The Supreme Court ruled Monday that former President Donald J. Trump is entitled to effective immunity from prosecution for his role in trying to overturn the results of the last election, a landmark decision in the midst of the 2024 election campaign that greatly expanded presidential powers.
The vote was 6-3, split along party lines. The immediate practical effect will be to further complicate the case against Trump: It's now highly unlikely that it will go before a jury before the election, and at the very least, the charges against him have been narrowed.
The decision was a powerful statement by the Supreme Court's conservative majority that presidents should be protected from being accused of crimes by their political opponents for actions they took in the course of official duties.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, writing the majority opinion, said Trump is entitled to presumed immunity at least for his official conduct. He added that judges must distinguish between official and non-official conduct and conduct thorough fact-finding investigations to determine whether prosecutors can overturn the presumption protecting Trump's official conduct.
If Trump wins the election, this issue could become moot because he could order the Justice Department to drop the charges.
In the most scathing dissents filed by the Supreme Court justices, liberals argued that the majority had created a kind of king who was not accountable to the law.
The Chief Justice wrote that broad immunity for acts conducted in the course of official duties is necessary to protect a “vigorous and independent executive.”
“Thus, the President cannot be prosecuted for the exercise of core Constitutional powers and, at a minimum, enjoys a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all official acts,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “This immunity applies equally to all members of the Oval Office, regardless of politics, policy, or party affiliation.”
The alternative, the Chief Justice wrote, is to invite vindictive political retaliation.
“Virtually every president has been criticized for poorly enforcing some aspect of federal law (drug, gun, immigration, environmental laws, etc.),” he wrote. “Ambitious prosecutors in the new administration may argue that former presidents violated that broad law. Without immunity, these types of prosecutions against former presidents could soon become routine.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, said the ruling was seriously wrong.
“Today's decision to grant a former president immunity is a sea change for the presidency,” she wrote. “It makes a mockery of the fundamental principle underlying our Constitution and political system: that no man is above the law.”
“For the first time in its history, the Court has declared that the most powerful official in the United States may make the law for himself (under circumstances that have yet to be fully determined),” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent.
Trump celebrated the verdict on social media, writing in capital letters that “this is a HUGE WIN FOR OUR CONSTITUTION AND DEMOCRACY.” “PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN!”
Biden's campaign focused on the events of January 6, pointing to Trump's recent conviction in New York for falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal. “Mr. Trump is running for president as a convicted felon who already stood by and watched as a mob violently stormed the Capitol,” said a statement attributed to a senior campaign official. “He believes he is above the law and will do whatever it takes to gain and keep power.”
The chief justice's opinion detailed in a staid, almost sterile summary the events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, which the dissent called a unique threat to democracy. And while the chief justice stressed the importance of protecting all presidents, the dissent focused on Trump.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote that it is not the Supreme Court's job to sift through the evidence and separate protected conduct from other conduct: “That analysis is ultimately best left to the lower courts,” he wrote.
But he did offer guidance to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the U.S. District Court in Washington, who is presiding over the case.
The chief justice wrote that Trump “is fully immune from prosecution for any alleged conduct relating to his discussions with Department of Justice officials.”
He added that Judge Chutkan should decide whether prosecutors can override the presumed immunity related to communications between Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
“We therefore remand for the district court to first evaluate, in light of appropriate comment from the parties, whether the charges regarding Mr. Trump's alleged attempts to influence the Vice President's oversight of the certification process in his capacity as President of the Senate pose a risk of interference with the powers and functions of the executive branch,” he wrote.
The chief justice said other parts of the indictment against Trump required a “thorough analysis of the indictment's broad and interrelated allegations.”
This includes Trump's comments on Jan. 6, including at the rally at the Ellipse, he wrote.
“Whether the tweets, the speech, and Mr. Trump's other communications on January 6 constituted official conduct may depend on their respective content and context,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in characteristically vague language.
In a sort of reiteration that permeates his opinions, he added that “this necessarily fact-bound analysis is best conducted first by the district court.”
Overall, the majority opinion was a broad defense of executive power and a detailed prescription for delay.
They were joined by other Republican-appointed justices: Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and, in part, Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
“The long-term implications of today's decision will be severe,” Justice Sotomayor said in her dissent.
“The Court effectively creates a lawless zone around the president, upending a status quo that has existed since the founding of our nation,” she wrote, adding: “The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and perhaps the world. Whenever he exercises any form of civil authority, the majority reasoned, he would henceforth be immune from criminal prosecution.”
She gave examples: “Order the Navy SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political opponent? With impunity. Organize a military coup to stay in power? With impunity. Accept a bribe in exchange for amnesty? With impunity. With impunity, with impunity, with impunity.”
Chief Justice Roberts rejected arguments by prosecutors that they could present evidence of Trump's official duties to the jury to provide context and information about his motives.
Trump has argued that he is entitled to absolute immunity from charges, relying on a broad understanding of the separation of powers and a 1982 Supreme Court precedent that gives the president such immunity in civil lawsuits for actions taken within the “periphery” of official duties.
A lower court rejected that argument.
“Whatever immunity a sitting president may enjoy, there can only be one Chief Executive Officer of the United States at a time, and that position does not confer lifetime 'get out of jail free' immunity,” Justice Chutkan wrote.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously agreed. “For purposes of this criminal case, former President Trump has become a citizen of the United States with the same right to a defense as any other criminal defendant,” the panel wrote in an unsigned decision. “However, the executive immunity that protected former President Trump while he was president no longer protects him from this prosecution.”
The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and said it would decide the question “whether, and to what extent, former presidents enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct allegedly conducted in connection with their official duties while in office.”
The court has heard two other cases this term related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
In March, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected an attempt to bar Trump from voting under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says anyone who participated in an insurrection cannot hold public office. The court did not discuss whether Trump was covered by the clause, but ruled that states cannot use it to bar a presidential candidate from the ballot.
The Supreme Court ruled Friday that federal prosecutors improperly used the obstruction statute to prosecute some members of the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. Two of the four counts against Trump are based on the statute. Chief Justice Roberts wrote in a footnote on Monday that “if necessary, the district court should first determine whether those counts can proceed in light of last week's decision.”
The Court quickly restored Trump's voting rights, hearing arguments one month after the agreement was reached and issuing a ruling another month later.
The immunity case has been moving at a fairly slow pace. In December, Jack Smith, the special prosecutor overseeing the prosecution, asked the Supreme Court to hear the case immediately, bypassing the appeals courts, writing that “it is of vital public importance that the defendants' immunity claims be resolved in this Court.” Smith added that “only this Court can resolve it definitively.”
The justices denied Smith's petition 11 days after it was filed, in a brief order that specified no dissent.
After the appeals court ruled against Trump, he asked the Supreme Court to step in. Sixteen days later, on February 28, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Trump's appeal, scheduling arguments for the final day of the session nearly two months later. Another two months passed.
During arguments, several conservative justices indicated they would not look into the specifics of the allegations against Trump. Instead, they said the Supreme Court should rule on presidential powers generally.
“We write rules that will stand the test of time,” Justice Gorsuch said.
The Supreme Court's announcement of the decision on Monday prompted some of the sharpest dissents yet from the justices on the court.
Justice Jackson, for example, stated that the practical result of the majority opinion was “a five-alarm fire that threatens to consume democratic self-government and the normal operation of government.”
“The relationship between the President and the American people has irrevocably changed. In every exercise of civil power, the President is now a king above the law,” Justice Sotomayor wrote in dissent, joined by Justices Jackson and Elena Kagan.
Justice Sotomayor concluded her opinion in an unusual way: “Out of concern for our democracy, I dissent,” she wrote.
Chief Justice Roberts said the dissent was excessive.
“Their decision strikes a chillingly pessimistic tone that is completely out of proportion to the Supreme Court's actual decisions today,” he wrote. “It concludes that immunity extends to formal discussions between the president and the attorney general, and then sends the case back to the lower courts to determine, 'first and foremost,' whether and to what extent Mr. Trump's remaining alleged conduct qualifies for immunity.”
