existence as a coequal branch of government...Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said that Mr. Whitaker’s expressed views of the Constitution and the role of the courts “are extreme and the overall picture he presents would have virtually no scholarly support” and would be “destabilizing” to society if he used the power of the attorney general to advance them. Simultaneously criticizing the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review while criticizing cases where it declined to strike down laws regulating economic and health insurance matters was a sign of an “internally contradictory” and “ignorant” philosophy, Mr. Tribe said.

The 2018 midterm elections brought significant gains for Democrats, who retook the House of Representatives and snatched several governorships from the grip of Republicans. But some were left questioning why Democrats suffered a series of setbacks that prevented the party from picking up even more seats and, perhaps most consequentially, left the US Senate in Republican hands...“The rise of minority rule in America is now unmistakable,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University. “Especially with a sitting president who won a majority in the electoral college [in 2016] while receiving roughly 3m fewer votes than his opponent, and a supreme court five of whose nine justices were nominated by Republican presidents who collectively received fewer popular votes than their Democratic opponents and were confirmed by Senates similarly skewed.”

Senior Republicans led a chorus of public warnings that the special counsel Robert Mueller must be allowed to continue his Russia investigation after Donald Trump finally fired his attorney general, Jeff Sessions....Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said Trump’s replacement of Sessions with Whitaker was arguably an impeachable offence in itself. “This rule of law crisis has been a slow-motion train wreck for a long time,” said Tribe.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. In ordinary times, a presidential proposal that stands no chance of surviving review, even by the judges and justices the president has appointed, wouldn’t matter much. But these aren’t ordinary times, and this president’s trial balloons are anything but harmless, even when we can confidently predict they won’t float. A perfect case in point is President Donald J. Trump’s threat to end birthright citizenship, a threat that sends chills down the spines of millions of lawful residents who understandably fear that they, or their children or grandchildren, may be cast into a stateless limbo, and become citizens of nowhere.

...Impeachment is so obviously the Democrats’ one overriding aim that the book industry has tried to anticipate its fulfillment. On my desk sits an impressive stack of books, all published in just the past few months, all on the subject of impeaching a U.S. president...As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz rightly contend in “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment” (Basic, 281 pages, $28), the fact that Congress has the power to impeach doesn’t mean it has the duty to impeach.

...“Even Trump and his lawyers surely realize that this off-the-wall threat has no legal legs to stand on and wouldn’t get the votes even of the most stalwart judicial conservatives,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard.

President Trump’s stunning new promise to end birthright citizenship by executive order is roiling the midterm debate at the eleventh hour, fanning the flames of an already explosive immigration fight — and dividing Republican message-makers — just days before voters head to the polls...Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, said in an email that the president can no more eliminate birthright citizenship “than he could wipe out the First Amendment (or the Second, for that matter).” “Even Trump and his lawyers surely realize that this off-the-wall threat has the weakest possible legal legs to stand on and wouldn’t be likely to get the votes even of the most stalwart judicial conservatives,” Tribe said. “And they must realize as well that this threat, while legally all but empty, nonetheless strikes fear in the hearts of a vast number of legal immigrants and current citizens — both naturalized and by birth.”

A course offered by Harvard University Law School for the spring 2019 semester will focus on ways to “push back against” strategies employed by President Donald Trump and Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Harvard professor Laurence Tribe will be teaching the course, titled "Constitutional Strategies For the McConnell/Trump/Kavanaugh Era.”..."Law students who are interested — from whatever ideological perspective — in what the current political and legal landscape might mean for the litigation and/or legislation they may consider becoming involved in (whether defensively or offensively) after they graduate deserve well-informed guidance as they navigate this complex new terrain. My new seminar is designed to offer that guidance," Tribe told Campus Reform in an email.

A couple of liberal Harvard law professors are lending their name to a new campaign to build support for expanding the Supreme Court by four justices in 2021. The campaign, calling itself the 1.20.21 Project and being launched Wednesday, also wants to increase the size of the lower federal courts to counteract what it terms "Republican obstruction, theft and procedural abuse" of the federal judiciary...Harvard professors Mark Tushnet and Laurence Tribe are joining an effort being led by political scientist Aaron Belkin. He was a prominent advocate for repealing the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that prohibited LGBT people from serving openly in the military..."The time is overdue for a seriously considered plan of action by those of us who believe that McConnell Republicans, abetted by and abetting the Trump Movement, have prioritized the expansion of their own power over the safeguarding of American democracy and the protection of the most vulnerable among us," Tribe said.

President Donald Trump used to attack Democrats as mere obstructionists determined to block his agenda. But with the opposition poised to seize control of the House, he’s painting them in far darker strokes -- as dangerous socialists hell-bent on turning the country into a poverty-stricken crime scene....The president’s dependence on hyperbole and inflammatory language receives less condemnation from Republican leaders today than it did when he campaigned for office, so there’s little incentive for him to tone it down, according to Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor and frequent Trump critic who teaches a class on the presidency. And the impact on the country may be long lasting. “I think that as dangerous as he has shown himself to be in many contexts, he’s said very little that’s quite as alarming as this,” Tribe said. “It’s rhetoric drawn directly from the playbook of fascists and dictators.”

...Roberts will, it is hoped, work hard to preserve the independence and integrity of the court, especially in the current highly politicised atmosphere. Laurence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law professor whose students included Obama and Roberts, believes that the chief justice will take a “substantially different” posture on the court in the wake of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. “I don’t think Roberts will be a centrist in the way Kennedy was, or a swing vote,” Tribe said. “But I think if and when there are cases about the ability to order a sitting president to testify or to indict a sitting president, or matters that go to the fate of Trump, if Kavanaugh joins Gorsuch and [Samuel] Alito and [Clarence] Thomas, I don’t think we can assume Roberts will go with them.” Tribe, who was sharply critical of Kavanaugh’s partisanship during the confirmation process, added: “I think Roberts is an institutionalist, he believes in stability, he believes in the role of the court, he clearly sees it as part of his responsibility to protect it as a vital institution.”

...Yet was Kavanaugh actually threatening to change the court into a partisan institution... or was he unintentionally telling the truth, which is that it already is a partisan institution? To find out, Salon spoke with Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School. "In a book that I wrote with a colleague named Joshua Matz several years ago called 'Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution,' I explored just how partisan the court was and concluded that really, with relatively few exceptions, it was much more even handed than people gave it credit for being," Tribe told Salon. "The court certainly lost a lot of its luster after Bush v. Gore, and it has from time to time vindicated the views of those who think of justices as just politicians in robes. But on the other hand, when Chief Justice [John] Roberts cast the decisive vote upholding the Affordable Care Act and a number of other equally notable occasions, the court has given people reason to trust it again."