After a marathon debate over whether former President Trump should be granted presidential immunity for crimes alleged by Special Counsel Jack Smith, legal experts tell Fox News Digital that most of the Supreme Court justices appear concerned with how the ruling will impact the future functioning of the executive branch.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In nearly three hours of debate on Thursday, the high court wrestled with this question:\u00a0\u2018Whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office?\u2019<\/p>\n
Legal experts told Fox News Digital that while it appeared the majority wasn\u2019t sold on the idea of absolute immunity, they could determine that Trump, and any future former presidents, should be granted a qualified version of it.<\/p>\n
\u2018I think the court recognizes that it would be a dangerous precedent if future presidents can prosecute their political rivals,\u2019 Mark Brnovich, former attorney general of Arizona, told Fox News Digital.<\/p>\n
\u2018They will set a limiting principle because, under the prosecutor\u2019s theory, future prosecutors would have a lot of power to persecute their political rivals,\u2019 Brnovich said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Over the course of questioning, the justices seemed generally split along ideological lines.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018If the potential for criminal liability is taken off the table, wouldn\u2019t there be a significant risk that future presidents would be emboldened to commit crimes with abandon while they\u2019re in office?\u2019 Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked in an exchange with Trump\u2019s lawyer, John Sauer.<\/p>\n
\u2018Once we say, \u2018No criminal liability, Mr. President, you can do whatever you want,\u2019 I\u2019m worried that we would have a worse problem than the problem of the president feeling constrained to follow the law while he\u2019s in office,\u2019 Jackson said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Conversely, Justice Samuel Alito questioned whether limiting immunity for a former president would send the country into a destabilizing cycle.<\/p>\n
\u2018If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possible after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy? And we can look around the world and find countries where we have seen this process, where the loser gets thrown in jail,\u2019 Alito remarked.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018We\u2019re writing a rule for the ages,\u2019 Justice Neil Gorsuch later stated.\u00a0<\/p>\n
John Shu, a constitutional scholar and former official in both Bush administrations, told Fox News Digital that the justices indicated \u2018they believe this case isn\u2019t really about Trump per se. It\u2019s about the Office of the President, what future presidents can do, and whether they\u2019ll be prosecuted for their choices.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018It\u2019s a very important issue and the Biden administration set a very bad precedent to go after not only a former president, but one who also is challenging Biden\u2019s re-election,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n
\u2018What the Biden administration has done here gives the terrible appearance of vindictiveness, and on an international or foreign policy level, it makes us look like just another banana republic that we generally criticize for prosecuting or trying to jail their political opponents,\u2019 he stated.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Shu added that \u2018many of the justices perhaps find what Trump did after the 2020 election distasteful.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018But they also seem uncomfortable with either granting blanket immunity on the one hand, or no immunity at all on the other.\u00a0As often happens, the middle ground is where the discussions will be,\u2019 he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
John Yoo, a law professor at University of California at Berkeley, said Trump\u2019s argument \u2018had much more success than many court watchers expected.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Only the three liberal justices seemed to reject the idea of immunity outright. The six conservative justices recognized the need to prevent future presidents from criminalizing policy and constitutional differences with their predecessors,\u2019 Yoo said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He added that a possible outcome could be that the justices punt the question back to the lower courts and ask them to first determine whether Trump\u2019s actions amounted to \u2018official\u2019 or \u2018private\u2019 acts, before they decide whether immunity might extend to official acts.<\/p>\n
A decision in the case is expected early this summer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The special counsel\u2019s office declined to comment when reached by Fox News Digital.<\/p>\n
Fox News\u2019 Bill Mears and Shannon Bream contributed to this report.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n
After a marathon debate over whether former President Trump should be granted presidential immunity for crimes alleged by Special Counsel Jack Smith, legal experts tell Fox News Digital that most of the Supreme Court justices appear concerned with how the ruling will impact the future functioning of the executive branch.\u00a0 In nearly three hours of <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":18416,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-18415","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18415\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}