How the President Obstructed Justice

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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/05/did_president_trump_obstruct_justice_in_firing_james_comey.html

How the President Obstructed Justice
Why legal scholar Laurence Tribe believes Trump committed impeachable offenses in his firing of James Comey.
By Dahlia Lithwick


Since the news broke on Tuesday that Donald Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey, Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe has been arguing that the president’s conduct, in and of itself, is illegal and amounts to impeachable “high crimes and misdemeanors.”


Tribe has been acting as citizen attorney general in the “shadow Cabinet” formed by progressive leaders in response to the Trump Administration and tweeting from the @ShadowingTrump handle. Tribe’s tweets (from @tribelaw) have become their own form of must-see TV for the resistance. I reached him via email this morning, with a clutch of lingering questions we at Slate have had about the past week.

Dahlia Lithwick: Talk a bit about the recusal rules and the attorney general. I’ve been trying to figure out all week what the consequences are if Jeff Sessions promises to recuse on the Russia investigation, then fires the person leading the investigation. These rules have no real enforcement mechanism if they are violated, right?

Laurence Tribe: Because Sessions has already lied under oath to Congress, this little song and dance of recusal/nonrecusal seems to me part of a pattern of obstruction of justice in its own right. Nobody can bring a civil or criminal action against Sessions for trying to have it both ways, but he needs to be held accountable to the people and the law in some way. And the only way I can see, whatever its political prospects, would appear to be impeachment.

In addition, President Trump’s sneaky decision to rope Sessions into the charade by which he initially offered a transparently phony explanation both to the FBI director and to the American people of why he was canning Comey seems to me part of Trump’s own pattern of obstruction, which I’ve argued is an impeachable offense by the president.

You’re started using the term obstruction of justice with regard to the president, and that’s got a very precise legal meaning. At what point does Trump’s conduct last week rise to the level of illegal obstruction?

In my view, we have clearly passed that point, both as a technical matter under 18 USC 1505, 1512, and 1513, and, much more importantly, as a matter of what might be called the “common law” of presidential impeachment, as established principally by the House impeachment and Senate trial of Bill Clinton and by the articles of impeachment of Richard Nixon.

What is the legal/ethical significance of Donald Trump’s Friday tweet threatening Jim Comey about taping his calls? Clearly, it was bad optics. But was it also more?

That’s a clear instance of witness intimidation under 18 USC 1512-13 and obstruction of pending congressional proceedings under 18 USC 1505, given the obvious likelihood that Comey’s testimony about who convened the infamous White House dinner involving himself and the president and who said what to whom at that dinner will be needed and sought by the pertinent congressional committees. It also helps form part of the damning pattern of obstruction of justice of which President Trump has all but convicted himself.

You are now making the case that even absent any clear connection of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to throw the election, Trump is complicit in a cover-up, which is itself illegal? Is this a standalone crime from your perspective?

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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/05/did_president_trump_obstruct_justice_in_firing_james_comey.html