Donald Trump may face charges for the 'serious crime of espionage' over classified documents: Lawrence Tribe

Legendary constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe offered his analysis to MSNBC viewers after The New York Times published a bombshell story under the headline, "prosecutors pursue inquiry into Trump's handling of classified material."

Tribe is a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, where he taught constitutional law for fifty years.

"On this day of truly historic escalations in those investigations into the ex-president and his inner circle, questions now arise about how the Justice Department will juggle all of it and weather all of it," MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace reported.

"The five sitting House Republicans and close allies of the ex-president are the first members of Congress to receive subpoenas from the Jan. 6th select committee and the DOJ moving ahead with its probe of Donald Trump's sensitive including sensitive government documents. Our next guest says we should see all of it and reassurance that Attorney General Merrick Garland is taking steps to hold Trump accountable. Joining me is Laurence Tribe, professor (emeritus) of constitutional law in Harvard and has argued and won 35 cases in front of the Supreme Court," Wallace said, not noting his loss against her old boss in Bush v. Gore.

Tribe explained his thoughts on the DOJ investigation.

"Nicole, I find that quite reassuring and it really brings back memories back from 2017, I think it was, when Donald Trump, right after firing the FBI director called [Russian Foreign Minister] Sergey Lavrov and [Russia Ambassador to America] Sergey Kislyak into the Oval Office by revealing the identity of a Mossad Israeli agent who was involved in an undercover operation to discover an Islamic plot to create methods of going through American airports without detection and carrying bombs," he said. "So we know we're dealing with a guy who is not particularly careful about classified information and if he can get some bragging rights by sharing it with adversaries he's willing to do it."

"Now when we find all of this apparent top secret information finding his way to unsecured boxes to Mar-a-Lago, it's very encouraging that the Department of Justice isn't simply asking who packed the boxes, but what did the president then of the United States on his way out of the Oval Office have in mind in taking that information? Did he use it for his own benefit?" he wondered.

"That would be a serious crime of espionage so there is both a national security angle and a potentially criminal angle and the most encouraging thing to me, because I'm worried about accountability so that we don't have a repeat of all of these things in 2024 of the attempted coup and insurrection," Tribe said. "What is most important to me is that no one should be above the law and the attorney general and his top deputy and associate attorneys general, people like Lisa Monaco should be taken at their word when they say they're going to follow the evidence wherever it leads right into the Oval Office, right into the former guy, so stay tuned."

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