Former GOP Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming said this Monday that the U.S. Supreme Court should find it “obvious” that former presidents of the United States are not above the law around actions they took amid their official responsibilities. Donald Trump has been trying to shut down a criminal case from Special Counsel Jack Smith with claims of wide-reaching protections from even the possibility of prosecution for actions as president.
“It’s been 3+ years since Jan 6 and Americans have a right to hear the grand jury evidence against Trump in open court. Putin may be immune from Russian law— and thus able to freely kill dissidents— but it should be obvious to the Supreme Court that a U.S. President isn’t,” Cheney said Monday on X, the platform formerly called Twitter.
Trump’s team sought a temporary hold from the nation’s highest court on a recent ruling from the federal court of appeals for Washington, D.C., that rejected his immunity arguments.
The underlying criminal case from Smith concerns Trump’s attempts after the last presidential election to stay in power despite losing — ploys that Trump has grouped with his official duties as president, though carrying out his ambitions would have undone the collective impact of tens of millions of duly documented votes from around the United States.
In pushing back in the context of multiple criminal cases, including the election-related proceedings and a New York case stemming from pre-2016 election hush money, Trump’s team has pointed to his ongoing campaign for president — something the ex-commander-in-chief announced after the underlying investigations producing all four of his currently active criminal cases were publicly known. Trump consistently claims he’s the victim of political and electoral plots and that expected general election challenger President Joe Biden himself is involved in pushing some of this forward — something for which there’s just no real-world evidence. Prosecutors in one of Trump’s federal cases said they’d step away if conditions were otherwise.
