Jon Turley

Jonathan Turley (born May 6, 1961) is an American attorney, legal scholar, writer, commentator, and legal analyst in broadcast and print journalism. He is a professor at the George Washington University Law School, and has testified in United States Congressional proceedings about constitutional and statutory issues. He participated in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump.

Jonathan Turley was born in Chicago, Illinois, on May 6, 1961. Turley served as a House leadership page in 1977 and 1978 under the sponsorship of Illinois Democrat Sidney Yates.

Turley received his bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1983, and his Juris Doctor degree from Northwestern University School of Law in 1987.

Since the 1990s, he has been the legal analyst for NBC News and CBS News covering stories that ranged from the Clinton impeachment to the presidential elections. He is on the board of contributors of USA Today. and writes regularly for the Washington Post. He has written hundreds of columns in those papers and other national publications including the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and other publications. He is also a columnist with The Hill. He currently is legal analyst for CBS News and the BBC.

Turley married his wife, Leslie, on New Year's Eve in 1997. He and his wife live in Washington, D.C., and have four children. They keep a Goldendoodle named "Luna" as a pet.

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.

In USA Today in October 2004, he famously argued for the legalization of polygamy, provoking responses from writers such as Stanley Kurtz.

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 and The Week magazine.

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."

In October 2006, in an interview by Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, he expressed strong disapproval of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

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.

He was ranked among the nation's top 500 lawyers in 2008. 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.

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. 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.  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.

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.

His articles on legal and policy issues appear regularly in national publications; as of 2012, Turley has had articles published in newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He frequently appears in the national media as a commentator on a multitude of subjects ranging from the 2000 U.S. presidential election controversy to the Terri Schiavo case in 2005. He often is a guest on Sunday talk shows, with more than two-dozen appearances on Meet the Press, ABC This Week, Face the Nation, and Fox News Sunday. He served as a contributor on Countdown with Keith Olbermann from 2003 until 2011, and later on Current TV in 2011 and early 2012; Turley also appears occasionally on Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now!.

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:

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."

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.

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.

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.

During the Reagan Administration, Turley worked as an intern with the general counsel’s office of the National Security Agency (NSA).

On December 4, 2019, Turley testified before the House Judiciary Committee regarding the constitutional grounds for presidential impeachment in the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump, arguing against a Trump impeachment. In his testimony, Professor Turley objected to the effort to craft articles of impeachment around four criminal allegations" bribery, extortion, obstruction of justice, and campaign finance violations. He argued that the evidence did not meet the standard definitions of those crimes and, against the testimony of the three Democratic witnesses, such legal definitions have always been used as a measure for impeachment deliberations. Turley objected to the lower of the impeachment standards to "fit a paucity of evidence and an abundance of anger." The Committee ultimately rejected all four of those articles and adopted the two that Professor Turley argued could be legitimate if proven: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Where the Committee departed from the testimony was the rejection of Professor Turley 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. It was observed that the bases he expressed regarding his prior position that President Bill Clinton should be impeached diametrically contradicted the opinions he shared regarding the impeachment of President Donald Trump, twenty one years later. Those 2019 reports contrasted his extensive quotes from the separate processes. Turley sought to clarify his positions regarding the two impeachments the next day in an op-ed. 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 like former national security adviser John Bolton. 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. 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. 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. Turley was cited by both the White House and House managers in their arguments before the United States Senate in the Trump impeachment trial. During the trial, Turley opposed the White House argument that impeachment requires a criminal allegation. 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."