At MSNBC, old habits die hard. On Thursday’s installment of The Last Word, former Mueller Probe prosecutor turned MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann raised the prospect of impeachment for President Trump’s attempts to defund Harvard.
Referencing a Truth Social post where Trump threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status, host Lawrence O’Donnell told Weissmann that, “There is now an active question of did Donald Trump violate the law with that social media posting.”
Weissmann immediately argued Trump was extorting the university, “This is, in my view, a sort of extortion racket through various means, whether it's saying we're going to go after international students, whether we're going to try and revoke your IRS status, and through an illegal means, whether we're going to just pull all of your funding for your medical school, and we're doing that in violation of the First Amendment. So, I mean, there's—when you're sort of asking, has the law been broken? My first response was, well, many.”
He then recalled, “There are just so many ways to look at this. I am so reminded of the first impeachment, which was an illegal means of withholding Congressionally mandated funding from Ukraine in order to get them to open a fraudulent investigation, so that they could, so that Donald Trump could say there was a criminal investigation into his political rival, Joe Biden. So many pieces of it were improper and or illegal. And that is exactly how Harvard is going to be portraying this, but they really are a victim of an extortion.”
Any school receiving federal funding is subject to federal civil rights law, but Weissmann then turned into a mind reader in order to claim Trump doesn’t actually care about that, “The reason, the purported reason, is because of Donald Trump's supposed hatred of anti-Semitism, and I don't notice his saying a word about the attack on Josh Shapiro and his family on Passover. That is just one example of the lying, that purported reason for attacking Harvard.”
From a legal perspective, Trump’s personal motivations really don’t matter. Either Harvard has violated federal law or it hasn’t. According to the administration, it has, and so if the private school doesn’t want to comply with federal demands, it can survive on its own.
Here is a transcript for the April 17 show:
MSNBC The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell
4/17/2025
10:34 PM ET
LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: There is now an active question of did Donald Trump violate the law with that social media posting.
ANDREW WEISSMANN: This is, in my view, a sort of extortion racket through various means, whether it's saying we're going to go after international students, whether we're going to try and revoke your IRS status, and through an illegal means, whether we're going to just pull all of your funding for your medical school, and we're doing that in violation of the First Amendment. So, I mean, there's— when you're sort of asking, has the law been broken?
My first response was, well, many. There are just so many ways to look at this. I am so reminded of the first impeachment, which was an illegal means of withholding Congressionally mandated funding from Ukraine in order to get them to open a fraudulent investigation, so that they could, so that Donald Trump could say there was a criminal investigation into his political rival, Joe Biden.
So many pieces of it were improper and or illegal. And that is exactly how Harvard is going to be portraying this, but they really are a victim of an extortion. And the reason, the purported reason, is because of Donald Trump's supposed hatred of anti-Semitism, and I don't notice his saying a word about the attack on Josh Shapiro and his family on Passover. That is just one example of the lying, that purported reason for attacking Harvard.
