Professor Larson helps Washington Post fact-check Trump speeches

The Washington Post consulted Professor Carlton F. W. Larson for its Sept. 12 Fact Checker piece “Anatomy of a Trump rally: 70 percent of claims are false, misleading or lacking evidence.”

The post took quotes from two Trump rallies in Montana, in July and September, to reach the 70 percent figure. Post writer Glenn Kessler asked Larson to assess this quote from Trump: “You look at The Washington Post or the New York Times, I can never get a good story. … Is it subversion? Is it treason? It's a horrible thing.”’

“There is a very big difference between disloyalty to a president and disloyalty to the United States,” Larson told the Post. “And it was precisely to prevent any such confusion that the framers drafted Article III as carefully as they did.” Article III defines treason strictly as applying only to “levying war against the United States, or adhering to their enemies, given them aid and comfort.”

Writing an editorial critical of the president therefore cannot be equated with treason, the Post found, declaring the Trump quote “false.”

Professor Larson is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the law of treason and is the author of the forthcoming book The Trials of Allegiance: Treason, Juries, and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press).