Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe: “Garland will indict Trump”
Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe, in an interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, said that Attorney General Merrick Garland could significantly expand the sensitive document case against former President Donald Trump if he were to file an indictment in the D.C. as opposed to Florida.
O’Donnell set up the conversation:
“When the question is ‘what will the Supreme Court do?’ there is a no one better to ask than Harvard Law professor and very successful Supreme Court practitioner Laurence Tribe, and when the question is, ‘what is Attorney General Merrick Garland going to do?’ there is no one available to us who is better to ask than Merrick Garland’s constitutional law professor, Laurence Tribe.”
Laurence Tribe discussing AG Garland, screenshot via YouTube.com
O’Donnell the asked if Tribe thought Garland would indict Trump, to which he replied:
“It seems to me that in these circumstances, it’s clear that all three of the crimes that led to the search and seizures, three alleged crimes, are strongly provable, including obstruction of justice. And that is not even to mention the grave crimes involving seditious conspiracy and insurrection.”
Trump at Mar-a-Lago via Flickr / Trump White House Archives, Public Domain
He continued:
“the real questions before Merrick Garland are not whether to indict, but when? And where? And for which crimes? Where, you would have to decide whether to indict him in Washington D.C., which by the way, he could do even over the Mar-a-Lago offenses because they began when he took the documents illegally from the White House, in Washington, and it was institutions in Washington that he was stiffing and deceiving when he didn’t return them.
And when it comes to trying the case in Washington, there one could include insurrection and seditious conspiracy, in addition to espionage, theft of government documents, and obstruction of justice. And the question of when depends very much on exactly when all the ducks are lined up in a row, when all the witnesses are ready. Merrick Garland is not going to bring less than an overwhelming case, that I know by knowing him for all these years.”
DOJ/FBI HQ via Flickr / J https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Tribe, who once worked as a research assistant to Garland, concluded that Garland “doesn’t do things halfway — he’s an enormously thorough.”
