Media Mentions

Sen. Lindsey Graham's resolution to the Senate condemning the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump has "absolutely no substance," said a constitutional scholar, and is full of "phony objections." The resolution brought by the South Carolina Republican is co-signed at the time of writing by 46 of his party colleagues in the Senate. It accuses House Democrats of a lack of due process and transparency in their impeachment inquiry. ... "Senator Graham's resolution has absolutely no substance," Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard, and a prominent critic of Trump, told Newsweek. "I looked at it carefully to see if any of its process complaints made sense historically, legally, or morally. I could find nothing in it worthy of being taken seriously. "And the fact that it focuses entirely on phony objections to a completely fair and traditional process speaks volumes about how little the Republican senators have to say in defense of what the president has done in shaking down a vulnerable ally for his own personal benefit."

A federal judge on Thursday fined Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for contempt of court, ruling that she had violated an order to stop collecting on loans owed by students from a now-defunct for-profit chain of colleges. ...The decision stems from a class-action lawsuit filed in 2017 by the Project on Predatory Student Lending of the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School and the group Housing and Economic Rights Advocates, both of which represent former Corinthian students. For more than a year, the students’ lawyers argued that Ms. DeVos had illegally punished thousands of cheated students who were owed relief from the federal government. Toby Merrill, director of the project, said that the ruling demonstrated “the extreme harm” of Ms. DeVos’s actions. “Secretary DeVos has repeatedly and brazenly violated the law to collect for-profit college students’ debts and deny their rights, and today she has been held accountable,” she said.

A person familiar with the matter stunningly confirmed the following on Thursday: the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the nation’s highest law enforcement organization, is now criminally investigating whether former special counsel Robert Mueller‘s Russia probe was based on improper activity by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Legal experts were astonished. ... Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe told Law&Crime that he also has his doubts about the legitimacy of the probe, suggesting that it could be a ploy to distract from impeachment. “Durham’s reputation is very solid, but then so was Barr‘s before he came into the Trump orbit. In any event, it’s hard for me to imagine what federal crime Barr purports to be investigating,” he said. “It looks very much like this is simply a way of giving President Trump some talking points about the Russia probe being under criminal investigation.”

A constitutional scholar tells CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that American democracy is in real danger of failing if the House of Representatives fails to impeach President Donald Trump. In a clip aired on CNN Friday morning, Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman tells Zakaria that the mechanics of the Constitution make it clear that impeachment is the sole way an American president can be held accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors. In particular, Feldman says that he believes it is wildly implausible to argue that Trump was not seeking a thing of personal value from Ukraine when he asked its government to launch an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden. “It’s extremely clear that it is a quid pro quo,” he said. “It’s laughable to think that the president was not trying to gain personally by investigating Joe Biden.”

As the FBI’s top lawyer, Jim Baker once butted heads with Apple Inc. and CEO Tim Cook over the tech giant’s refusal to help law enforcement unlock the San Bernardino, California, shooter’s iPhone. Now, three years later, Baker has done an apparent about-face—he’s espousing strong encryption as being vital to national security.  Baker wrote earlier this week in a blog post for Lawfare that he’s had time to reflect and make “efforts to embrace reality with respect to some aspects of several interrelated subject areas that have comprised a substantial part of my career: national security, cybersecurity, counterintelligence, surveillance, encryption and China. “In the face of congressional inaction, and in light of the magnitude of the threat, it is time for governmental authorities—including law enforcement—to embrace encryption because it is one of the few mechanisms that the United States and its allies can use to more effectively protect themselves from existential cybersecurity threats, particularly from China,” he added. “This is true even though encryption will impose costs on society, especially victims of other types of crime.”  Baker was the FBI’s top lawyer from 2014 until late 2017. He left the bureau last May and now serves as director of national security and cybersecurity for the R Street Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, public policy research organization based in Washington, D.C. He’s also a CNN legal analyst and lecturer at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: To understand where the impeachment inquiry has gone so far, and where it’s likely to go next, you need to keep in mind one key concept. Hint: it’s not quid pro quo. It’s momentum. To date, House Democrats have built on the original whistle-blower’s document by eliciting behind-closed-doors depositions from those officials in the State Department, Defense Department, and White House who are willing to defy Donald Trump’s order not to participate. By leaking the headlines of their testimony, the Democrats have been able to dominate the news cycle for weeks.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was held in contempt of court and the Education Department must pay a $100,000 fine after a federal judge ruled it failed to stop collecting student loans on a now-defunct college. The rare rebuke came after U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim was "astounded" to discover that DeVos and her department continued to chase more than 16,000 former students from the bankrupt Corinthian Colleges Inc. for funds allegedly owed earlier this month despite a 2018 order to stop. ...In an interview with Newsweek prior to this week's hearing, Harvard lawyer Toby Merrill said that such a finding would be inevitable as there was "no factual question" that DeVos violated the 2018 order. Merrill is the director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard University who brought about the class action suit on behalf of 80,000 affected students against the Education Department. ..."Taking this rare and powerful action to hold the Secretary of Education in contempt of court shows the extreme harm Betsy DeVos' actions have caused students defrauded by for-profit colleges," she said. "Secretary DeVos has repeatedly and brazenly violated the law to collect for-profit college students' debts and deny their rights, and today she has been held accountable.  

Professor Laurence Tribe told Anderson Cooper if there were ever an example of a high crime or misdemeanor the call President Trump had with Ukrainian President Zelensky is it. Tribe said Wednesday night the Ukraine call makes the "Nixon situation" look silly in comparison. "If there were ever a model case for an impeachable offense, a high crime and misdemeanor that includes bribery this is it," Tribe declared. "This is just the most transparently clear abuse of power and an impeachable offense that I can remember in the history of the United States," Tribe said. "And I've studied it pretty thoroughly. This makes the Nixon situation look silly by comparison. This is way more serious."

Defenders of President Donald Trump have gone past their “no quid pro quo” claim to allege “hearsay” to denounce the testimony of acting ambassador William Taylor that further implicated the president in the growing Ukranian scandal. Also on the defensive, Sen. Lindsey Graham told reporters Thursday that he and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will introduce a resolution to condemn the impeachment inquiry. He is urging the House to make the hearings public and allow for cross-examination — something Democrats are reportedly planning to do sometime in November. To discuss, Jim Braude was joined by Jennifer Taub, a professor at Vermont Law School and a visiting professor at Harvard Law this semester who also serves on the Board of Advisors for the group Impeach Trump Now, and William Weinreb, former acting U.S. Attorney and lead prosecutor of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter James B. Stewart ’76 talks about his new book, “Deep State: Trump, the FBI, and the Rule of Law," and the president's ongoing battle with the nation’s top law enforcement agencies.

...Only a few years ago, such “deepfakes” were a novelty, created by hobbyist coders. Today, they are increasingly commodified as yet another service available to those with even a little disposable cash. ...One way to deal with this would be through enacting clear regulation. Mutale Nkonde, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, was among those involved in helping draft the Defending Each and Every Person from False Appearances by Keeping Exploitation Subject (DEEPFAKES) to Accountability Act. “It became incredibly important to enter a piece of legislation,” she says. “As we move towards 2020, we may be subject to supposed video evidence and we need a way of identifying what may look real [but is not].” She says that there are fears that both China and Iran could turn to deepfakes as a tool to attack the US.

In the summer of 2016, Hillary Clinton was heavily favored to become the next president of the United States. And one story was dominating coverage of her campaign: her emails. Following Donald Trump’s election, researchers at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society found that media coverage of the Clinton campaign overwhelmingly focused on scandals surrounding her campaign, rather than policy issues. Coverage of the Trump campaign, on the other hand, favored policy over scandals.

Facial-recognition software correctly matched photos of research volunteers to unidentified medical scans of their heads, in a new study of images that are commonly used in brain research. The finding draws attention to a privacy threat that will increase with technology improvements and the growth of health-care data, experts in medical imaging and facial recognition said. ...The findings suggest existing privacy protections don’t go far enough, the study’s authors said. They also point to the continuing challenge of anticipating new risks from emerging technology, as well as to the need for caution in handling medical data, said I. Glenn Cohen, director of Harvard University’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics. “Our imaginations are only so good,” he said.

Two student advocacy groups have filed separate lawsuits against Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, one alleging her Department of Education allowed an operator of for-profit schools to mislead students and sack them with debt they are now unable to repay, and another that accused her of continuing to refuse to discharge the student loan debt of borrowers previously enrolled in for-profit schools that abruptly shuttered. ... The Project on Predatory Student Lending, part of the Legal Services Center at Harvard Law School, also filed a lawsuit Tuesday against DeVos on behalf of approximately 7,200 former students enrolled in now-defunct for-profit schools in Massachusetts operated by Corinthian Colleges, demanding department officials cancel their student loans.

In November, Seattle will elect a new city council. It is the second election in which the city’s democracy vouchers are in play, a first-of-its-kind financing program for taxpayers, which is either, depending on who you ask, the roadmap to fixing big money in politics across America or responsible for a $3 million jump in PAC spending. In 2015, Seattle overwhelmingly passed Initiative 112  with 63 percent of the vote. The idea first surfaced in the broader public sphere in 2011, 13 months after the Citizens United decision allowed a new flood of corporate money into politics. Harvard law professor Lawerence Lessig proposed a counterbalance in a New York Times op-ed: “more money.” Lessig argued that if corporations were able to classify vast sums of money as protected speech, it might be time to start asking how to match that capitalistic tide with money from ‘the people.’ “[I]magine a system that gave a rebate of that first $50 [we pay in taxes] in the form of a ‘democracy voucher,'” Lessig proposed.

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe shares with CNN's Anderson Cooper why he thinks President Donald Trump's decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine amounts to an impeachable offense.

Aexander hamilton warned in 1788 that impeachment risks “agitat[ing] the passions of the whole community” and spurring “pre-existing factions” to “animosities, partialities, influence and interest”. The process, he wrote, carries the “greatest danger” that “real demonstrations of innocence or guilt” will amount to little in the face of raw political calculations. But the constitution carves a path around the maelstrom, Hamilton insisted: the United States Senate will have the “sole power to try all impeachments” sent its way by the House of Representatives. ...Keeping the Senate proceedings “civil and orderly”—a task that the constitution assigns to the chief justice—may be a struggle, says Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and co-author of “To End a Presidency”. The previous chief justice, William Rehnquist, said of his role in the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton in 1999 that “I did nothing in particular, and I did it very well.” John Roberts, the chief today, faces a more partisan environment but, Mr Tribe says, will seek to emulate his predecessor.

Laurence Tribe on Wednesday suggested that Democrats are now in possession of the “smoking Howitzer” with which to impeach President Donald Trump. The Harvard constitutional law professor told CNN’s Anderson Cooper he believed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was “wise to hold off” until last month to begin an impeachment investigation, after she had “what amounts to not just a smoking gun, but a smoking Howitzer.”

Former Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker on Tuesday attempted to defend President Donald Trump against the onslaught of increasingly inculpatory evidence emerging from Democrats’ impeachment inquiry by claiming that abusing the power of the presidency is not a crime. Appearing on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle, Whitaker argued that Trump’s conduct was not criminal and therefore not impeachable...Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe, one of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars, described Whitaker’s comments as “the epitome of ignorance.” “Matt Whitaker’s statement that ‘abuse of power is not a crime’ is the epitome of ignorance – ignorance of the Constitution, ignorance of the purposes and history of the Impeachment Clause, ignorance of America’s history, ignorance of the law,” Tribe told Law and Crime. “Impeachable offenses, which the Constitution quaintly calls ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors,’ are offenses against the nation and its Constitution, not necessarily violations of criminal statutes.”

Costa Rican magistrate Victor Madrigal-Borloz has served for the past 21 months as the U.N. independent expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual…

With the 2020 race for the White House in full swing, speakers at a Harvard panel on Saturday sharply differed on whether an interstate compact to effectively disable the Electoral College and move to a national popular vote offers an antidote to problems with the presidential selection system. “We are not seeking perfection. We are seeking a more perfect union,” National Popular Vote advocate Rob Richie said during the discussion, part of a conference at Harvard Law School on the history and future of the Electoral College hosted by the Harvard Law & Policy Review...While he backs the compact, in a keynote speech Lawrence Lessig, the Roy. L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, outlined a new proposal for a constitutional amendment he suggested could garner broader support. The proposal would award the support of each state’s electors to the top two candidates on a “fractional proportional” basis, meaning they would receive votes equal to their percentage of the overall state results. It also includes a provision aimed at lessening what some critics consider the unfair advantage small states enjoy in the allotment of electoral votes. “If we had fractional proportional allocation by states, the swing-state problem disappears,” Lessig said. “Presidential candidates would … at least try to campaign to everyone throughout the whole country.”