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Special Counsel Jack Smith told the Supreme Court on Monday to reject Donald Trump’s claim for blanket immunity, denying the former president any chance to delay his trial on charges of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. asked to do so.
Mr. Smith told the court that Mr. Trump’s position has no basis in the Constitution, in this country’s history, or in the American people’s understanding that the president is not above the law. Smith said that even if the Supreme Court finds that former presidents have some immunity, at least some of Trump’s actions are far from “official” and are private and could be prosecuted. He claimed to have sex.
“The Framers never supported impunity for former presidents, and they knew that every president from the founding of the nation to the present would face potential criminal liability for their acts in office after leaving office. ” Mr Smith said in court.
Smith’s motion has emerged as the highest-profile case of the Supreme Court’s current term. A wide-ranging ruling against Trump could invalidate not only the special counsel’s election destruction case, but also a series of other criminal charges pending against him.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments on April 25 and is expected to issue a decision by July. Trump is expected to respond in writing to Smith next week.
Smith will seek to counter Trump’s argument that lower courts should consider how qualified immunity, if any, applies to the former president’s case. And so. If a majority of the justices made such a choice, it could significantly delay the trial.
But the special counsel argued that many of Trump’s actions were private. He said the constitution does not give the president the role of certifying the selection of his successor. Mr. Trump’s efforts were therefore part of “the petitioner’s efforts to maintain power through fraud, a private scheme by private actors to achieve private ends,” Smith added.
Trump filed his first argument last month, arguing that if the court does not grant immunity, future presidents could be exposed to “de facto blackmail and extortion while in office.” He said previous presidents could also be indicted for any controversial acts they committed while in office.
Mr. Smith asserted that position in his latest brief.
“For the office of the president to function effectively, it is not necessary that a former president be exempted from liability for these alleged violations of federal criminal law,” Smith wrote on Monday. “On the contrary, a fundamental principle of our constitutional order is that no one is above the law, including the president.”
In a filing last month, the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee laid out his political goal of delaying the trial until after the November election if the justices are unwilling to accept a maximalist theory of presidential immunity. It also suggested alternative routes to help achieve it. .
Under that scenario, the court could send the case back to a lower court for further proceedings to determine whether the partial immunity theory applies to his case. This would postpone the trial for several months.
But Smith seemed eager to distance the court from that outcome. Instead, he said, if the Supreme Court finds that the former president has certain immunity, a trial could begin focused on Trump’s personal conduct.
Smith told the Supreme Court, “Even if courts tend to grant some degree of immunity to former presidents for their official conduct, the indictment does not suggest that the appellants were able to substantively serve the appellant’s private purposes.” “It should be remanded for trial because it alleges that there was a personal act.”
The special counsel said Trump’s “use of public power was merely an additional means to achieve his private goal, namely, perpetuating his term, and that it could be prosecuted on the basis of private conduct.” “There is,” he claimed.
Trump’s argument that former presidents need immunity to avoid political retribution when they leave office has been rejected by two lower federal courts. A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit unanimously rejected Trump’s position in February.
Smith also took aim at Trump’s previous claims about whether the laws he is accused of violating apply to former presidents.
Mr. Smith said President Trump is “proposing that unless a criminal statute explicitly names the president, the law does not apply.” “His radical proposal to exempt the president from virtually all criminal laws, including crimes such as bribery, murder, treason, and sedition, is baseless.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
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