Laurence Tribe

...“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. If the concern is that a criminal trial would be too inundating, Tribe suggested indicting a president, but delaying any criminal proceedings until the end of his term, an option other legal experts have agreed with.

...“Cohen’s sworn allocution in [the Southern District of New York courtroom] in support of his pleas of guilty to having feloniously manipulated the 2016 election at Trump’s direction point directly to impeachable ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ by Trump,” argues Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, who noted that the wrongdoing in question is “entirely apart from Russiagate and Obstructiongate.” Tribe explains that “Trump’s ‘no collusion’ mantra is now ludicrous. Collusion—indeed, conspiracy—with Michael Cohen and others to defraud the American people by criminally manipulating the presidential election is now clear from Cohen’s guilty pleas—even without Russia’s involvement.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. Imagine if in 1972, President Richard M. Nixon, rather than routing his opponent, had barely won the presidential election. In that world, when evidence came to light that Nixon had committed impeachable offenses during his campaign, it would have been plausible to suppose that those offenses were essential to his victory. And the stakes would then have been even higher than they were when, in 1974, the Supreme Court was deciding whether Nixon had to comply with a grand jury demand that he deliver up subpoenaed tapes and documents that would prove whether those offenses, and abuses of executive power to cover them up, had indeed been committed by the president. As we all know, United States v. Nixon came out 8 to 0, sounding the death knell of Nixon’s presidency, once he produced the incriminating tapes. A similarly unanimous outcome would be less likely today, however.

But legal scholars said that committing crimes aimed at undermining the integrity of an election could well satisfy the constitutional standard for impeachment, which is set out in Article II, Section 4: “The president, vice president and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”...“If the president bribes members of the Electoral College in order to obtain office, it was clear from the debates that that was thought to be an impeachable offense,” said Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard and the author of “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.” “That’s an exception to the general proposition that it has to be abuse of the authority you have by virtue of being president,” he said. “It was an effort to protect the sanctity — and I think sanctity is the right word — of the process by which someone becomes president.”...Of course, bribery is not the same thing as depriving voters of information by paying hush money. But both interfere with the democratic process, said Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, the other author of “To End a Presidency” and a frequent critic of Mr. Trump. “The felonies of which Cohen, in statements that were self-incriminating and thus particularly trustworthy, accused his former client, the president, didn’t literally involve bribery,” he said, referring to Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, “but certainly involved criminal conduct designed to reduce the risk that disclosure of his extramarital affairs and dalliances on the eve of the election would cost him the votes he ended up needing in places like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.”

Legal heavyweight Laurence Tribe is bowing out of the litigation over the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan. The Harvard University professor today filed paperwork notifying the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit of his withdrawal. Tribe made waves in environmental law circles for his legal critiques of the Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of the Obama administration's plan to address climate change. A former mentor to Obama at Harvard University, Tribe represented coal company Peabody Energy Corp. in the litigation attacking the 2015 rule in the D.C. Circuit.

Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe joins Katy Tur to discuss how the President’s threat to strip former intelligence officials of their White House security clearances fits into the Special Counsel’s investigation.

...“It’s idiotic if its purpose is to prevail in the arbitration,” says constitutional scholar Larry Tribe. “It’s not necessarily idiotic if its only purpose is to continue deflecting attention from vastly more serious issues — like what Trump and Putin said to one another during that two-hour meeting in Helsinki, or which version of [Rudolph W.] Giuliani’s defense of Trump’s conversation with [former FBI director James] Comey about going easy on [Michael] Flynn the president wants us to accept.”

After the New York Times reported that White House counsel Donald McGahn had spent 30 hours with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team, the Trump spin machine came up with two (both false) responses...The assertion that “lawyers made a mistake” or “Trump was just being transparent” in letting McGahn testify is largely hogwash. Constitutional scholar Larry Tribe tells me: “There is no attorney-client privilege for communications between the president and counsel for a government entity like the office of the presidency. That is of course McGahn’s role, in contrast with Giuliani’s.”

...perhaps another body of Kavanaugh’s work warrants closer inspection: the twenty-four articles that he wrote, from 1983 to ’86, as a sports reporter for the Yale Daily News...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor who mentored Barack Obama, zeroed in on the lead sentence in Kavanaugh’s account of a midseason game against Cornell: “In basketball, as in few other team sports, it is possible for one person to completely dominate a game.” Was this a harmless observation? Tribe noted, “Kavanaugh’s seeming fascination with single-player domination might be a muscular view of executive power.” On the other hand, he found a departure from Kavanaugh’s typical jurisprudence in “Dartmouth Rally Upends Streak.” “Kavanaugh complained that the refs let the game ‘get completely out of control’ as Dartmouth players ‘consistently hammered’ a Yalie ‘without the whistle blowing’ once,” Tribe said. “One might see in that a rare early condemnation of judicial restraint.”

At least 125 Republican campaigns and conservative political groups spent more than $3.5 million at President Donald Trump’s resorts, hotels and restaurants since January 2017...“Trump’s use of his high office to exact tribute from the multitude of American politicians and hangers-on who are quite willing to fill his coffers in order to win him to their side doesn’t violate the emoluments clauses or constitute high crimes and misdemeanors (unless out-and-out bribery can be proven), but [it] stinks to high heaven anyway,” says constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe. “Trump’s selling of the presidency is of a piece with the self-serving and self-aggrandizing approach he has taken to his entire adult life as a user, cheater, and exploiter of others. It’s neither criminal nor impeachable for Trump to besmirch the highest office in the land, but it certainly highlights his unfitness for that office and the burden that his leaving it will lift from America’s soul.”

One of the internet’s most odious conspiracy theorists has had his videos and podcasts removed from Apple, YouTube, Spotify and Facebook. Alex Jones (pictured), who has a radio show and runs a few websites, including Infowars, has raised doubts about the murders of 26 children and teachers in the Sandy Hook mass shooting, claiming the story was manufactured by gun-control advocates...Laurence Tribe, a constitutional-law expert at Harvard, points out a small but fascinating caveat to this bright line between governmental and private censorship. “A very limited set of nominally private actors have been recognised as essentially governmental,” he says, in a few narrow contexts. For example, in Marsh v Alabama (1946), a company-owned town was told the First Amendment prevented it from arresting a Jehovah’s Witness for distributing religious pamphlets near a post office. The Supreme Court ruled that the town, though privately owned, functioned like a traditional municipality and needed to respect the proselytiser's constitutional rights.

...Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional scholar and Supreme Court litigator, points out that a favorable outcome for Mueller is no slam dunk at the Supreme Court. Therefore, Tribe reasons, “he might want at least to try reaching a resolution, even if suboptimal, that doesn’t require going all the way to the Supreme Court, where he might not find five justices prepared to follow U.S. v Nixon, at least in the context of subpoenaing more than documents.”

President Trump’s lack of self-control has never been so apparent. At a time when reports suggest that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is looking at tweets for evidence of “corrupt intent’ — a necessary element of the crime of obstruction of justice — Trump serves up tweets that evidence corrupt intent...Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional scholar and Supreme Court advocate, likewise cautions that “what Trump has said about Sessions isn’t equivalent to telling the attorney general ‘You’re fired unless you direct your deputy discharge Mueller by close of business today.’ ”

It is no longer remotely newsworthy when President Donald Trump tells lies. It is, however, newsworthy when his own Department of Justice calls him out for having lied. That is essentially what happened when Benjamin Wittes, the journalist behind the blog Lawfare, filed Freedom of Information Act requests in April 2017 to find out whether there was any truth to this statement made by Trump in his February 2017 State of the Union address...Salon reached out to [Laurence] Tribe to unpack his thoughts on the deeper meaning behind both Trump's lie about immigrants and the seemingly remarkable fact that his own government has been forced to acknowledge the untruth.

The Post reports on the resolution introduced by 11 members of the House Freedom Caucus to impeach — yes, impeach — Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein...“It’s a PR stunt that nobody who knows anything about impeachment could take seriously,” says constitutional scholar Larry Tribe. “But it will do great harm anyway by contributing to the degradation of the impeachment power, making it harder to use when it is truly needed to rein in a would be-dictator.”

...Norman Eisen, Laurence Tribe and Caroline Frederickson wrote in February: “Endeavoring to stop an investigation, if done with corrupt intent, may constitute obstruction of justice. Plotting to assist such action may be conspiracy to obstruct justice. Normally, what is called ‘speech or debate immunity would provide a strong bulwark against any such liability for Mr. Nunes or his staff.” However, they argued, “Mr. Nunes and company may have ranged so far afield that those protections no longer apply. Under the clause, mere peripheral connection to legislative acts cannot serve as a fig leaf to shield criminal conduct.” They argued that if “a member or staff employee of the House Intelligence Committee engaged with the White House to stifle the special counsel inquiry, it would be difficult to see how such collaboration would be” protected by the speech or debate clause.

A federal judge on Wednesday rejected President Trump’s latest effort to stop a lawsuit that alleges Trump is violating the Constitution by continuing to do business with foreign governments. The ruling, from U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte in Greenbelt, Md., will allow the plaintiffs in the case — the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia — to proceed with their case, which says Trump has violated the Constitution’s little-used emoluments clause...Laurence Tribe, who along with Eisen has been making the emoluments argument in court and in the court of public opinion, says, “It’s an extremely significant ruling, the first federal judicial decision addressing — and endorsing — the theory we have been advancing on the Emoluments Clause ever since the start of the Trump administration.”

...“United States v. Nixon was a watershed decision in establishing the core principle that not even the president is above the law,” emailed Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard. “[I]ts singular relevance in the present moment — when issues about the president’s amenability to judicial subpoenas and the like play a pivotal role — is obvious. … [Kavanaugh’s] analysis of the decision suggests an almost non-existent role for the federal judiciary in umpiring disputes between the president and the other branches of government.”

...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “This is probably the clearest and most indefensible of Trump’s First Amendment violations.” He observes, “The idea that it could be covered up vis-à-vis the courts by blanket claims that national security is at issue strikes me as highly implausible.” He continues, “If the president [were] to make individualized findings that one of the officials he seeks to deprive . . . of security clearance has in fact [abused] the privilege of using that security clearance by releasing classified information, that would be another thing. But to take an enemies list of this kind and threaten every member of it the way the president has done makes Nixon’s enemies list look trivial by comparison.”

...While many may think of Russia as an adversary and even an enemy, it has not been declared so. An “enemy,” Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe said in an email to The Post, “arguably” requires a formal state of war. “Some commentators,” Tribe writes with co-author Joshua Matz in “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” “have argued that Russia also ranks among our ‘enemies’ ” because of its hacking to influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. The argument is “interesting and important,” they write, but “continued legal uncertainty about whether it is treasonous to lend ‘aid and comfort’ to Russia militates against basing an impeachment on this theory.” There are plenty of other potential crimes in the Russia investigation, they write, but probably not treason.

...HuffPost asked some constitutional scholars if it would be legal for lawmakers to make Trump’s interpreter share details from that meeting. Even they weren’t sure. “The legal territory is unsettled,” said Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb university professor and a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University. “I don’t think there is any authoritative on-point precedent either way.”