- Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to grant him full legal immunity as president.
- He wants to throw out Special Counsel Jack Smith's case to overturn the 2020 election.
- The Supreme Court has granted immunity in the past, but not in the full form President Trump has requested.
Former President Donald Trump is scheduled to face his highest-stakes legal battle Thursday in his highest-stakes criminal case.
His lawyers are facing off against the Justice Department and trying to convince the Supreme Court that Trump should have complete immunity from criminal prosecution even if he tries to overturn the election results.
The indictment, filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith in Washington, D.C. federal court, accuses President Trump of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results and obstructing Congress. According to the indictment, Trump aided and abetted fake electors, pressured public officials, led his supporters to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and rioted, depriving the American people of legitimate claims. They say he tried to steal votes.
President Trump is seeking to regain the presidency and is asking the Supreme Court to grant him sweeping immunity. If the courts decide his way and he wins again in November, he could cross the threshold for presidential criminal conduct.
Former President Richard Nixon famously declared to journalist David Frost, “The fact that the president is doing it means, by definition, it's not illegal.'' The views of Mr. Trump and his lawyers may test that.
The president already enjoys certain protections. A sitting president cannot be indicted under decades-old Justice Department guidelines. The Supreme Court previously extended protections for the former president from civil lawsuits in a lawsuit brought against him by a former Air Force contractor. Trump wants to extend this shield even further if the former president can argue that the conduct in question was within the scope of his official duties.
One of Trump's lawyers said the court's decision goes beyond the president's future, affecting not only the election interference case but also “virtually all four criminal cases” he faces. There is a possibility of giving.
A separate indictment over President Trump's attempts to overturn the election results in Georgia has an overlapping set of facts. Mr. Smith then filed a separate criminal case in Florida, accusing Mr. Trump of taking classified documents to Mar-a-Lago after he left office and refusing to return them.
Trump will not attend the Supreme Court hearing. He is on trial in New York on a further set of charges for allegedly interfering in another election.
Prosecutors at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office say President Trump falsified hush money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, with whom he is said to have had an affair, in order to keep her quiet before the 2016 presidential election. It was announced that the preservation law had been violated 34 times. election.
Todd Blanche, the lead attorney in the Manhattan trial, President Trump's lead attorney in the Mar-a-Lago case, and defense attorney in the Washington, D.C., case, said the Supreme Court's hearing will “return to several different indictments. ” he said when making the request. So that his client will be allowed to attend the Supreme Court hearing.
But criminal defendants are required to be in court during their trials, and the Manhattan judge overseeing the case did not allow Trump to take a break to attend oral arguments.
On Tuesday, the trial's first witness, tabloid executive David Pecker, took the stand.
President Trump wants complete immunity
In the Washington, D.C., election interference case, Mr. Trump argued that presidential immunity, a principle typically understood to give the U.S. president legal protection in office, protects him from prosecution.
He also said the case should be dismissed on double jeopardy grounds because the U.S. Senate failed to convict him when he was impeached for election interference.
And the Supreme Court previously ruled that presidents cannot escape criminal proceedings related to the “peripheries” of their jobs, leaving President Trump with no choice but to respond to a subpoena in a 2021 Manhattan criminal case. Although he did not, Trump's lawyers now argue that the president is not immune from criminal proceedings related to the “outer periphery” of his presidential duties. He is “categorically immune from federal criminal prosecution for any conduct conceivable within the perimeter of executive responsibility.”
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, appointed by former President Barack Obama, rejected President Trump's motion to dismiss the case, saying that being a former president “does not confer a lifetime 'get out of jail free' pass.” handed down a judgment. The prosecution was “unprecedented” and so were his alleged crimes.
Trump's lawyers continued their pursuit. At an appeals court hearing, his lawyers said the president could order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate political opponents and return unscathed if Congress allowed it.
A three-judge appellate panel upheld Chutkan's decision, saying Trump “will be held accountable in court for his actions.”
“For the purposes of this criminal proceeding, former President Trump has assumed the defense of all other criminal defendants and has become a Trump citizen,” the appellate judges wrote. “But the executive privileges that may have protected him during his time as president no longer protect him from this prosecution.”
The Supreme Court considered whether impeachment constituted double jeopardy with criminal prosecution, and whether “a former president enjoys presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for acts he allegedly engaged in in the course of his official duties while in office.” They agreed to consider whether and, if so, to what extent they would be entitled to exemptions. ”
Smith wrote in his brief to the high court that the U.S. Constitution does not give the president any role in certifying the election, much less the power to “deceive the United States in certifying the results of the presidential election or obstruct the process therefor.” It was pointed out that this was not done. , or deprive voters of the effectiveness of their votes. ”
Trump's lawyers warned that the decision to allow the former president to be prosecuted would cause chaos. The threat of politically motivated criminal charges by the Justice Department “will hang like a millstone around the neck of future presidents,” they argued.
“Without immunity from criminal prosecution, the presidency as we know it would cease to exist,” Trump's lawyers said in a prepared statement.
Lawyers for Mr. Smith's team wrote in their own brief that Mr. Trump's claims are ahistorical. They pointed to the fact that Nixon accepted President Gerald Ford's sweeping pardon, which Ford reportedly considered an admission of guilt. Special Counsel Leon Jaworski considered indicting Mr. Nixon. Independent prosecutor Robert Ray also nearly charged former President Bill Clinton with lying under oath about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
“Since Watergate, the Justice Department has indicated that former presidents may be subject to criminal prosecution, and the independent counsel and special counsel have acted on a similar understanding,” Smith said. the team writes. “So did the former president, until the appellant in this case asserted that.”
Donald Ayer, who served as a Justice Department official in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, said the case was a test for the United States as a democracy.
“This may indeed be the most important U.S. Supreme Court case in our nation's history,” he told reporters during a panel discussion hosted by the Democracy Defense Project. “Because this year's election is not just about who will be president, it's also about whether our country still believes in democracy and the rule of law works.”
The Supreme Court ruled on the Justice Department's decision to indict hundreds of rioters on January 6th for obstructing an “official proceeding,” one of four charges brought against Trump by Smith. Another lawsuit is being considered over the decision.
According to reports, at a hearing last week, the judges appear likely to rule that prosecutors took the law too broadly, meaning that even if the case goes to trial, Trump would prevail and the charges would be dropped. The possibility is increasing.
Trump probably won't be tried again before November's election
Mr. Chutkan had originally scheduled his trial to begin in early March. However, the appeal has made it unlikely that it will be implemented before the November election.
The Supreme Court will likely issue a decision in late April. At that point, Chutkan can resume the pretrial process. If she continues to follow the previously planned schedule for her pretrial hearing, jury selection likely won't begin until late October at the earliest. Given Trump's candidacy, it is unlikely that she will insist on spending the final days of her election in court.
If Trump becomes president again, he could pardon himself or pressure the Justice Department to drop the case.
The Mar-a-Lago incident will likely be in jeopardy under President Trump's administration. Neither the state nor Georgia prosecutors have yet scheduled a trial date, and a trial likely won't happen until 2025 at the earliest.
Some former government officials who served under the Trump administration are asking the Supreme Court to deny him immunity. A group of former military personnel has filed a brief that gives the president “absolute immunity” allowing them to use military force for “criminal purposes” or “threats to disrupt military operations.” He argued that it would be. A group of founding-era historians also filed briefs arguing that the concept of unlimited presidential immunity is inconsistent with what the framers of the U.S. Constitution intended.
Mark Meadows, President Trump's chief of staff during his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and co-defendant in the Fulton County, Georgia criminal case, also filed a brief with the Supreme Court. He called for ensuring that lower-level employees like Trump would continue to have immunity protections even if a court found Trump potentially liable in the case.
Norm Eisen, a former White House lawyer in President Barack Obama's administration, said the Supreme Court should decide only whether Trump deserves immunity in Smith's case and leave aside more abstract questions of legal doctrine. , said it could move the case forward quickly.
“Donald Trump has articulated an outrageous, unprecedented and ahistorical claim of absolute immunity,” he told a panel at the Democracy Defense Project. “The Supreme Court doesn't have to go into other issues just because President Trump has made the process easier. The Supreme Court should decide this case.”
