Laurence Tribe: an “avalanche” of Trump-Russia indictments is coming, with Donald Trump as co-conspirator
As the scandalous news about Donald Trump and his advisers continues to leak out, it’s becoming more clear by the day just how much legal trouble they’re all in. Today’s latest international scandal bombshell involving Trump and Michael Flynn is so eye popping that it’s led one prominent legal expert to make a bold prediction about what’s about to come.
The latest scandal goes like this: during the transition period, Flynn was promoting a for-profit plan to build nuclear reactors across the Middle East. He pushed the plan on his fellow Trump advisers, as well as others outside the transition team, while he was secretly taking money from the people behind the plan. Politico broke the story (link). But the real story may be what this means in legal terms – and that’s where Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe comes in.
Professor Tribe reacted to the news by tweeting that “When the indictments start rolling out, I predict an avalanche” (link). He then added that “for Trump to escape being an unindicted co-conspirator would be miraculous.” That second part may be key, because it’s happened once before. During the Watergate scandal, a grand jury named then-president Richard Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator in 1974, as a way of working around the never-tested legal grey area of indicting a sitting president.
Because Michael Flynn committed the crime of taking unregistered foreign money while promoting the plan within the Trump transition team, it provides legal grounds for Donald Trump himself to be seen as a co-conspirator in Flynn’s scheme. There is also some belief within the legal community that the president cannot pardon his own co-conspirators. So if Trump is named a co-conspirator by a Mueller jury, it may empower the Supreme Court to rule that he can’t pardon Flynn – and if so, then Flynn would have to flip on Trump to avoid a lengthy prison sentence.
