Amid former President Donald Trump’s wide range of courtroom troubles, he’s still claiming at the U.S. Supreme Court that he is legally protected from even the possibility of a key criminal case he’s currently facing by mere virtue of once serving as president. The case accuses Trump of several conspiracies furthering an election interference plot, covering — in broad terms — what Trump was (very prominently) doing after the last presidential race.
And Trump is still facing intense backlash for his immunity claims, including with a recent filing made at the nation’s highest court by the federal prosecutors running his case, who are led by the Justice Department’s Special Counsel Jack Smith. They point to history — from both the nation’s founding period and recent decades — and the law in asserting that there’s just no reasonable foundation whatsoever for the kind of legal protections that Trump is claiming.
“Rightly so: the absolute immunity Trump seeks is something that belongs to dictators, not an American president,” said expert Norm Eisen of the think tank/policy organization Brookings.
Smith’s own filings cast a startling vision of the kinds of impacts that Trump’s arguments could impose. “Petitioner suggests that unless a criminal statute expressly names the President, the statute does not apply. That radical suggestion, which would free the President from virtually all criminal law—even crimes such as bribery, murder, treason, and sedition—is unfounded. That rule finds no support in this Court’s decisions,” prosecutors said.
The dispute forced an extensive, ongoing delay to the anticipated trial in Trump’s election interference case, which was originally set to reach a jury last month.
Trump, meanwhile, is on track for a criminal trial on different allegations next week in New York City after his team lost a couple of attempts this week to get the proceedings delayed in connection to both an attempt to change its location and a challenge to a gag order on Trump from the presiding judge, which Trump despises.
