The Supreme Court on Thursday appeared ready to reject Donald Trump\u2019s sweeping claim that he is immune from prosecution on charges of trying to subvert the 2020 election, but in a way that is likely to significantly delay his stalled federal trial in the nation\u2019s capital.<\/p>\n
In nearly three hours of oral argument, both conservative and liberal justices grappled with the historic significance of the case, which will set boundaries for presidential power in the future even as it impacts whether Trump faces trial in D.C. before this year\u2019s presidential election \u2014 in which he is the likely Republican nominee.<\/p>\n
Trump, who is already on trial this week in a separate New York case involving business records connected to a hush money payment, was known for breaking norms while in the White House. He faces two other criminal cases as well, and is the first former president to be indicted. But again and again on Thursday, members of the high court noted that their decision, expected by late June or early July, will not just affect him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are writing a rule for the ages,\u201d said Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis case has huge implications for the presidency, for the future of the presidency, for the future of the country,\u201d added Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.<\/p>\n
The court seemed unlikely to fully embrace either Trump\u2019s broad claim of immunity or the special counsel\u2019s position that former presidents have no guarantee of immunity for their official acts. Instead, a majority of justices seemed to be looking for a way to provide more narrow protections for a president\u2019s core constitutional duties, with some of the conservative justices especially concerned about hampering the power of future presidents.<\/p>\n
In contrast, the court\u2019s three liberal justices emphasized that a president is not above the law. They seemed to reject the idea of immunity from prosecution, expressing fears about giving a president unbounded power to commit crimes from the White House.<\/p>\n
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked Trump\u2019s lawyer about the prospect of turning the Oval Office into \u201cthe seat of criminal activity in this country.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cIf the potential for criminal liability is taken off the table,\u201d she asked, \u201cwouldn\u2019t there be a significant risk that future presidents would be emboldened to commit crimes with abandon while they\u2019re in office?\u201d<\/p>\n
Most of the justices \u2014 and even the lawyers on opposite sides in the case \u2014 seemed to agree that a former president can be prosecuted for private conduct while in office.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere does seem to be some common ground between you and your colleague on the other side that no man is above the law and that the president can be prosecuted after he leaves office for his private conduct. Is that right?\u201d Gorsuch asked Trump lawyer D. John Sauer, who agreed.<\/p>\n
No lower court has determined whether the allegations in Trump\u2019s indictment amount to official acts that could be shielded from liability or private conduct. But when the Supreme Court agreed to take the case, it rephrased the question it would consider as: \u201cwhether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.\u201d<\/p>\n
That means the high court\u2019s ruling is likely to require lower courts to separate out Trump\u2019s official acts from his private ones, as alleged in the indictment, before proceedings can restart in the election obstruction case. If the D.C. trial is stalled until after the election, and Trump returns to office, he could pressure his attorney general to drop the federal charges against him.<\/p>\n
Special counsel Jack Smith, who sat in the courtroom on Thursday to hear the arguments, has charged Trump with four felonies. The former president is accused of using false claims of massive voter fraud to pressure state officials, the Justice Department and former vice president Mike Pence to change the election results; scheming with others to submit to Congress slates of phony electors from swing states and get lawmakers to toss out lawful ballots; and encouraging supporters to gather on Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol, where a violent mob stopped the vote count for many hours.<\/p>\n
In a key exchange during oral argument, Justice Amy Coney Barrett read aloud from detailed allegations in the special counsel\u2019s indictment and got Sauer to concede that many of the alleged acts amount to private conduct that would not be shielded from prosecution.<\/p>\n
Even if the court decides there is some level of immunity for a president\u2019s official acts, Barrett noted, the special counsel has told the court that there is enough evidence of Trump\u2019s private conduct to go to trial. She asked Michael Dreeben, the special counsel\u2019s lawyer, if the trial could proceed based solely on the alleged private acts in the interest of \u201cspeed and wanting to move forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a foreshadowing of potential additional legal wrangling in the lower courts, there was sharp disagreement between the parties about what in the indictment amounts to official conduct.<\/p>\n
Dreeben said the allegations involve an \u201cintegrated conspiracy\u201d and abuse of public office for a private aim \u2014 staying in power after losing the election.<\/p>\n
Presidents, he said, have no official role in the certification of an election.<\/p>\n
He said prosecutors would want to tell jurors about Trump\u2019s interactions with the Justice Department and Pence even if the high court rules a president is not liable for some official acts, because those actions would help illustrate the full context of Trump\u2019s alleged wrongdoing.<\/p>\n
Sauer, however, said any action deemed official \u201chas to be expunged completely from the indictment before the case can go forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
That assertion drew skepticism from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who said wiping out the official part was like a \u201cone-legged stool\u201d and suggested the case could not go forward without jurors having the full picture.<\/p>\n
The justices were reviewing a unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which forcefully said Trump could be prosecuted for his alleged efforts to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. Their decision to hear the case on the last day of the high court\u2019s argument calendar \u2014 rather than let the appeals court ruling stand \u2014 has drawn criticism from Trump\u2019s critics, who say the American public should know the outcome of the prosecution before voting in November.<\/p>\n
Roberts was highly critical on Thursday of the reasoning in the D.C. Circuit opinion, which he characterized as saying in essence that \u201ca former president can be prosecuted because he\u2019s being prosecuted.\u201d Such circular reasoning \u201cconcerns me,\u201d he said, in part because it relies only on a prosecutor acting in good faith with no other protections for the office of the presidency.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know how easy it is in many cases for a prosecutor to get a grand jury to bring an indictment, and reliance on the good faith of the prosecutor may not be enough in some cases,\u201d Roberts said, adding, \u201cI\u2019m not suggesting here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dreeben, representing the special counsel\u2019s office, said the Justice Department was not endorsing a scenario that would expose former presidents to criminal prosecution in bad faith, for political reasons, or without adequate evidence. But he took issue with Roberts\u2019s assertion that the D.C. Circuit\u2019s opinion had taken away immunity.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no immunity that is in the Constitution, unless this court creates it today,\u201d said Dreeben, who has argued before the court more than 100 times as a former deputy solicitor general representing both Democratic and Republican administrations.<\/p>\n
Because Trump is the first former president to face criminal prosecution, the justices do not have many past cases to look to for guidance. Trump\u2019s lawyers urged the court to expand on a 1982 decision in a case involving President Richard M. Nixon. A divided court recognized \u201cabsolute presidential immunity\u201d from private civil lawsuits for \u201cacts within the \u2018outer perimeter\u2019 of his official responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
But that case did not address criminal liability. The special counsel\u2019s office has pointed to a different decision involving Nixon from 1974. In that case, a unanimous court refused to \u201csustain an absolute, unqualified presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process,\u201d and said Nixon had to comply with a subpoena for tapes of his White House conversations.<\/p>\n
The questions from the high court on Thursday illustrated how differently justices from opposite sides of the ideological spectrum view the allegations against Trump.<\/p>\n
Some of the conservatives repeatedly tried to steer the discussion away from the specifics of Trump\u2019s indictment, instead focusing on concerns about politically motivated prosecutions that they said could undercut democracy in the future.<\/p>\n
Justice Clarence Thomas \u2014 whose wife, Virginia \u201cGinni\u201d Thomas, was involved in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election \u2014 asked whether a president could be prosecuted for orchestrating a coup. (Democrats called on Thomas to recuse himself from the case because of his wife\u2019s involvement but he did not.)<\/p>\n
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., a former U.S. attorney, asked what would happen if an incumbent president loses a closely contested election and knows that \u201ca real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWill that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?\u201d<\/p>\n
In response, Dreeben said there is an appropriate, legal way to contest the outcome of an election through the courts. He suggested that until Trump, officials have understood: \u201cIf you lose, you accept the results. That has been the nation\u2019s experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the high court\u2019s three liberals, followed up on Alito\u2019s question and said, \u201cA stable democratic society needs the good faith of its public officials, correct?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that good faith assumes that they will follow the law?\u201d she asked, adding that Trump\u2019s immunity argument had \u201cput into suspicion here, that no man is above the law either in his official or private acts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Devlin Barrett, Spencer S. Hsu, Tobi Raji, Perry Stein and Rachel Weiner contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court on Thursday appeared ready to reject Donald Trump\u2019s sweeping claim that he is immune from prosecution on charges of trying to subvert the 2020 election, but in a way that is likely to significantly delay his stalled federal trial in the nation\u2019s capital. In nearly three hours of oral argument, both conservative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3576,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}