Jonathan Turley is an American attorney,legal scholar,writer,commentator,and legal analyst in broadcast and print journalism.[3] A professor at George Washington University Law School,he has testified in United States congressional proceedings about constitutional and statutory issues. He has also testified in multiple impeachment hearings and removal trials in Congress,including the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and both the first and second impeachments of President Donald Trump.[4][5] Turley is a First Amendment advocate and writes frequently on free speech restrictions in the private and public sectors.[6][7][8] He is the author of The Indispensable Right:Free Speech in the Age of Rage (Simon &Schuster 2024).[9]
As an attorney,Turley has worked on notable cases in civil rights defense including the defense of Dr. Sami Al-Arian,NSA whistleblower David Faulk,protesters at the World Bank/IMF demonstrations in 2000,and the Brown family in their challenge to Utah polygamy laws. Turley has also served as counsel on prominent Federal cases including the defense of Area 51 workers,and as lead counsel in the 2014 challenge to the Affordable Care Act.
Early life and education
Turley grew up in a politically active Chicago family as the youngest of five children. His father,John (Jack) Turley was an international architect,partner at Skidmore,Owens,and Merrill,and the former associate of famed modernist architect Mies van der Rohe. Turley has written about his father's influence on his constitutional theories.[10] His mother,Angela Piazza Turley,was a social worker and activist who was the former president of Jane Addams Hull-House in Chicago. He is of Irish and Italian ancestry.[11]
Turley served as a House leadership page in 1977 and 1978 under the sponsorship of Illinois Democrat Sidney Yates.[12]
Since the 1990s,he has been a legal analyst for NBC News,CBS News,the BBC and Fox News,covering stories that ranged from the Clinton impeachment to presidential elections.[26][17] He is on the board of contributors of USA Today[27] and is a columnist with The Hill.[28] He is currently a legal analyst with Fox News.[29]
Politics
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He has opined that the Supreme Court is injecting itself into partisan politics.[34] He frequently has expressed the view that recent [when?] nominees to the court hold extreme views.[35][36]
In October 2006,in an interview by Keith Olbermann of MSNBC,he expressed strong disapproval of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.[37] Commenting on the Military Commissions Act of 2006,which he contends does away with habeas corpus,Turley says,"It's something that no one thought—certainly I didn't think—was possible in the United States. And I am not too sure how we got to this point. But people clearly don't realize what a fundamental change it is about who we are as a country. What happened today changed us."[37]
When the U.S. Senate was about to vote on Michael Mukasey for U.S. attorney general,Turley said,"The attorney general nominee's evasive remarks on 'water-boarding' should disqualify him from the job."[38] On the treatment of terrorism suspect JoséPadilla,Turley says,"The treatment of Padilla ranks as one of the most serious abuses after 9/11... This is a case that would have shocked the Framers. This is precisely what many of the drafters of the Constitution had in mind when they tried to create a system of checks and balances." Turley considers the case of great import on the grounds that "Padilla's treatment by the military could happen to others."[39]
Turley has said,"It is hard to read the Second Amendment and not honestly conclude that the Framers intended gun ownership to be an individual right."[40]
When Congressional Democrats asked the Justice Department to investigate the CIA's destruction of terrorist interrogation tapes Turley said,"these are very serious allegations,that raise as many as six identifiable crimes ranging from contempt of Congress,to contempt of Justice,to perjury,to false statements."[41]
Turley disagrees with the theory that dealing with bullies is just a part of growing up,claiming that they are "no more a natural part of learning than is parental abuse a natural part of growing up" and believes that "litigation could succeed in forcing schools to take bullying more seriously".[42]
He has written extensively in opposition to the death penalty,noting,"Human error remains a principal cause of botched executions... eventually society will be forced to deal directly with a fundamental moral question:Has death itself become the intolerable element of the death penalty?"[43]
He is a critic of special treatment for the church in law,asking why there are laws that "expressly exempt faith-based actions that result in harm."[44]
On October 11,2016,Libertarian Party candidate for President,Gary Johnson,announced that if he was elected President,Turley would be one of his two top choices for the Supreme Court seat that remained open following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.[45] Turley has been repeatedly named as a top pick for the Court by libertarian presidential candidates,including in 2020.[46]
In a 2017 column for The Hill,Turley was critical of military intervention in the Middle East and questioned its constitutionality. He also mentioned that he supported the Supreme Court nomination of Neil Gorsuch.[47]
In the wake of the 2020 U.S. presidential election,Turley argued that,despite his doubts that fraud existed,Americans should welcome the involvement of the courts to vet and validate the election results.[48]
Obama administration views
In another commentary,Turley defended Judge Henry E. Hudson's ruling declaring the individual mandate in health insurance unconstitutional for violating the Commerce Clause of the Constitution:"It's very thoughtful—not a screed. I don't see any evidence this is motivated by Judge Hudson's personal beliefs... Anybody who's dismissing this opinion as a political screed has obviously not read the opinion."[49]
For Obama, there has been no better sin eater than Holder. When the president promised CIA employees early in his first term that they would not be investigated for torture, it was the attorney general who shielded officials from prosecution. When the Obama administration decided it would expand secret and warrantless surveillance, it was Holder who justified it. When the president wanted the authority to kill any American he deemed a threat without charge or trial, it was Holder who went public to announce the "kill list" policy. Last week, the Justice Department confirmed that it was Holder who personally approved the equally abusive search of Fox News correspondent James Rosen's e-mail and phone records in another story involving leaked classified information. In the 2010 application for a secret warrant, the Obama administration named Rosen as "an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator" to the leaking of classified materials. The Justice Department even investigated Rosen's parents' telephone number, and Holder was there to justify every attack on the news media.[50]
In a December 2013 congressional hearing, responding to a question from Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) about presidential power in the Obama administration, Turley said:
The danger is quite severe. The problem with what the president is doing is that he's not simply posing a danger to the constitutional system. He's becoming the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid. That is the concentration of power in every single branch. This Newtonian orbit that the three branches exist in is a delicate one but it is designed to prevent this type of concentration. There is[sic] two trends going on which should be of equal concern to all members of Congress. One is that we have had the radical expansion of presidential powers under both President Bush and President Obama. We have what many once called an imperial presidency model of largely unchecked authority. And with that trend we also have the continued rise of this fourth branch. We have agencies that are quite large that issue regulations. The Supreme Court said recently that agencies could actually define their own or interpret their own jurisdiction.[51]
On November 21, 2014, Turley agreed to represent House Speaker John Boehner and the Republican Party in a suit filed against the Obama administration alleging unconstitutional implementation of the Affordable Care Act, specifically the individual mandate.[52] In 2016, the federal court ruled that the Obama Administration violated the separation of powers in ordering billions to be paid to insurance companies without an appropriation of Congress.[53]
Testimony before Congress
The conceptual thread running through many of the issues taken on by Turley is that they involve claims of executive privilege. For example, he said that the president's claim of executive authority based on Article Two "would put our system on a slippery slope."[54] He has argued against national security exceptions to fundamental constitutional rights.[35][55]
He is a frequent witness before the House and Senate on constitutional and statutory issues,[56][57] as well as tort reform legislation.[17]
Turley has testified regularly during national controversies. He testified at the confirmation hearings of Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch,[58] Attorney General Loretta Lynch,[59] and Attorney General William Barr.[60] He also testified during the Clinton impeachment hearings.[5] Turley, in his capacity as a constitutional scholar,[61] testified in favor of the Clinton impeachment.[62][63] He was quoted extensively by congressman James Rogan during the Clinton impeachment hearings.[64]
Turley also testified in Congress against President George W. Bush's warrantless domestic surveillance program and was lead counsel in a case challenging it. In regard to warrantless wiretaps he noted that, "Judge Anna Diggs Taylor chastised the government for a flagrant abuse of the Constitution and, in a direct message to the president, observed that there are no hereditary kings in America."[65]
Views on Trump impeachments
On December 4, 2019, Turley testified before the House Judiciary Committee regarding the constitutional grounds for presidential impeachment in the impeachment inquiry against then-President Donald Trump, arguing against a Trump impeachment.[4][66][67][68]
In his testimony, Turley objected to the effort to craft articles of impeachment around four criminal allegations: bribery, extortion, obstruction of justice, and campaign finance violations.[69] He argued that the evidence did not meet the standard definitions of those crimes, contrary to the testimony of three witnesses that such legal definitions have always been used as a measure for impeachment deliberations.[69] Turley characterized the charges against Trump as a lowering of impeachment standards to "fit a paucity of evidence and an abundance of anger."[70] The Committee ultimately rejected all four of those articles and adopted the two that Turley argued could be legitimate if proven: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.[71] Where the Committee departed from the testimony was the rejection of Turley's call for more time to develop a more complete record rather than fulfill a promise to impeach by Christmas—an issue that was rekindled by the delay in the submission of the articles to the Senate as new evidence emerged in 2020.[72]
It was observed that his prior reasoning for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton contradicted the opinions he shared against the Trump impeachment.[66][67][68] Turley sought to clarify his positions regarding the two impeachments the next day in an op-ed.[73] Turley noted that in both hearings he stressed that a president could be impeached for non-criminal acts, including abuse of power, and House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler ended the Trump impeachment hearings by quoting him to that effect. He has noted that the only disagreement was the sufficiency of the record and his calling on House to issue subpoenas for key witnesses such as former national security adviser John Bolton.[73] The push for additional time was due in part to Turley's concern that the House was going to impeach a president for going to the courts rather than yielding to congressional demands for witnesses and documents.[74] Given the short period of investigation, Turley objected that such a move would effectively make seeking judicial review as high crime and misdemeanor. He noted that both Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were able to go all the way to the Supreme Court on their challenges before impeachment.[75] While Turley told the Committee that such judicial opinions were not required to impeach on obstruction, the abbreviated period of investigation undermined the foundation of that article.[76]
Turley was cited by both the White House and House managers in their arguments before the United States Senate in the Trump impeachment trial.[77] During the trial, Turley opposed the White House argument that impeachment requires a criminal allegation.[78] Turley wrote in The Washington Post that "If some of the president’s critics are adopting a far too broad understanding of impeachable offenses, the White House is adopting a far too narrow one."[79]
After the second impeachment of Donald Trump, he said there could not be a trial after Trump left office.[80] Turley's views were also cited on the House floor in Trump's second impeachment in January 2021 in the aftermath of the January 6 United States Capitol attack, particularly his opposition to what he called a "snap impeachment."[81] Turley opposed the decision to forego any hearing to consider the implications of such a rapid impeachment, consider changes to the language, and allow for a formal response from Trump.[82] While Turley said that Trump's conduct could amount to an impeachable offense, he expressed reservations over the specific language of the article on free speech grounds.[82] He condemned Trump's speech before the riot on Twitter when it was still being given and opposed from the outset the challenge to the electoral votes that decided the election in favor of Joe Biden brought by pro-Trump Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives.[83] He argued for a bipartisan, bicameral vote of censure to condemn Trump's words and actions leading up to the riot.[83] Turley declined to represent Trump,[84] but did speak to Republican senators before both the first Trump trial[85] and the second Trump trial.[86]
Awards
Turley was ranked as 38th in the top 100 most cited "public intellectuals" (and second most cited law professor) in a 2001 study by Judge Richard Posner of intellectuals referenced in the media and public debates.[87]
In 2005, Turley was given the Columnist of the Year award for Single-Issue Advocacy for his columns on civil liberties by the Aspen Institute[17] and The Week magazine.[88]
In 2008 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of law from John Marshall Law School in recognition of his career as an advocate of civil liberties and constitutional rights.[89]
He was ranked among the nation's top 500 lawyers in 2008.[90] Turley was found to be the second most cited law professor in the country as well as being ranked as one of the top ten military lawyers.[17]
In 2008 his blog was ranked as the top law professor blog and legal theory blog by the American Bar Association Journal survey of the top 100 blogs.[91][92] His work with older prisoners has been honored in various states, including his selection as the 2011 recipient of the Dr. Mary Ann Quaranta Elder Justice Award at Fordham University.[26] He has also been ranked in the top five most popular law professors on Twitter.[93]He has received other awards including the James Madison award and was declared one of four university fellows at the Utah Valley University in 2019.[26]
Prominent cases
Turley has served as counsel in notable cases; representing whistleblowers, military personnel, and a wide range of other clients in national security, environmental, and constitutional law cases. His cases as lead counsel have secured decisions striking down both a federal and a state law,[26] among them:
Larry Hanauer, a House Intelligence Committee staff member falsely accused of leaking classified information to The New York Times[94]
David Faulk, a whistleblower who revealed abuses at NSA's Fort Gordon surveillance programs[95]
Former Judge Thomas Porteous's impeachment trial defense[56] Turley characterized Porteous's chronic bribe-taking as merely being a "moocher", convicted on four articles of impeachment, removed as judge by a Senate vote of 94-2[97][98]
Defendants in terrorism cases, including Ali al-Tamimi (the alleged head of the Virginia Jihad/Paintball conspiracy)-[99] On September 1, 2020, a federal court found that his challenges to his conviction had merit and ordered his release to Turley at Supermax in Colorado to drive back to Virginia to avoid risks of Covid-19.[100]
Turley testified on December 4, 2019, regarding the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, regarding constitutional issues not supporting the impeachment of Trump.[105]
Turley filed a challenge to the Libyan War on behalf of ten members of Congress. The lawsuit was before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.[106]
Personal life
Turley married his wife, Leslie, in 1997. They have four children.[107][108]
Addison Mitchell McConnell III is an American politician and retired attorney who has served as Senate Minority Leader since 2021 and the senior United States senator from Kentucky since 1985, the longest serving senator in his state's history. He previously served as minority leader from 2007 to 2015, majority leader from 2015 to 2021 and was majority whip from 2003 to 2007. McConnell has been the leader of the Senate Republican Conference since 2007, making him the longest serving Senate party leader in U.S. history.
Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States, was impeached by the United States House of Representatives of the 105th United States Congress on December 19, 1998, for "high crimes and misdemeanors". The House adopted two articles of impeachment against Clinton, with the specific charges against Clinton being lying under oath and obstruction of justice. Two other articles had been considered but were rejected by the House vote.
In the United States, impeachment is the process by which a legislature may bring charges against an officeholder for misconduct alleged to have been committed with a penalty of removal. Impeachment may also occur at the state level if the state or commonwealth has provisions for it under its constitution. Impeachment might also occur with tribal governments as well as at the local level of government.
Abuse of power or abuse of authority, in the form of "malfeasance in office" or "official abuse of power", is the commission of an unlawful act, done in an official capacity, which affects the performance of official duties. Malfeasance in office is often a just cause for removal of an elected official by statute or recall election. Officials who abuse their power are often corrupt.
Jamin Ben Raskin is an American attorney, law professor, and politician serving as the U.S. representative for Maryland's 8th congressional district since 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he served in the Maryland State Senate from 2007 to 2016. The district previously included portions of Montgomery County, a suburban county northwest of Washington, D.C., and extended through rural Frederick County to the Pennsylvania border. Since redistricting in 2022, Raskin's district now encompasses only part of Montgomery County.
Benjamin Eric Sasse is an American academic administrator and former politician who is the president of the University of Florida. He served as a United States senator from Nebraska from 2015 to 2023 and is a member of the Republican Party.
Michael J. Gerhardt is the Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law in Chapel Hill. He is also the director of the Center on Law and Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is an expert on constitutional law, separation of powers, and the legislative process. He is a Scholar in Residence at the National Constitution Center and visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. On December 2, 2019, it was announced that Gerhardt would testify before the House Judiciary Committee regarding the constitutional grounds for presidential impeachment in the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump.
Various people and groups assert that former U.S. president Donald Trump engaged in impeachable activity both before and during his presidency, and talk of impeachment began before he took office. Grounds asserted for impeachment have included possible violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution by accepting payments from foreign dignitaries; alleged collusion with Russia during the campaign for the 2016 United States presidential election; alleged obstruction of justice with respect to investigation of the collusion claim; and accusations of "Associating the Presidency with White Nationalism, Neo-Nazism and Hatred", which formed the basis of a resolution for impeachment brought on December 6, 2017.
On January 31, 2017, soon after taking office, President Donald Trump, a Republican, nominated Neil Gorsuch for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States to succeed Antonin Scalia, who had died almost one year earlier. Then-president Barack Obama, a Democrat, nominated Merrick Garland to succeed Scalia on March 16, 2016, but the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate did not vote on the nomination. Majority leader Mitch McConnell declared that as the presidential election cycle had already commenced, it made the appointment of the next justice a political issue to be decided by voters. The Senate Judiciary Committee refused to consider the Garland nomination, thus keeping the vacancy open through the end of Obama's presidency on January 20, 2017.
James Comey, the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was fired by U.S. President Donald Trump on May 9, 2017. Comey had been criticized in 2016 for his handling of the FBI's investigation of the Hillary Clinton email controversy and in 2017 for the FBI's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections as it related to alleged collusion with Trump's presidential campaign.
Pasquale Anthony "Pat" Cipollone is an American attorney who served as White House Counsel for President Donald Trump. While in office he defended Trump in his first impeachment trial. He objected to Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and played a key role in the January 6 committee hearings, specifically the committee's sixth hearing.
The inquiry process which preceded the first impeachment of Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States, was initiated by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on September 24, 2019, after a whistleblower alleged that Donald Trump may have abused the power of the presidency. Trump was accused of withholding military aid as a means of pressuring newly elected president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky to pursue investigations of Joe Biden and his son Hunter and to investigate a conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind interference in the 2016 presidential election. More than a week after Trump had put a hold on the previously approved aid, he made these requests in a July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president, which the whistleblower said was intended to help Trump's reelection bid.
The first impeachment of President Donald Trump occurred on December 18, 2019. On that date, the House of Representatives adopted two articles of impeachment against Trump: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. On February 5, 2020, the Senate voted to acquit Trump on both articles of impeachment.
The first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, began in the U.S. Senate on January 16, 2020, and concluded with his acquittal on February 5. After an inquiry between September and November 2019, President Trump was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on December 18, 2019; the articles of impeachment charged him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. It was the third impeachment trial of a U.S. president, preceded by those of Andrew Johnson and of Bill Clinton.
Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, was impeached for the second time on January 13, 2021, one week before his term expired. It was the fourth impeachment of a U.S. president, and the second for Trump after his first impeachment in December 2019.
The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, began on February 9, 2021, and concluded with his acquittal on February 13. Donald Trump had been impeached for the second time by the House of Representatives on January 13, 2021. The House adopted one article of impeachment against Trump: incitement of insurrection. He is the only U.S. president and only federal official to be impeached twice. He was impeached by the House seven days prior to the expiration of his term and the inauguration of Joe Biden. Because he left office before the trial, this was the first impeachment trial of a former president. The article of impeachment addressed Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and stated that Trump incited the attack on the Capitol in Washington, D.C., while Congress was convened to count the electoral votes and certify the victory of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
This is a timeline of major events in second half of 2019 related to the investigations into the myriad links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies that are suspected of being inappropriate, relating to the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. It follows the timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections before and after July 2016 up until election day November 8, and the transition, the first and second halves of 2017, the first and second halves of 2018, and the first half of 2019, but precedes that of 2020 and 2021.
In the United States, federal impeachment is the process by which the House of Representatives charges the president, vice president, or another civil federal officer for alleged misconduct. The House can impeach an individual with a simple majority of the present members or other criteria adopted by the House according to Article One, Section 2, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution.
A proposal has been floated by some Republican members of the United States House of Representatives of having the Republican-led House vote to "expunge" the two impeachments of former U.S. president Donald Trump, a Republican.
↑ Michael A. Memoli (December 9, 2010). "Senate convicts Louisiana federal judge in impeachment trial". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on October 22, 2018. Retrieved December 5, 2019. The Senate also voted to bar him from ever holding public office in the future... The vote on the first count was unanimous, 96-0. On subsequent counts, the votes were 69-27, 88-8, and 90-6. Impeachment required a vote of two-thirds of the Senate.
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