No. of Recommendations: 7
That doesn't mean Trump gets found immune from prosecution. Most of the factual basis for his prosecution involves private actions as a candidate, not Presidential actions. And I suspect that even a SCOTUS ruling that found that some official Presidential actions were immune from criminal prosecution would have criteria/standards that the US could argue weren't met here.
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First, for clarity, I think the correct outcome of this entire immunity debate should be an explicit rejection of ALL criminal immunity for Presidents IN office or OUT of office for acts claimed to be performed WITHIN the scope of Presidential responsibilities or OUTSIDE such scope. Any caveating away from a complete rejection of criminal immunity is only going to tempt corrupt actors in the future and trigger more political paralysis when the government's focus at such times should be eliminating such a President from office (if still serving) or subjecting them to the rule of law like any other citizen.
That being said, I agree it is HIGHLY unlikely this conservative court will define such an absolute barrier. Without making an ACTUAL decision to cause immediate turmoil, they will simply punt by covering the two easy corner cases --- stating there is NO absolute IMMUNITY from criminal prosecution and stating there are likely "extenuating circumstances" under which "official acts" might qualify for some degree of immunity -- without providing specifics. This strategy serves / served multiple purposes:
1) sends a signal to legal extremists who believe in a unitary executive branch that they should keep plugging away in lower courts to identify and pursue cases needed to cement unitary executive theory more firmly in future rulings
2) puts up a smoke screen to cloud the danger of the immediate indecision from less legally / politically literate voters to delay a backlash
3) gave them the excuse to ponder this case until the last day of court to ensure the CURRENT criminal trial could not take place prior to the election
Given how the court operates without any code of ethics or any functional hierarchy, it would only take one corrupt judge to delay writing their opinion or dissent until the very end of the term to serve the desires of the forces funding their vacations, providing them liquidity on their real estate holdings, etc. The Chief Justice doesn't really assign a degree of difficulty score to cases then use that to assign a "due date" to peers when they begin their private deliberations. In terms of work expectations, the court operates as a passive-aggressive co-op and is only as productive and responsive as the least productive or most obstructive / corrupt Justice wants to be. This court easily has three justices (Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh) matching that criteria who likely delayed such a simple (and still wrong) decision. One thing is clear. The delay had nothing to do with the time required to make the decision. That was made when they took the case. The delay had nothing to do with the difficulty in finding supporting case law to justify their decision. THERE iS NO CASE LAW or historical documents supporting the idea of granting immunity from criminal prosecution to a FORMER President for ANY actions.
At least in the case of the national security documents case, the crimes involved:
* knowingly retaining classified documents
* knowingly housing classified documents outside legally designated "safe" facilities
* intentionally misleading federal agents in the course of executing a lawful subpoena
* continuing to knowingly retain subpoened documents after failing to deliver them under search warrant
ALL of these crimes could be argued were committed as a FORMER President so it is impossible to argue they involve any scope of official acts the USSC might hint could enjoy limited immunity. Of course, that doesn't stop Aileen Cannon from purposely confounding any such ruling to toss the case to protect Trump, even if it triggers other investigations of her after the fact. There's no way the US Senate would be able to obtain a two thirds majority to convict her even if the House managed to impeach her. She could remain a pariah within her District but she seems to care little about her professional reputation in front of her judicial peers.
WTH
