Lawrence
Tribe says Trump 'High Crimes and Misdemeanors' already evident
As conflicting accounts of what led to James Comey's firing linger and questions remain as to which equally troubling account of the dinner President Donald Trump had with the then-FBI director are accurate, one constitutional law expert has declared the developments "staggering" and evidence of "a series of high crimes and misdemeanors.
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Speaking Thursday to MSNBC's
Lawrence O'Donnell, Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe said
that Trump directly asking Comey if he was under investigation, as the
president indicated to NBC's Lester Holt during a "kryptonite" interview,
"is much worse than just a conflict of interest."
"You're essentially dangling in front of the person who's
supposed to be investigating the chaos swirling around you, and perhaps you,
you're basically saying, 'If you will assure me that I'm not going to be under
investigation, then maybe I'll keep you on. We'll see what happens.'
“It's essentially the language of bribery. It's the language of
the underworld, of racketeering, not the language of a president who is
supposed to be enforcing the rule of law," he said.
"It's staggering—for all the bizarre things that have happened in these 112 or 113 days, this is really like the 13th chime of a clock," Tribe continued.
As for the New York Times reporting on presumably the same one-one-one
event which indicates Trump asked Comey to pledge his loyalty to the president,
Tribe again said, "It's staggering. That is clearly, on its face,
obstruction of justice."
"In this case, what loyalty means [...] is 'Can I count on
you to not to make me a target of this investigation?'" Tribe said.
"That's clearly an impermissible question. So either Trump's own account
of the discussion is true, in which case he's guilty of obstruction of justice
in one respect. Or much more likely Comey's account is true [...] in which case
again Trump is guilty again of attempting to suborn obstruction of justice.
“Either way, as with the first article of impeachment against
Richard Nixon, this is a series of high crimes and misdemeanors regardless of
whether Trump was or was not part of a collusive plot with Russia to steal an
American election."
According to Tribe, "we are in a situation where the only
way to avoid constitutional crisis is for members of Congress to basically get
a spine or 'grow a pair' and really stand up to their responsibilities to the
law. We need an independent counsel, but we also need an independent
Congress."
Tribe further outlined his views on Comey's firing in an op-ed published Thursday at USA
Today.
Writing jointly with former White House ethics lawyers Richard
Painter and Norman Eisen, the trio argues that the sudden firing of Comey—for
which Trump gave "'laughably pretextual" excuses—is "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."
They further write that "the most important task is to
credibly track down the details of the global financial entanglements that have
ensnared this administration from the outset, and that have led to litigation
against Trump under the Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution.
That is likely the key to unlocking the mystery of what
underlying conduct is so terrible that the Trump administration is willing to
tie itself into knots and disgrace itself on the world stage to conceal its
conduct."
