Laurence Tribe: ‘High Crime and Misdemeanor’ If Trump Made a Deal with Putin to Gain Power

EXCERPT:

TRIBE: "Well, you know, lawyers love to parse things closely and my former student and my friend Jeff Toobin is as good as anybody at doing it. But I decided to look at what the U.S. Supreme Court has said about this and there really are only three places I could find where it talks about collusion and conspiracy in comparison to each other. And in all of them -- one of them as long ago as 1899, another as recently as 2007 -- the court basically said it's a tempest in a teapot. They're synonymous. Of course, just agreeing with somebody to do something like, let's say, play golf at Bedminster, that's not a crime. But agreeing with somebody and then doing something to advance the agreement in order to subvert American democracy or an American election, or in order to refuse to enforce the Magnitsky Act of sanctions against Russia, that can be described as collusion or as conspiracy. Of course, Robert Mueller is smart enough in an indictment to use the words of the statute which usually include the word conspiracy and not collusion. But when it comes to the really big stakes in all of this, high crimes and misdemeanors, I'm sure Jeffrey will agree that there is no difference. There's no difference in the sense that if the evidence shows -- and it's premature to say, but if the evidence shows that Donald Trump, in order to gain power made an implicit deal with Putin and his thugs that if they would help him win the election he would help them by changing the plank of the party in terms of Ukraine and, more importantly, by doing all he could to pull down the Magnitsky sanctions, that would almost certainly be a high crime and misdemeanor whether you call it collusion or conspiracy."