Donald J. Trump’s blustery attacks on the press, complaints about the judicial system and bold claims of presidential power collectively sketch out a constitutional worldview that shows contempt for the First Amendment, the separation of powers and the rule of law, legal experts across the political spectrum say.
Even as much of the Republican political establishment lines up behind its presumptive nominee, many conservative and libertarian legal scholars warn that electing Mr. Trump is a recipe for a constitutional crisis.
.. David Post, a retired law professor who now writes for the Volokh Conspiracy, a conservative-leaning law blog, said those comments had crossed a line.
“This is how authoritarianism starts, with a president who does not respect the judiciary,” Mr. Post said. “You can criticize the judicial system, you can criticize individual cases, you can criticize individual judges. But the president has to be clear that the law is the law and that he enforces the law. That is his constitutional obligation.”
.. Randy E. Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown and an architect of the first major challenge to President Obama’s health care law, said he had grave doubts on both fronts.
“You would like a president with some idea about constitutional limits on presidential powers, on congressional powers, on federal powers,” Professor Barnett said, “and I doubt he has any awareness of such limits.”
.. Several law professors said they were less sure about Mr. Trump, citing the actions of another populist, President Andrew Jackson, who refused to enforce an 1832 Supreme Court decision arising from a clash between Georgia and the Cherokee Nation.
“I can easily see a situation in which he would take the Andrew Jackson line,” Professor Epstein said, referring to a probably apocryphal comment attributed to Jackson about Chief Justice John Marshall: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”
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“He owns Amazon,” Mr. Trump said in February. “He wants political influence so Amazon will benefit from it. That’s not right. And believe me, if I become president, oh do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems.”
The Reporter Resists His Government
In this covert action of the Clinton administration, according to Risen, the CIA recruited a Russian scientist to provide flawed nuclear weapons designs to Iran, in hopes of delaying the country’s progress toward constructing a bomb. Instead, the scientist pointed out the design flaws to the Iranians, which may have helped them.
.. In more than one instance, the Justice Department took positions that came close to criminalizing the act of professional reporting on classified subjects.
.. Risen presents a startling account of how a Texas lawyer and Republican loyalist named Stuart Bowen tried to find out what happened to the approximately $20 billion that the Bush administration sent into Iraq in the first year or so after the 2003 invasion. More than half of that sum was flown into Baghdad on cargo planes as bundles of hundred-dollar bills.
.. The Bush administration’s controls were so weak that even today, despite Bowen’s persistent efforts, Risen writes, “at least $11.7 billion of the approximately $20 billion…is either unaccounted for or has simply disappeared” (his italics).
.. “At the height of the war,” Risen reports, “KBR had more than fifty thousand personnel and subcontractors working for it in Iraq, making the company’s presence…larger than that of the British Army.”
.. Risen has added a fresh element, however, by concentrating on the position of the American Psychological Association in supporting the psychologists who took part in the CIA’s program of torture. “Despite the professional consensus among psychologists that torture was counterproductive,” Risen writes, the American Psychological Association nonetheless “worked assiduously to protect the psychologists who did get involved in the torture program.”
.. Holder said, “As long as I’m attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail.” In late September, however, Holder announced his resignation, upon confirmation of a successor, so it was unclear how significant a promise this would prove to be.