Harvard Law School star and constitutional law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe has been an unrelenting critic of President-elect Donald Trump, whom he accuses of having repeatedly disrespected and violated the U.S. Constitution in both the letter and spirit of the law. Trump’s purported violations, as Tribe sees it, are poised to continue in Trump 2.0.
.@BillKristol is right about the convoluted Vacancies Act: We’re about to see Team Trump weaponize it in clear violation of its purpose https://t.co/KQj88T0L2l
— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) December 2, 2024
Tribe, who supported each of Trump’s Democratic opponents in his three runs for President (Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris), is now pushing Biden — in the President’s lame duck phase — to issue pardons to those who may be targeted for “retribution” during a second Trump administration.
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly threatened retribution for those who antagonized him while he was in office and afterwards, vowing that his critics and pursuers like Senator-elect Adam Schiff (D-CA), former Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R), and others should be punished for their roles in fingering Trump for his alleged collusion with Russia, his role in the January 6 insurrection, and his two impeachments.
Trump repeated this weekend, well after his electoral victory, that the lawmakers who investigated him on the January 6 Committee should “go to jail.”
Obviously people like Cheney, Kinzinger, Thompson, etc, committed no crimes and should be offered safe harbor by preemptive pardons that President Biden has full power to give and that they may accept without admitting they committed any offense when they in fact committed none. https://t.co/d3njmKjdrX
— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) December 8, 2024
With the threats looming large, Tribe weighed in on the controversial idea that Biden could issue pre-emptive pardons to those who are on Trump’s “enemies list” — a list Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, has been transparent about.
Chilling – Trump says he won’t direct Patel to investigate his enemies, but says Patel probably should. Plausible deniability is all you need with maniac like Patel in charge.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/08/us/trump-interview-news/3799acd8-937c-56d7-88db-216f9392a43c?smid=url-share[image or embed]
— Brendan Nyhan (@brendannyhan.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 9:35 AM
Biden has already heard loud dissenting voices from both sides of the aisle after issuing a broad pardon to his son, Hunter. In that case, Biden explained his action by asserting that the younger Biden was being targeted politically and that the forces aligned against him were not commensurate with the offenses he’d committed. (Special Counsel David Weiss disagreed with Biden’s assessment.)
Political targeting, of course, is also at the core of the idea for pre-emptive pardons of Schiff, Cheney, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger and others that Tribe is advocating for.
Tribe suggests that these pardons can be accepted by the grantees without having to admit to wrongdoing (“without admitting the committed any offense”), with Tribe emphasizing his contention that “they in fact committed none” of the offenses they are accused of by Trump and his MAGA adherents.
It’s notable to consider that even pardons may not eliminate future problems for their recipients, as congressional inquiries are almost a certainty from the likes of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and James Comer (R-KY) — and while a pardon takes away the possibility of prosecution, it also takes away the right of the pardoned to plead the Fifth Amendment under oath.
[NOTE on Tribe: Widely acknowledged for his intellectual prowess, Tribe studied mathematics at Harvard after graduating from high school at age 16. He is officially the “Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard University. The title ‘University Professor’ is Harvard’s highest academic honor, awarded to fewer than 75 professors in the University’s history.”]
Tribe’s politically diverse list of former students/researchers includes former President Barack Obama, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts and associate Justice Elena Kagan, and Attorney General Merrick Garland. Considered a liberal, he has also represented frequent liberal clients such as when he sued the Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of a coal mining company.]
