Laurence Tribe

...Let’s cut through all this: Republicans are petrified of provoking Trump (“the bear”), whom they treat as their supervisor and not as an equal branch of government. The notion that Congress should not take out an insurance policy to head off a potential constitutional crisis when the president has repeatedly considered firing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein defies logic. By speaking up in such fashion, McConnell is effectively tempting Trump to fire one or both of them. That will set off a firestorm and bring calls for the president’s impeachment...“As Senate Majority Leader, McConnell has extraordinary power to control the nation’s legislative agenda — and that power carries great responsibility,” said constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe.

I have long thought Scooter Libby’s conviction was unjust and that President George W. Bush should have pardoned him rather than commute his sentence. However, coming on the heels of the raid on President Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen’s office and on the same day that Trump phoned Cohen(!), Trump’s pardon of Libby means we are now at risk of a constitutional standoff concerning the pardon power...“Pardoning Cohen would greatly strengthen the case for obstruction because its obvious purpose would be to remove the pressure for Cohen to cooperate with federal prosecutors seeking to learn about the Trump-related skeletons in Cohen’s closet and to give Manafort and other Mueller targets reason to believe in the pardon prospects Trump has dangled in front of them,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe.

President Donald Trump all but confirmed that the United States will soon strike the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as he communicated in a threatening Wednesday morning tweet in which he taunted Russia and suggested American missiles were "coming" in Syria...Trump’s taunting tweets are ridiculous and dangerous, as well as totally inconsistent with his stated view that it’s dumb to alert the enemy to what you plan to do and when you plan to do it," Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School told Salon. "Trump has put the United States in a box. If he acts on his threats, he’ll have given Assad, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and the [Iranian Supreme Leader] Ayatollah [Ali Khamenei] advance warning and endangered our military.

Their timing could not be better. A day after reports surfaced that President Trump wanted to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in December (in addition to an earlier effort in June), five veteran Republicans have formed a new organization, Republicans for the Rule of Law, seeking to restrain the president from doing exactly that...Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe voices alarm at the prospect that Rosenstein might be on the chopping block. “Trump firing Rosenstein would be part of an ongoing impeachable pattern of presidential obstruction of justice,” he says. “Attorney General Jeff Sessions firing Rosenstein might violate the terms of his recusal but not if there was a genuine justification unrelated to Mueller’s investigation.”

When President Trump upon taking office refused to completely sever his ties to his international business interests, he set in motion events that would inevitably lead to violation(s) of the foreign emoluments clause of the Constitution and gross conflicts of interest...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe explains: Trump’s refusal to sever his all-entangling business ties throughout the world when he became president was and continues to be both a clear violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause and a profound threat to our nation’s security, which depends on having a president whose only allegiance is to the United States and its people, including of course our Constitution and laws. The way lawyers from the Trump Organization and its often opaque network of nested corporations blatantly intervened in U.S.-Panama relations last month was a classic example of what we get when we elect a president with no respect for the separation of his own and his family’s economic interests from the conduct of America’s foreign policy.

In an extraordinary series of events, the FBI executed a no-knock raid on President Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen’s office, home and hotel...Let us not understate how extraordinary a development this is. The standard of proof required to raid any attorney’s office is exceptionally high. To authorize a raid on the president’s lawyer’s office, a federal judge or magistrate must have seen highly credible evidence of serious crimes and/or evidence Cohen was hiding or destroying evidence, according to legal experts. “The FBI raid was the result of an ongoing criminal investigation *not* by Mueller but by the interim US Attorney personally interviewed and selected by Trump himself, pursuant to a warrant issued under strict standards by a federal judge, subject to approval by the head of the Criminal Division,” said constitutional scholar Larry Tribe.

The four nor’easters in March brought down trees and closed schools and nearly derailed a much anticipated, historic contest between the Norfolk Prison Colony Debating Society and the Harvard College Debating Union. But, after a storm cancellation, the debate at last took place at the end of the month, at MCI-Norfolk, a medium-security prison an hour outside Boston. The prison, which was designed in the nineteen-twenties by a Harvard alumnus and modelled on a college campus, started a debate team in 1933. Malcolm X, who entered the prison in 1948, was a member. (“Once my feet got wet,” he said, “I was gone on debating.”) Its first international debate was held in 1951, against Oxford University; Norfolk, charged with arguing against free health care, won. Laurence Tribe debated at Norfolk in 1961, when he was a Harvard junior and the national intercollegiate champion. “The guys we debated that day were serving either life sentences or the rough equivalent,” Tribe recalled recently. “They gave us a good fight.”

If Friday afternoons are the best time to shove off embattled advisers, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt might want to start clearing out his desk today...Meanwhile, a new appointee is ensnared in his own troubling ethical issues. CNBC reports: John Bolton, who is days away from becoming President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, has been meeting with White House attorneys about possible conflicts of interest, CNBC has learned...Constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe points to a series of campaigns in which Bolton’s PACs played a significant role. “Bolton’s superPAC appears to have spent a very substantial sum of money retaining the services of Cambridge Analytica to help Republicans get elected in some 2014 campaigns like that of Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, paying that data firm over $1 million for various kinds of ‘research.'”

The Post reports: The Trump administration will pressure U.S. immigration judges to process cases faster by establishing a quota system tied to their annual performance reviews, according to new Justice Department directives. Nevertheless, the Trump administration’s move raised immediate concerns...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe concurs. He tells Right Turn, “This is a shameful and cruelly inhumane effort to impose an assembly-line mentality on the already too-perfunctory deportation proceedings to which our nation has long subjected people, including children, who are identified for expulsion from our country.”

In a decision with far-reaching implications for President Trump, a federal court ruled this week that a lawsuit could go forward claiming he unconstitutionally received foreign emoluments — that is, monies from foreign governments explicitly prohibited by the Constitution — from his hotel in Washington..."Why did this case make it past the first hurdle and not the New York case? Will the New York case be appealed?" [Laurence Tribe]: We are appealing the decision in the Southern District of New York dismissing our suit there. One reason for the different results is that Judge Messitte considered but rejected as wrong some of the grounds Judge Daniels erroneously gave for dismissing the SDNY case. In particular, Judge Messitte correctly rejected Judge Daniels’s conclusion that because Trump’s patrons chose to stay at his hotel, there was nothing a court could do to redress the injuries caused by the emoluments violations; he also rejected Judge Daniels’s conclusion that only Congress, and not the courts, could enforce the foreign emoluments clause.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. Sometimes the young are wiser than their elders. Days after the survivors of the Stoneman Douglas slaughter stunned the world with the 800-city #MarchForOurLives and their brilliantly effective call for laws to stem the tide of gun violence, retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens handed the gun lobby a rhetorical howitzer. For years, that lobby’s most effective way to shoot down proposed firearms regulations has been to insist, falsely, that any new prohibition would lead to the eventual ban of all firearms. It is easy for those who revile our lax gun laws to lose sight of how many Americans cherish the right of law-abiding citizens to keep guns at home for self-defense or hunting.

As President Donald Trump shakes up his legal team in preparation for a likely interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, the president and his attorneys have a number of different options for how they could approach the face-to-face session — but history shows that if they are too defensive, they might become embroiled in a lengthy court battle...But there is another method Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe said Trump could use. "The Supreme Court held in the Nixon Tapes Case that executive privilege cannot overcome a grand jury subpoena," he told Business Insider. "So Trump would have to answer every question or be held in contempt — unless he takes the Fifth Amendment."

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Ron Fein. The adult-film actress Stormy Daniels has been dragged into secret arbitration over allegations that she has violated a hush agreement to keep quiet about her affair with Donald Trump. In response, Daniels (whose real name is Stephanie Clifford) has filed a lawsuit in California, asking the court to toss out the contract because Trump never signed it. That case is still in its early stages. But even if Daniels is forced to defend herself before a private arbitrator rather than a judge, the arbitration proceeding should not be secret. It should be open to the public.

Since the revelation that President Trump (or someone acting on his behalf) compelled senior staff to sign non-disclosure agreements — in essence, preventing them from speaking about their White House service — much of the focus, and rightly so, has been on the improper presidential attempt to stomp on government employees’ First Amendment rights and attempt to prevent employees from speaking to congressional oversight committees (i.e., a violation of the separation of powers)...If candidates for administration jobs wrote out a $1,000 check to Trump to get hired, few would doubt that is anything but a bribe. Likewise, if Trump demanded $1,000 to hire someone, we’d all agree that amounted to soliciting a bribe. So, is the exchange of an NDA — something plainly of value to Trump — somehow different?...Constitutional scholar Larry Tribe doesn’t think that there’s a legal difference. “I’ve argued and believe that the NDAs Trump might have extracted from executive branch employees (if that story proves accurate) are a form of extortion in terms of what they extract from government employees and have the stench of bribery as well,” he tells me.

President Trump’s top attorney tasked with handling the special counsel’s Russia investigation stepped down Thursday amid a larger legal team overhaul. Lawyer John Dowd confirmed to the Daily News in a text that he was resigning, adding that he “loves the president” and wishes him well. Dowd’s departure comes as Trump’s attorneys have been negotiating with special counsel Robert Mueller over the scope and terms of an interview with the President...“Even tyrants and killers have rights and deserve legal defenders — but why would any lawyer with integrity want to represent someone who won’t take advice and, even worse, who basically wants the lawyer to help him continue his criminal career while remaining President?” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe said.

...The cascading momentum of newly filed lawsuits surrounding Trump’s past payoffs to women to hide adulterous behavior will drive coverage of another legal sphere: the silencing of women via what may be judged to be unenforceable contracts...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School constitutional scholar, said Gerety is raising legitimate issues that courts will have to consider. “Gerety raises good questions about a number of factors that would go into any judicial decision about whether to enforce a non-disclosure agreement of the kind Donald Trump seems to have pressured some of his sexual partners, and maybe even members of his administration, into signing,” he said.

When Law School Professor Cass R. Sunstein found out on March 14 that he was this year’s recipient of the Holberg Prize, he said he was both surprised and gratified. “It felt like squash had been made an Olympic sport, and I had been informed that I made the team,” Sunstein said. “Meaning, very surprising and slightly surreal—and a great honor.” The Holberg Prize is a Norwegian award given annually to a researcher who has made great contributions to the arts and humanities, the social sciences, law, or theology. Sunstein is a researcher in behavioral science and political theory, and his work explores the intersection of the two fields...Law School Professor Laurence H. Tribe, who taught Sunstein, wrote in an email that Sunstein “is a national treasure.” “His breadth and depth of insight across disciplines is unparalleled, as is his productivity. That he credits me as his mentor is humbling but enormously gratifying,” he wrote.

A progressive group that says it wants to expose misconduct by President Trump and his Cabinet is taking on the president through his favorite form of communication: Twitter. The Shadow Cabinet, a group of 21 scholars, activists and former officials, announced Tuesday morning that it’s launching “We the Constitution."...In a statement, Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard who serves as the citizen attorney general in the Shadow Cabinet, said Trump’s conduct in office raises profound questions about the survival of a democracy in which all are constrained by the rule of law. “This president defies legal rules, standards, principles, and norms — including how he even looks away when our system of government is under attack by a hostile foreign power — to an alarming degree,” he said.

On February 28th, two weeks after a 19-year-old gunman killed 17 people in Parkland, Florida, President Donald Trump said “it doesn’t make sense” for teenagers to be allowed to buy a semi-automatic weapon when federal law bans handgun sales to people under 21...On March 12th he tweeted, in the face of evidence to the contrary, that there is “not much political support (to put it mildly)” for raising the age to buy rifles. Mr Trump says he prefers to wait and see how the courts handle challenges to age limits in the states. He appears to be thinking of the conflict that is brewing in Florida, where the NRA filed a lawsuit on March 9th claiming that the Sunshine State’s new age restrictions violate the constitutional rights of 18-20-year-olds wishing to buy semi-automatic weapons...According to Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, the NRA “should and probably will lose”. No court has found people aged 18 to 20 to be a class worthy of special constitutional protection.

This week, more than a dozen high-profile social scientists and legal scholars charged their profession to help fix democracy by studying the crisis of fake news. Their call to action, published in Science, was notable for listing all that researchers still do not know about the phenomenon. How common is fake news, how does it work, and what can online platforms do to defang it? “There are surprisingly few scientific answers to these basic questions,” the authors write...The authors of the Science essay—who include Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor and former Obama administration official, and Duncan Watts, a social scientist at Microsoft Research—argue that avoiding the term distorts the issue. Fake news refers to a distinct phenomenon with a specific name, they say, and we should just use that name (fake news) to talk about that problem (fake news)...In an email, [Laurence] Tribe responded: “I do my best to avoid retweeting or relying in any way on dubiously sourced material and assume that, with experience, I’m coming closer to my own ideal. But no source is infallible, and anyone who pretends to reach that goal is guilty of self-deception or worse.”

Donald Trump owes his presidency to the Electoral College more than any other factor, even Russian interference. This constitutional quirk also gives a hint of irony to an unusual bill passed earlier this week by Maryland’s Democratic-controlled State Senate. The senators voted 28-17 on Monday, largely along party lines, to require presidential candidates to file copies of their tax returns with the state board of elections two months ahead of Election Day, so the filings can be made public...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University law professor and frequent critic of the Trump administration, described Maryland’s bill as a “neutral, even-handed way” to allow voters to assess the “financial and ethical history” of would-be candidates. He also viewed its constitutional footing as more secure.“It’s not an interference with any federal prerogative, nor does it filter out in advance any set of presidential candidates who meet the Constitution’s age, residence, and other qualifications,” Tribe said.