The Supreme Court delivered a heavy blow to special counsel Jack Smith's election interference case against former president Donald Trump, ruling along partisan lines that Trump has broad immunity for acts taken while he was in office. This will be referred to from now on as a landmark opinion of the Supreme Court. It's not only important for President Trump's criminal case. They really have set a framework for all future presidents. In August 2023, a federal grand jury indicted Trump in an unprecedented criminal case, charging the former president with four crimes related to his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Donald Trump's defense team puts forward this argument that a former president should be held completely immune from prosecution for any of the acts that they performed while in office. I feel that as being president, you have to have immunity, very simple, after a lower court rejected Trump's immunity claims. The former president appealed, and on July 1st, the Supreme Court gave him a sweeping amount of protection against criminal prosecution.

The court's very explicit about this. It lays out its framework by saying, quote, the nature of presidential power entitles a former president to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. What the court is saying in this part is quite surprising. They're basically saying that nothing he does in terms of pressuring the justice department to investigate whoever he wants to investigate as President can ever be subject to criminal liability. The high court's opinion also says that Trump is entitled at a minimum to presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. However, a court could determine that some conduct, such as a campaign speech or fundraising, constitutes an unofficial act. The Supreme Court says, quote, the president enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts and not everything the president does is official, end quote. So a big question here is, when was President Trump acting in his official capacity as President United States versus when was he acting as a candidate for re-election?

We will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there, when President Trump gives his speech at the Ellipse on January 6th and suggest to his supporters to go to the Capitol. Is he speaking as a political candidate or is he speaking as president? The majority opinion doesn't tell us which. They give the lower court some quote-unquote guidance. But that will be a key determination as to whether that can even be part of the allegations, even part of the evidence that could be used at trial. The court's three Liberal justices could barely contain their outrage. The dissenter said the majority opinion makes a mockery of the principle foundational to our constitution and system of government that no man is above the law having won from the court. Nearly everything he could have hoped for. Trump celebrated in a truth, social post writing big win for our constitution and democracy. President Biden called the court's decision a terrible disservice to the people of this nation. Today's decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits on what the President can do.

This is a fundamentally new principle. It's a dangerous precedent. The ruling sends the case back to federal district Judge Tanya Chatin in Washington. The next step is for Judge Chutkan to engage in what we call fact finding. She will now apply the Supreme Court's framework to the allegations to determine what is official versus unofficial conduct. If it is official conduct, is it absolutely immune? If it's not absolutely immune, is it presumptively immune? And if it's presumptively immune, could the government rebut the presumption? That's all a hodgepodge of very difficult legal questions. I think it's inconceivable that there will be a criminal trial before the election. If Trump is elected to a second term, experts say he has several options to quash the case. President Trump would be the head of the executive branch of the justice department. He could order the justice department just to stand down. He could say on day one, I have determined this was a witch hunt.

President Trump could potentially try to issue a self-pardon, that's more controversial. And even the Justice Department in the distant past has said that a president cannot pardon himself.

Trump’s Immunity: Legal Expert Breaks Down Supreme Court Ruling | WSJ

The Wall Street Journal takes you inside carefully selected stories and events in a visually captivating way so you can dig deeper into the news and insights that matter to you. 

Trump’s Immunity: Legal Expert Breaks Down Supreme Court Ruling | WSJ

Trump’s Immunity: Legal Expert Breaks Down Supreme Court Ruling | WSJ

Scripts