Longtime Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe has outlined a case for the impeachment of Donald Trump based on obstruction of justice.
“The country is faced with a president whose conduct strongly suggests that he poses a danger to our system of government,” Tribe wrote in a column in Sunday’s Washington Post.
Tribe, a longtime supporter of liberal causes and co-founder of American Constitution Society, makes his case primarily based on Trump’s public statements regarding the reason for his firing last week of FBI director James Comey, after which the president “shockingly admitted on national television that the action was provoked by the FBI’s intensifying investigation into his campaign’s ties with Russia.”
Tribe also cited what he termed the president’s “brazen defiance” of the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, which aims to prevent U.S. officials from falling under pressure to foreign powers because of their personal or business ties, by insufficiently separating himself and his family from his private business interests.
“Political reality made impeachment and removal on that and other grounds seem premature,” Tribe wrote.
Tribe outlined not only Trump’s removal of Comey, who was leading an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to interfere with the 2016 election, but also the president and White House team’s contradictory statements since then.
“To say that this does not in itself rise to the level of ‘obstruction of justice’ is to empty that concept of all meaning,” Tribe wrote.
Tribe said the matter was an urgent one. “To wait for the results of the multiple investigations underway is to risk tying our nation’s fate to the whims of an authoritarian leader,” he wrote.