Media Mentions

A book review of "The Enigma of Clarence Thomas" by Kenneth Mack : In March 1960, the civil rights movement came to Savannah, Ga., and an 11-year-old Clarence Thomas did his best to join in. At the behest of his grandfather, a quiet but diligent supporter of the local NAACP chapter, Thomas and his brother dutifully sat through protest meetings, even though many in the city’s conservative black Catholic community stayed away. Soon, Thomas was staring down hostile whites while using the newly desegregated public library and refusing to sit in the black balcony in the movie house. As an adult, he became an ardent black nationalist, attended Yale Law School and militantly opposed interracial marriage. Thereafter, Thomas sought out white Republicans as his political patrons, became a conservative and eventually married a white woman (his first wife was black). He strongly endorsed patriarchal protection of black women, but his Supreme Court nomination famously produced Anita Hill’s credible testimony that he had sexually harassed her while serving as her supervisor in the federal government.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: There is now powerful evidence that President Trump committed impeachable offenses by soliciting (and all but coercing) Ukraine’s president to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has confirmed that the House will move swiftly to investigate this threat to democracy, national security, and the separation of powers. The first stages of that impeachment inquiry are already underway. It’s therefore important to think ahead about what should happen as the House inquiry unfolds — especially in the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, chaired respectively by Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler. If the House is going to impeach the president, it better have a plan.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: There is now powerful evidence that Donald Trump committed impeachable offenses by using his foreign policy and military powers to solicit (and all but coerce) Ukraine’s president to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, has confirmed that the House will move swiftly to investigate this threat to democracy, national security, and the separation of powers.  The first stages of that impeachment inquiry are already underway. It’s therefore important to think ahead about what should happen as the House inquiry unfolds – especially in the House intelligence and judiciary committees, chaired respectively by Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler. If the House is going to impeach the president, it better have a plan. This may seem obvious, but it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Each passing day brings new revelations about the depth of Trump’s abuses, and the involvement of senior officials in fomenting or concealing them. Trump and his allies have responded by seeking to daze and disorient the public; they apparently hope to gaslight their way past high crimes and misdemeanors. With so many fires being set, attention is focused on the latest breaking news.

In 2015, Greene County’s newly minted elections chief went to a conference where people were talking about voting on the internet.  Shane Schoeller wasn’t interested. Sure, voting via iPhone would be more convenient than trudging to the polling place, waiting in line and then casting a ballot. But he worried about getting hacked and thought there was some value to having a paper record of each vote. ... When cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier, a fellow with Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, reviewed the plans, he was pleasantly surprised. “This is pretty fantastic,” he said. “Voter-verifiable ballots and risk-limiting audits are the two things experts have been saying you need. So we’ve got one and the other on a pilot. This is better than everybody else. This is someone who’s taking it seriously.” Schneier warned that Greene County could still face threats: voter registration rolls could be manipulated, for example, meaning registered voters could show up and find themselves removed from the rolls. But he concluded Schoeller was off to a “great start.”

MSNBC’s Richard Lui outlines the process for impeaching a sitting U.S. President, and discusses the current impeachment inquiry into President Trump with Cass Sunstein, a Harvard University Law Professor and author of the book “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” Krishna Patel, a former assistant U.S. attorney, and Katie Phang, an MSNBC legal contributor. Sunstein provides background on what types of actions qualify as “impeachable offenses,” while Patel and Phang give their thoughts on what will happen next in regards to the impeachment inquiry. Phang also noted that while Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, could theoretically decide to go against a House impeachment vote and elect not hold a trial, that would be highly unlikely, as the optics would be very poor.

Diplomat, immigrant, journalist, mother. Samantha Power occupies many roles. Born in Dublin in 1970, she rose to become one of the most senior figures in the Obama administration, appointed US ambassador to the United Nations in 2013. She first emerged on the public scene with the publication of A Problem from Hell, a work inspired by her time as a war correspondent in the former Yugoslavia. The book is an intellectual tour de force, breathtaking in its analysis and argument, as it chronicles key episodes in 20th-century history exposing how the United States’ foreign-policy establishment stood by in the face of genocide. Although the book cemented her stardom – a young senator from Illinois called Barack Obama invited her to work for him after reading it – it also proved something of a poisoned chalice. Once she became a policymaker Power was bound to be scrutinised for her adherence, or otherwise, to the ideals she so passionately espoused in her book.

Ever since the revelation in the summer of 2016 that Russia was hacking the Democratic National Committee to help elect Donald Trump, his critics have been searching for evidence that he is loyal to Russia. We still don’t know the full story of President Trump’s ties with Moscow; an FBI counterintelligence investigation is apparently still going on. But from what we know, it’s a mistake to imagine that Trump is loyal to any country — whether the United States or Russia. His only loyalty is to himself. His policy is not “America First.” It is Trump First. ... Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe tells me the current Supreme Court “wouldn’t regard U.S. v. Nixon as controlling,” both because the court is now more conservative and because (unlike in 1974) there is no ongoing criminal prosecution of presidential aides that requires the documents. But Tribe suggests that the transcripts may come out anyway: “Now that impeachment is all but inevitable, the sinking ship will spring one leak after another.”

President Donald Trump's tweets denouncing Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff were "terribly irresponsible thing" according to a military expert. On Sunday, Trump lashed out against Schiff, who heads up the House Intelligence Committee, accusing the Californian Congressman of "Fraud & Treason." ... Laurence Tribe, a legal scholar and Carl M. Loeb University Professor at the Harvard Law School, called it "a grave abuse of his bully pulpit," describing Trump as "a menace to our democracy."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Soon the House of Representatives will have to decide what, if any, alleged misconduct by President Donald Trump should go into formal articles of impeachment. Some of those decisions will be hard. But here’s an easy one: Under the Constitution, the House should not consider any actions, however terrible, that Trump took before he became president. (There’s one exception; we’ll get to it in due course.) This principle has bite. For example, it would exclude Trump’s alleged involvement in his lawyer’s hush-money payments to cover up sexual encounters with the porn star Stormy Daniels and the Playboy model Karen McDougal. It would also exclude misconduct by Trump’s businesses before 2017.

President Donald Trump's recent tweet quoting a longtime evangelical pastor who warned of a "Civil War" if Democrats seriously pursue removing him from office could actually be grounds for impeachment, one Harvard Law professor said. "If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal," Trump tweeted on Sunday night. ... The president's tweet was immediately met with backlash, and Harvard Law professor John Coates argued that the social media post itself is an "independent basis" for lawmakers to remove him from the White House. "This tweet is itself an independent basis for impeachment - a sitting president threatening civil war if Congress exercises its constitutionally authorized power," Coates wrote on Twitter on Monday.

An article by Noah Feldman: Believe it or not, it’s time for a new special counsel investigation. Not targeting Donald Trump himself: Congress can and will investigate the president in the course of its impeachment inquiry. But as a result of the whistle-blower complaint, a separate investigation does need to get underway immediately. The Department of Justice must investigate Rudy Giuliani’s potential crimes in trying to get Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 U.S. election. It also needs to investigate whether White House officials criminally covered up evidence of Trump’s call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. And because the whistle-blower complaint alleges that the top law enforcement official in the federal government, Attorney General William Barr, “appears to be involved” in these events, a special counsel must be appointed.

An article by Noah Feldman:  The whistle-blower complaint against Donald Trump, in just a few pages, establishes the evidence for a quid pro quo between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy — unfreezing aid payments in exchange for investigating Joe Biden and digging into an unsupported fringe theory about the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion allegation. Second, it provides strong evidence that some in the Trump administration understood that Trump’s call to Zelenskiy was wrong and potentially criminal — and, third, that they took steps to cover it up. Despite its brevity, the whistle-blower complaint does just about everything that Robert Mueller’s report failed to do over several hundred pages: provide proof of Trump soliciting interference in a U.S. election from a foreign government. The complaint also documents Trump abusing his office for personal gain. Abusing one’s office for personal gain is a textbook definition of the federal crime of bribery and extortion. It’s also a textbook definition of an impeachable offense.

I SHOW UP at Samantha Power’s handsome clapboard house outside Concord, Massachusetts, a little after 8.30am, bleary-eyed and rather nervous. I have not merely arranged to interview Barack Obama’s former human-rights guru and ambassador to the UN. She has also suggested we run together. And having been up half the night reading Power’s doorstopper of a new memoir, a late arrival from its publisher, I am slightly dreading whatever workout she might have in mind. Almost as an aside in her book, “The Education of an Idealist”, she describes running the Boston marathon in her early 20s (for the first of several times). Her running mates wrote witty slogans on their T-shirts to draw shouts from the crowd. Fresh from a stint of war reporting in Bosnia, she wrote on hers: “Remember Srebrenica – 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys murdered”. Power is not to be taken lightly.

In Michigan, residents who appear in court face judges who rely on money from defendants to make their budgets work. A final report from Michigan’s Trial Court Funding Commission reached the unanimous conclusion that this funding system - and its inherent conflicts of interest - is quote "broken." The fixes recommended in the report largely rely on lawmakers to sponsor and pass new legislation. But a new report from Harvard Law School suggests courts and judges don't need to wait for politicians to act. We talk to Mitali Nagrecha, co-author of the Harvard report, about how, and why, judges should be using their discretion to make sure that courts are fairer for low-income defendants.

The Democrats don’t have a stellar recent record of conducting congressional hearings. They couldn’t figure out how to respond effectively to Brett Kavanaugh’s righteous anger or to ask some of the probing follow-up questions that his testimony raised. Democrats also struggledthis year to turn hearings on the Russia scandal into the kind of compelling television that would move public opinion...I am glad to see that the party has given a central role to Adam Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He’s a much more effective questioner and speaker than most members of the judiciary or oversight committees...Schiff “is focused like a laser on national security. That’s at the heart of why Trump must be impeached. He endangers the nation for his own benefit,” Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School wrote this week.

President Donald Trump’s decision not to release his tax returns in 2016 has spurred battles coast-to-coast on the state and federal level. Two states have passed laws in response to his refusal, which he has said is because he is under IRS audit. And Congressional Democrats have requested and subpoenaed his returns, saying they need them to assess how the IRS audits presidents. Those efforts have brought unique legal battles, and the outcomes could determine whether lawmakers or the public are able to scrutinize the president’s financial activity...“The California law does not add an additional ‘qualification’ because any candidate can easily comply with it merely by disclosing readily available and obviously relevant information,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School who focuses on constitutional issues. A free speech question is whether California could be seen as forcing Trump and other candidates to speak, in a certain sense, by producing their returns, said Lawrence Lessig, also a professor at Harvard Law School...“The idea that it’s not constitutional because it doesn’t serve a legitimate legislative purpose is just crazy talk,” Lessig said. While politics will always play a role in the decisions of lawmakers, Congress “certainly has the right to police the integrity of the executive branch of the president,” he said. That assessment fits into the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, according to Howard Abrams, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School who focuses on tax issues. “Historically the Supreme Court has been reluctant to invalidate legislative action based on bad intent because if it could be done with good intent, they’ll just re-pass the law with a different record,” he said.

The Democrats don’t have a stellar recent record of conducting congressional hearings. They couldn’t figure out how to respond effectively to Brett Kavanaugh’s righteous anger or to ask some of the probing follow-up questions that his testimony raised. Democrats also struggled this year to turn hearings on the Russia scandal into the kind of compelling television that would move public opinion. ... Schiff “is focused like a laser on national security. That’s at the heart of why Trump must be impeached. He endangers the nation for his own benefit,” Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School wrote this week.

An article by Susan Hennessey, Quinta Jurecic, Benjamin Wittes: The Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives suddenly seems to be careening toward impeachment. The resistance to this measure, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, appears to be crumbling in the face of the new scandal over President Trump’s bullying of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to produce damaging information on Joe Biden and his son. Whether the newfound momentum will sustain itself over the coming days is anyone’s guess. But the sudden and urgent focus on impeachment raises an important question: What should the House impeach President Trump for? If the House is no longer considering whether to impeach Trump and has really decided to move forward, it needs to think about what articles of impeachment should—and should not—contain.

President Trump’s comments in a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July have prompted the House of Representatives to launch an impeachment inquiry. Trump reportedly pressured his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Joe Biden and the former vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, who served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. He also offered to enlist U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr and his personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in that effort. Trump’s action — far from the first controversy the president has created while interacting with a foreign counterpart — appears to be a flagrant abuse of power. But it is one enabled by a system that extends presidents enormous freedom in conducting personal diplomacy with limited transparency and few checks on their power...Similarly, Trump often abruptly shifts American policy with little consultation with his aides, U.S. allies or Congress. And legally, he’s free to do so. “Putting it brutally, Article II gives the president the authority to do, and say, and pledge, awful things in the secret conduct of U.S. foreign policy,” Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith tweeted. “That is a very dangerous discretion, to be sure, but has long been thought worth it on balance.”

If you've followed the vanishing Jimmy Hoffa caper over the years, you've likely heard of Chuckie O'Brien, a burly, confidant who was his driver, gofer and conduit to the mob. Hoffa considered him like a son. One theory is that O'Brien was instrumental in Hoffa's July 1975 disappearance. Others disagree, or say any role was unwitting. Whatever the case, the FBI refers to O'Brien in 1976 as a pathological liar. Many books explore the Hoffa case. But now comes one of the more unlikely Hoffa-book authors -- Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith -- a total opposite of O'Brien, his stepdad, who lives in the land of early bird specials, southern Florida.  Goldsmith's 368-page book, "In Hoffa's Shadow," came out this week and is about the former Teamsters union leader and O'Brien, now 84. Its subtitle is "A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth."

When should law forgive? That's a question that Martha Minow, a professor at Harvard and the former dean of Harvard Law School, has been wrestling with for years. Now, it's the title and the question at the heart of her new book.