Laurence Tribe Smacks Down Trump Impeachment Team’s Free Speech Defense: Like ‘Being the Fire Chief and Urging a Mob to Burn the Theater Down’
Harvard constitution law professor Laurence Tribe shot down the Trump impeachment counsel’s signaled First Amendment defense of Donald Trump in next week’s Senate trial for inciting an insurrection. Spinning off the “Can’t yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” trope about the limits of free speech, Tribe compared the former president’s incendiary, false claims to “being the fire chief and urging a mob to burn the theater down.”
Speaking with CNN’s Erin Burnett on Tuesday night, Tribe, who has assisted the House Democrats’ impeachment team, spoke in response to a brief, New York Times interview with Trump impeachment counsel David Schoen. The lawyer cited the former president’s right to speak his mind and shifted the blame for the Capitol riot fully on those allegedly misinterpreted Trump’s comments: “We can’t control the reaction of the audience.”
“It’s a First Amendment defense. Will it hold up?” Burnett asked.
“I don’t think so. It’s a very serious point, but it’s wrong,” Tribe said. “I don’t know anybody who is a stronger First Amendment advocate than I am, but I fully recognize that there is a difference between the right of an ordinary citizen to express herself passionately and the right of someone to run for president, take the oath as president and then stand by the presidential seal in front of the white house and urge an angry mob to burn it down. To go to the Capitol and basically take it over.”
“There’s a big difference between the rights of an ordinary citizen and no citizen will be chilled if a president has been held accountable for what this guy did,” Tribe added. “What’s involved here is like being the fire chief and urging a mob to burn the theater down. That is not freedom of speech. We are not talking about the rights of people to express themselves. We’re talking about getting rid of someone permanently from government when that person is an enemy of government when that person threatens to take it apart.”
To underline the connection between Trump’s escalating rhetoric and the motivations of the Capitol insurrectionists, Burnett then played a clip of the rioters repeating — sometimes verbatim — a number of claims and phrases made by the former president on January 6th and in the days before.
“He’s not some guy talking on a street corner. He is the President of the United States,” Tribe reiterated. “Those words echoed by the mob show a direct link and there are pages upon pages of evidence in the trial brief filed by the House managers today detailing in really painful detail how unbelievable it would be to say that the president wasn’t responsible. Liz Cheney thought he was. The Majority Leader thought he was.”
Tribe then wound up the interview by reprising a line used by the House Democratic impeachment managers in their brief to the Senate setting up the incitement of insurrection charge.
“Anybody looking at this evidence would realize that the president riled this mob up, aimed toward the Capitol like a cannon, and fired.”
Watch the video above, via CNN.
