Trump could be impeached for falsely accusing Obama, says Harvard professor

‘Using power of White House to falsely accuse predecessor of impeachable felony qualifies as impeachable offense’

A Harvard University professor has claimed that US President Donald Trump could face impeachment if he lied when he claimed former president Barack Obama had ordered surveillance of his phones during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Law professor Lawrence Tribe expressed these remarks in response to George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley’s opinion in which he claimed that the US president could not be impeached for making false claims about Obama because the comments were made on Twitter.

“There’s no penalty to the president for bad tweets,” Turley said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe broadcast on Tuesday. “[Twitter] postdated the [US Constitution’s] impeachment clause. So, there’s no impeachment for bad tweets.”



However, Tribe disagreed by arguing that using the power of the White House to falsely accuse a predecessor of an impeachable felony qualifies as an impeachable offence, "whether via tweet or not".

1/On @JoeNBC @JonathanTurley says Trump's false claim that 44 wiretapped him cdn't be impeachable because #Twitter didn't exist when the

— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) March 7, 2017

2/Impeachment Cl. was written in 1787. What's he mocking? Stupid versions of originalism? The gravity of T's abuse of power? POTUS himself?

— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) March 7, 2017

3/Using power of WH to falsely accuse predecessor of impeachable felony does qualify as an impeachable offense whether via tweet or not

— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) March 7, 2017