Source: https://trumpedprogressives.com/2018/06/05/legal-scholars-address-trumps-lawyers/
Timestamp: 2018-09-25 15:38:36
Document Index: 575071590

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 1505', '§ 1512', '§ 9', '§ 10', '§ 1', '§ 1', '§ 9', '§ 1', '§ 8', '§ 4', '§ 3']

Legal Scholars Address Trump’s Lawyers – Trumped Progressives
Legal Scholars Address Trump’s Lawyers
We, legal scholars who study and teach constitutional and criminal law, write in connection with the President’s apparent belief that he is empowered by the Constitution to halt the Special Counsel’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election for any reason whatsoever, and his apparent view that he is not constrained by Congress’s duly enacted laws prohibiting the obstruction of justice. As reported in the New York Times, attorneys for the President wrote a letter to Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller asserting that the Constitution empowers him to “to terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon,” and that he cannot illegally obstruct any aspect of the investigation because of these powers.[1] These views are incorrect.
The President’s duties of care and faithfulness are the fiduciary duties most explicitly required by the Constitution, a document that refers to many offices as “Offices of Trust,” invoking the legal concept of trusteeship (a fiduciary relationship). Mirroring the Constitution’s text, the Federalist Papers repeatedly use the language of care, faith, and trust to describe the offices and duties of all three branches of the federal government and the way their powers should be exercised on behalf of the American people. George Washington, in the opening lines of his first inaugural address, spoke of the presidency as a “trust” committed to him by the American people.[4] The Founders’ carefully-chosen words, with their well-known meanings, reflect a conception of a chief magistrate who is duty bound to act with faithfulness to the law and the people, not to his own selfish interests. A similar view of the office underlies the conclusion of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel that a president may not pardon himself.[5]
We have no doubt that you take your professional roles very seriously—and we hope our legal analysis above provides some illumination as you continue to advise your client to faithfully execute our laws and to take care that those laws are faithfully executed throughout the Executive Branch.
Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution*
Professor of Law, Fordham University School of Law*
John D. Calamari Distinguished Professor of Law, Fordham University School of Law *
Lecturer in Law, UCLA School of Law*
Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center*
Kirkland & Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law, Arthur and Esther Kane Research Chair, University of Chicago Law School*
Director of Admissions and Senior Lecturer, Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs*
Jacob E. Davis & Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law, The Ohio State University,
Moritz College of Law*
Betts Professor of Law Emeritus, Columbia Law School*
Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in Law, University of Alabama School of Law*
Professor of Political Science, Brown University & Visiting Professor of Law, Fordham Law School
Cc: Rod J. Rosenstein
Deputy Attorney General, United States Department of Justice
Chairman, House of Representatives Judiciary Committee
Ranking Member, House of Representatives Judiciary Committee
[1] See Michael S. Schmidt, Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Matt Apuzzo, “Trump’s Lawyers, in Confidential Memo, Argue to Head Off a Historic Subpoena,” the New York Times, June 2, 2018.
[2] See 18 U.S.C. § 1505 et seq. Most relevant here, 18 U.S.C. § 1512 (b), the “witness tampering” provision, prohibits any person from “corruptly” persuading a witness in order to prevent them from testifying or communicating information to a federal officer or judge in an “official proceeding.”
[3] See Ethan J. Leib & Jed H. Shugerman, Fiduciary Constitutionalism and “Faithful Execution”: Two Legal Conclusions, Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy (forthcoming 2018) at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3177968.
[4] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/wash1.asp.
[5] See Presidential or Legislative Pardon of the President, OLC Opinion, August 5, 1974; see also Daniel J. Hemel & Eric A. Posner, Presidential Obstruction of Justice, 106 California Law Review (forthcoming), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3004876, at 50-51.
[6] See The Federalist (No. 69) (Alexander Hamilton).
[7] U.S. Const. art. I, § 9, cl. 8 & § 10 cl. 1.
[8] U.S. Const. art. II, § 1.
[9] U.S. Const. art. II, § 1, cl. 5.
[10] U.S. Const. art. I, § 9, cls. 7-8 & art. II, § 1, cl. 7.
[11] See, e.g., The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, Heritage.org/Constitution (“Under this reading of the [take care] clause, the President can neither authorize violations of the law (he cannot issue dispensations) nor can he nullify a law (he cannot suspend its operation).”).
[12] Notably the Ineligibility Clause of Article I and the rule that the Vice President may not preside at the impeachment trial of the President. See Hemel & Posner, supra, at 36; Zephyr Teachout, The Anti-Corruption Principle, 94 Cornell L. Rev. 341 (2009).
[13] See Leib & Shugerman, supra.
[14] See, e.g., Young v. United States ex rel. Vuitton et Fils S.A., 481 U.S. 787 (1987); Ganger v. Peyton, 379 F.2d 709, 714 (4th Cir. 1967).
[15] See, e.g., Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557, 638-39 (2006).
[16] U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 18.
[17] See Hamdan, supra. See also Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952), in which the Court, at the height of the Korean War, held that Congress’s refusal to grant the President the authority to seize private property in the United States meant that a presidential seizure of steel plants to avert a slowdown in production of war materiel was illegal.
[18] Richard Pildes, In the View of the Supreme Court, Alan Dershowitz Is Wrong About the Powers of the President, Lawfare (June 9, 2017), https://lawfareblog.com/view-supreme-court-alan-dershowitz-wrong-about-powers-president (quoting Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 654 (1988)).
[20] Zivotofsky v. Kerry, 135 S. Ct. 2076, 2084 (2015).
[21] See U.S. Const. art. II § 4 (“The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”), and art. I, § 3, cl. 7 (“Judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States: but the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.”).
[22] Hemel & Posner, supra, at 37.
Author ariusaardvarkPosted on June 5, 2018 Categories TrumpTags 14 legal scholars, constitutional claims, Trump
Previous Previous post: Where’s Melania? The Truth at Last!
Next Next post: A Message from Runnymede, 1215