Laurence Tribe

One question is now gripping much of the U.S.: Did President Donald Trump commit a crime in his first month in the Oval Office? Democrats say reports that the president asked former FBI Director James Comey to drop a criminal investigation into one of his former top aides amount to obstruction of justice, if true. Some legal experts aren’t so sure...Laurence Tribe, Dershowitz’s Harvard colleague, is among those who view Trump’s request for Comey to end the probe as potentially criminal. When asked by email if Trump’s comments amounted to obstruction of justice Tribe said, “I believe it does, quite strongly.”

...Because every error is someone else’s fault, President Trump — who went through three campaign leaders — is reportedly thinking about a major shake-up — or at least threatening a shake-up in his already shell-shocked White House...If the president is engaged in obstruction of justice, partially through his lies to the public, then aides who knowingly lie are implicated as well. At the very least, close aides may need to lawyer up before they enter the White House. Harvard Law School professor and constitutional law expert Laurence H. Tribe warned, “Unlike POTUS, they’re all subject to federal prosecution, indictment, trial, criminal conviction and ordinary sentencing for conspiring with, aiding and abetting, or helping cover up federal crimes.”

...To Americans of a certain age, Washington’s atmosphere recalls the Watergate crisis that made Richard Nixon the first man to resign the presidency. Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and a former counsellor to Mr Obama, says the first article of the impeachment against Mr Nixon accused him of obstructing justice. Most Republicans in Washington have only loose ties to Mr Trump, a populist who executed a hostile takeover of the party. If his standing deteriorates, more Republicans could embrace the idea of a special counsel to investigate the Russia links. “The ability of the system to dust itself off and move forward cannot be taken for granted,” says Mr Tribe. “It is a dangerous time.”

An interview with Laurence Tribe. President Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey has led to renewed calls by Democrats for a special prosecutor to investigate Russia's influence on the presidential election and ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. There are also calls for the president's impeachment.

Since the news broke on Tuesday that Donald Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey, Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe has been arguing that the president’s conduct, in and of itself, is illegal and amounts to impeachable “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Tribe has been acting as citizen attorney general in the “shadow Cabinet” formed by progressive leaders in response to the Trump Administration and tweeting from the @ShadowingTrump handle. Tribe’s tweets (from @tribelaw) have become their own form of must-see TV for the resistance.

Harvard constitutional law Professor Laurence Tribe and former U.S. Solicitor General Ken Starr weigh in on the fallout of former FBI Director James Comey's firing.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe The time has come for Congress to launch an impeachment investigation of President Trump for obstruction of justice. The remedy of impeachment was designed to create a last-resort mechanism for preserving our constitutional system. It operates by removing executive-branch officials who have so abused power through what the framers called “high crimes and misdemeanors” that they cannot be trusted to continue in office. No American president has ever been removed for such abuses, although Andrew Johnson was impeached and came within a single vote of being convicted by the Senate and removed, and Richard Nixon resigned to avoid that fate.

Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe tells Joy Reid why it is critically important to put the impeachment process in motion now, before it is too late.

The New York Times is now reporting that according to “associates” of former FBI director James B. Comey, President Trump asked Comey at a private dinner in January to pledge his loyalty. Comey told Trump that he could not do that, the sources say, and now blames this in part for Trump’s decision to fire him...In an interview with me this morning, Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, a persistent Trump critic, argued that this demand for loyalty, if it happened, could constitute an effort to obstruct justice, particularly when viewed in the light of the subsequent firing of Comey. “The demand for loyalty from the head of the organization investigating those around you, when you have the power to fire that person — if you wrote a novel about obstruction of justice, this would almost be too good to be true,” Tribe told me.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation...Sessions may have some explanation for why he chose to participate in the firing of Comey. But the attorney general may now be in considerable legal peril...So Sessions faces a host of serious, potentially career-ending questions. “As I see it, the President’s discharge of FBI Director Comey on a clearly pretextual basis for the obvious purpose (even if unlikely to be achieved) of shutting down the FBI’s then-accelerating investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was on its face an obstruction of justice, the very same charge that the first Article of Impeachment against Richard Nixon made,” says constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe.

President Donald Trump says he asked former FBI Director James Comey if he was under investigation. Constitutional expert Laurence Tribe takes issue with that and other Trump actions he says are likely impeachable offenses.

In the hours after he sacked the very man investigating his ties to Russia, sparked a media firestorm, and engendered political blowback fierce enough to imperil his legislative agenda, President Donald Trump spent his time firing off 140-character insults at U.S. senators. For Trump’s critics, the sequence of events ― from the firing to the tweeting ― was both dizzying and further cause to question the mental state of the man in the Oval Office...“At first glance it looks crazy,” said Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard. What he worries about, he said, is if it’s “crazy like a fox.” “He is yet again changing the headline from what was disadvantageous for him; namely what a pistol [former AG] Sally Yates was” in testifying about Trump’s former top national security adviser’s ties to Russia, Tribe said.

Constitutional law experts say that while President Donald Trump’s decision to fire Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey was legal, it appears to be an abuse of power that could constitute an impeachable offense. Trump’s decision to terminate Comey, the head of the nation’s top law enforcement agency, was announced Tuesday and sent shockwaves throughout the political sphere...Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School went one step further. In an email to ThinkProgress, Tribe said that Trump’s firing of Comey has triggered a constitutional crisis. Only a fully independent investigation can prevent this crisis from “engulfing our democracy,” wrote Tribe.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe, Richard Painter, and Norman Eisen. If President Trump’s shockingly sudden firing of FBI Director James Comey had violated some statute or constitutional provision, our judicial branch could easily have remedied that misstep. What the president did was worse. It was a challenge to the very premises of our system of checks and balances precisely because it violated no mere letter of the law but its essential spirit. No one, not even a president, is above the law. And thus no public official, high or petty, can simply fire those our system trusts to investigate and remedy that official’s possible bribery, treason, or other disloyalty to the nation.

President Donald Trump asserted in his extraordinary letter firing James Comey that the ousted FBI director told him three times he’s not under investigation, a questionable claim that if true would be a startling breach of protocol...Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, who served in the Obama Justice Department, wrote, “That self-serving assertion was completely implausible. To put it bluntly, it appears to have been a blatant lie.” Tribe said “it would have violated well-established DOJ rules and policies for the director to offer any such assurance to anyone, especially the president. In addition, given Comey’s dependence on the president for retention of his role as head of the FBI, offering that assurance would be highly unethical and at odds with Comey’s reputation as a man of integrity.”

...To put it bluntly, Rosenstein was tasked with overseeing an investigation in which — for arguably false, pretextual reasons — he assisted in and recommended the firing of the lead investigator. What he thought he was doing or why he thought this was remotely acceptable has former Justice Department lawyers flummoxed...Rosenstein might consider resigning, perhaps the one act that could save his reputation and restore the integrity of the Justice Department. At the very least, Rosenstein “could partially redeem himself by asking a 3-judge court to appoint a genuinely independent prosecutor to investigate the Russia-Trump connection,” says constitutional expert and Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe.

It’s hard to think of a worse example of the “swamp” that needs draining than a president hiring his unqualified, inexperienced 30-something daughter and son-in-law with a myriad of conflicts (some involving foreign countries) who refuse to fully divest while given broad, undefined duties ranging over the entire government. The nepotism all by itself is regrettable and arguably violates at least the spirit of the anti-nepotism law...An ad from 2012 recently surfaced featuring Ivanka Trump promoting the Trump hotel in the Philippines, a property Trump still owns. In the wake of his bizarre, widely criticized invitation for strongman Rodrigo Duterte to visit, one has to ask whose interests the Trump gang represents. “Despite its age, the Ivanka [ad] serves to remind anyone who’d forgotten that the Trumps have a major Trump-branded property in Duterte-land,” says legal maven Laurence Tribe.

...Trump’s critics are actively exploring the path to impeachment or the invocation of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which allows for the replacement of a President who is judged to be mentally unfit...Over the years, the use, or misuse, of the Twenty-fifth Amendment has been irresistible to novelists and screenwriters, but political observers dismiss the idea. Jeff Greenfield, of CNN, has described the notion that Trump could be ousted on the basis of mental health as a “liberal fantasy.” Not everyone agrees. Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, told me, “I believe that invoking Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment is no fantasy but an entirely plausible tool—not immediately, but well before 2020.”

It was bad enough when Hillary Clinton as secretary of state agreed to have meetings with people who had given to her foundation. Now, according to news reports, Ivanka Trump, while a federal employee, is soliciting donations for a new fund from foreigners. This comes on top of instances in which she sat with heads of state (from Japan and China) at a time that her business was doing deals in their countries...If true, this is egregious and potentially illegal, according to multiple ethics and legal experts. “If the donation would be a quid pro quo bribe, then asking for it is certainly solicitation of a bribe, which is every bit as criminal as the bribe itself,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe tells me via email.

Someone in the Trump administration recognized that even for the Trump clan, the latest act of self-promotion went too far. As NPR spelled out: An article on a State Department website about President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort has been removed after criticism that it was an inappropriate use of taxpayer funds...This time, the administration acted not just unethically but apparently illegally. “It manifestly violates 5 CFR 2635.702,” says legal scholar and litigator Laurence Tribe, referring to the statute that bars using public office for private gain. “Our emoluments case [challenging his receipt of foreign government monies derived from hotels] will put a stop to this sort of outrageous use of public office for private gain, which essentially puts the White House on the auction block and distorts U.S. government policy in the direction of foreign interests in ways that are opaque to public scrutiny.”