Laurence Tribe

Donald Trump Jr.’s explanation this week about why he and other top Trump advisors met in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer who promised “information helpful” to his father’s US presidential campaign raises more questions than it answers...Trump Jr. has hired New York criminal defense lawyer Alan Futerfas to represent him in any Russia-related probes. Futerfas says his client has done nothing wrong...Legal experts told Quartz they see a wide scope for criminal investigation...Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, told Quartz that “a properly conducted presidential election” could be construed as what was taken by illegal means.

Mark Weidick thought it had to be some kind of mistake. In late May, the CEO of HiQ Labs, a data analytics startup in San Francisco, received a letter from LinkedIn, ordering his company to stop using data from user profiles. LinkedIn, the Sunnyvale professional networking company now owned by Microsoft, might as well have told Weidick to just fold up HiQ, because the startup relies on that information in its algorithm to help businesses identify and retain talent...HiQ’s situation is not merely a dispute between two companies. Though early, the case could well end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. A decision would ultimately guide courts on how to meld high-minded ideas about freedom forged in the 18th century with the 21st century digital economy. But don’t take my word for it. The case could very well establish “a lasting precedent on applying constitutional principles to social media,” famed Harvard law Professor Laurence Tribe told me.

Harvard law professor and ardent Donald Trump critic Laurence Tribe says the president may have violated federal law by tweeting a warning about secret tapes of fired FBI director James Comey. “It could readily be viewed, as Trump himself has conceded, as an effort to influence the ‘due administration of justice,’ defined under 18 USC sec. 1503 as criminal obstruction of justice,” Tribe told TheWrap in an email. 18 USC 1503 is a federal criminal law that makes it a crime to try to interfere with an official government investigation.

It’s not clear whether President Trump, on the day the Senate health-care bill was released, fessed up that he has no tapes of conversations of then-FBI Director James B. Comey (“I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings”) because he wanted to avoid intense media coverage of his embarrassing bluff or because the health-care bill is so bad that any distraction is welcome. Either way, no communications strategy can hide a bad health-care bill and another legal misstep that special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III can use to ensnare him...Constitutional lawyer Larry Tribe also points me to the federal statute that prohibits sending a “threatening letter or communication” that “endeavors to influence … the due administration of justice.”

In a lawsuit filed against President Trump, the attorneys general of the District of Columbia and Maryland seek to pierce the web of Trump-related proprieties and force him to make a choice: the presidency or his business empire? The suit adds four critical elements to the legal fight over Trump’s refusal to liquidate domestic and foreign holdings that put him in violation of the Constitution...Constitutional expert Laurence H. Tribe explains, “The attorneys general of states and of the district are in a particularly good position to emphasize the domestic emoluments prohibition inasmuch as the Article II ban on extra compensation to the president from any state and from any part of the federal government is directly and dramatically concerned with sparing the states and federal agencies and departments from the distracting and resource-draining consequences of interstate and interagency competition for presidential attention and priority, so the kind of harm they can allege and prove directly illustrates the evils against which the Article II domestic emoluments clause was designed to shield them.”

Donald Trump confirmed on Friday he was the subject of an investigation over his firing of former FBI director James Comey, as the US president appeared to accuse the number two official at the justice department of orchestrating a “witch hunt."...Alan Dershowitz, a constitutional law expert and former Harvard University professor, has argued that Mr Trump would be within his constitutional rights to order the end to an FBI probe, because of rights derived from his position as head of the executive branch of government. But Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard and former colleague of Mr Dershowitz, said he “strongly disagreed.”...“On Alan’s view, a president would even have a constitutional right to bribe FBI agents with offers of hush money to destroy evidence of presidential perfidy,” said Mr Tribe.

...Mr Trump, a fan of seeing people in court, now faces four different lawsuits over his conflicts of interest...The Department of Justice has already responded to a challenge from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a watchdog group, by urging the court to dismiss charges. CREW does not have the right to sue, the administration argued, and courts have no authority to stop presidents carrying out their “official duties”. This back-of-the-hand response will be harder to support in the suit brought by the states, which features sovereign entities as plaintiffs and which, according to Joshua Matz, a lawyer, and Laurence Tribe, a professor of law at Harvard, has an “exceptionally powerful” justification for legal standing.

Constitutional scholars Laurence Tribe & Elizabeth Foley debate the legal issues that emerged from Comey's testimony, from his firing to Trump's impeachment.

The Post is reporting that President Trump is now personally under investigation by the special counsel for possible obstruction of justice, and this morning, Trump is in full meltdown-martyr mode over it...Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe emails me: "The conversation Trump had with Rosenstein and Sessions just before firing Comey would clearly be important to Mueller’s probe into whether Trump obstructed justice because it would bear directly on whether Trump acted “corruptly” in “endeavoring to influence or impede the due administration of justice” (to use the language of 18 USC 1503) by firing Comey."

In advance of his highly anticipated hearing Thursday, the testimony of former FBI director James B. Comey has been released by the Senate Intelligence Committee. (That, in and of itself, is a favor to the White House, allowing it to prepare.) The testimony is not the same as the individual memos Comey wrote, but presumably those support the narrative he tells in a gripping account of five of his nine interactions with the president...Constitutional lawyer and Harvard law professor Laurence H. Tribe observes, “Comey’s recollections strongly suggest that the President deliberately sought to create the impression with Comey that the best way to get his wish of retaining his position as Director was to back off in his investigation of Flynn and to assure Trump that he would not later become a target of the Russia investigation.”

Even as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to decide the constitutionality of the revised travel ban proposed by President Trump, he went out of his way Monday to criticize the courts, and he seemed to suggest he would favor Christian refugees over Muslims. “The courts are slow and political!” Trump said in one of a series of early-morning Twitter postings about his executive order prohibiting U.S. entry of anyone from six nations whose populations are almost entirely Muslim. The order is under review by both the Supreme Court and the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco...But [Laurence] Tribe told The Chronicle that Trump’s preference for his earlier order could “properly increase judicial skepticism over his claim that individuals subject to the ban could rely on the discretionary waiver provision to reduce the risk of undue hardship.”

Chimpanzees do not deserve the same rights as people, a New York state appeals court unanimously concluded on Thursday, as it refused to order the release of two of the animals to a primate sanctuary. The 5-0 decision by the Appellate Division in Manhattan is the latest defeat for the Nonhuman Rights Project and its lawyer Steven Wise in a long debate over whether caged chimpanzees are actually legal "persons" entitled like humans to bodily liberty...Tommy's and Kiko's cause drew support from Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe in a friend-of-the-court brief. Tribe suggested that nonhuman animals could face legal duties, citing a "long history, mainly from the medieval and early modern periods, of animals being tried for offenses such as attacking human beings and eating crops."

James Comey’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee lived up to its billing: In a blockbuster hearing, the former FBI director accused President Donald Trump of telling “lies” about the reason for his abrupt firing, and detailed what he viewed as the president’s attempts to shut down a federal investigation...It’s one man’s word against another, with nothing less than the presidency of the United States potentially at stake. To sift through the questions raised by Comey’s dramatic testimony, we asked a bipartisan group of legal experts to analyze his remarks and tell us what they mean for the president’s fortunes and the FBI’s ongoing investigation. Here’s what they said: [Laurence Tribe]: "Comey was totally convincing and completely fair both in what he said and in what he refused to say. I can’t imagine anyone doubting a word of what he said."

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe joins Lawrence O'Donnell exclusively to explain why being accused of abuse of power could be just as bad for President Trump as being accused of obstruction of justice… both are impeachable offenses.

Questions over whether President Donald Trump attempted to obstruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Russia probe could hinge on testimony from the nation’s top intelligence chiefs. But this week, they refused to answer key questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee, even as they admitted they had no legal justification for that refusal...One form of executive is the deliberative process privilege, which involves advice given to the president, for example during deliberations or the decision-making process of executive officials. Another form of the privilege applies to confidential presidential communications, but doesn’t apply to conversations of a criminal nature, which the witnesses were being questioned about during the hearing, explained Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School.

President Donald Trump's legal team, in the wake of damning testimony from James Comey, plans to file a complaint against the former FBI director with the Justice Department Inspector General and the Senate judiciary committee early next week, two sources with knowledge of the situation told CNN...Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, said that the "only impropriety, and perhaps illegality, in connection with the Comey release of his conversation with the President and of the memo recording was that of Trump, threatening the former FBI Director through Marc Kasowitz yesterday."

Even as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to decide the constitutionality of the revised travel ban proposed by President Trump, he went out of his way Monday to criticize the courts, and he seemed to suggest he would favor Christian refugees over Muslims...Trump also said his Justice Department “should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted” to the Supreme Court. He appeared to be deriding the revisions that his lawyers have asked the court to uphold...[Laurence] Tribe told The Chronicle that Trump’s preference for his earlier order could “properly increase judicial skepticism over his claim that individuals subject to the ban could rely on the discretionary waiver provision to reduce the risk of undue hardship.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. Donald Trump's tweets in the wake of the London massacre Saturday night have become the subject of much speculation: Will they reduce the administration's chances of victory for its executive order banning travel to the United States from six majority-Muslim countries when the ban is taken up by the Supreme Court? Predictions either way are perilous, but one thing seems clear: It's not the President's return to calling his executive order a "travel ban" rather than a "pause" that matters in the tweets he has sprayed all over the globe.

Eric Goode, 59, is a New York entrepreneur who is an owner of downtown establishments like the Bowery Hotel and the Waverly Inn. He was a creator of Area, the art-gallery-nightclub from the 1980s. He is also a conservationist with something of an obsession for turtles. And now he is the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit that accuses President Trump of violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, a once-obscure provision intended to prevent federal officials, including the president, from falling under the influence of foreign powers...Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional scholar who is among the lawyers representing CREW, said the addition of Mr. Goode helped buttress the suit’s legitimacy. “It makes it inconceivable that this lawsuit would be tossed out,” he said, offering a bit wishful thinking, as the Justice Department, which is representing Mr. Trump, will almost certainly try to move at some point to have the case dismissed.

If you want to know what a responsible approach to House oversight in response to substantial evidence of possible executive wrongdoing might look like, watch House Judiciary Committee Democrats...Constitutional litigator and Harvard law professor Laurence M. Tribe tells me: “This latest Trump gambit for wiggling out of a constitutional mandate certainly shows that liquidation is the only practical way for Trump to comply with the Emoluments Clauses. All he and his lawyers are doing is picking a course of action — donating selected profits to charities he favors — that is constitutionally defective to begin with and then complaining that it’s also infeasible to implement.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. All Spider-Man fans will recognize the line, “With great power comes great responsibility.” We need to act now on that maxim’s converse: When great power is placed in the hands of one who cannot be trusted to act responsibly, we must take that power back. That means starting now to trim President Trump’s power to do irreparable harm to the nation and, ultimately, the world. That’s why I’ve previously raised 25th Amendment questions about Trump’s ability to “discharge the powers and duties of his office” and have recently called for immediate initiation of impeachment investigations — akin to convening a grand jury to consider returning a criminal indictment.