Leading Democrats and their supporters in academia, journalism, and entertainment have an exceptionally long track record of peddling stolen-election theories and denying the legitimacy of American elections, as I’ve most recently summarized here and here regarding House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his contention that the 2016 presidential election was stolen. They’re at it again. Here is Harvard Law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe on Wednesday:
It certainly looks like Putin, with the help of Manifort [sic] and Trump, stole the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton but, more importantly, from the 65.8 million people who voted against the Thief in Chief, Donald Trump, who, btw, won just 62.9 million votes despite Putin’s efforts.
Is Tribe simply some random Twitter crackpot? A Twitter crackpot, yes, but not a random one. He has 1.3 million followers. He wrote what is still treated as the leading constitutional law treatise (disclosure: I worked as one of his army of research assistants on one edition of it). He is still regularly treated as a serious commentator on MSNBC and in other media outlets.
He’s also deeply tied to Democratic leaders, including the current president. In 2021, Biden directed his Justice Department to follow Tribe’s legal advice that the CDC eviction moratorium was constitutional. (It wasn’t, as the Supreme Court found.) Their relationship goes way back to when Biden, as chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, called Tribe as a star witness against Robert Bork and other Reagan judicial nominees. Biden appointed him to his commission on Court-packing, and Tribe has been pushing Biden, successfully, on unilateral presidential student-loan debt forgiveness. Some of his more aggressive legal arguments in advance of the 2020 election were cited by John Eastman. (Although Tribe did have to backtrack in 2020, after signing a letter supporting his friend and colleague Elizabeth Warren for vice president, when he said that Biden picking a black running mate would be a matter of “cosmetics.”)
Before Biden, Tribe was widely described by liberal outlets as Barack Obama’s mentor, for having taught Obama and employed him as a research assistant; he served as a legal adviser to Obama’s 2008 campaign and in the Obama Justice Department. In 2016, Tribe argued that Ted Cruz might be ineligible to be president because he was born in Canada (this was also obviously wrong.) He was a chief legal adviser to Al Gore’s effort to overturn the 2000 election in court.
None of this stuff bothers Democrats when their own side does it.