When a lawyer for former President Donald Trump argued before the Supreme Court last week that his client should enjoy immunity from charges of conspiracy to sabotage the last election, he asked the justices to imagine a world in which presidents prosecute relentlessly to the former presidents in court.
“Could President Biden one day be charged with improperly inducing immigrants to enter the country illegally due to his immigration policies?” asked attorney D. John Sauer.
What Sauer failed to mention was that Trump has done as much as anyone to expand the scope for threatening his political opponents with prosecution. In 2016, her followers received mentions of Hillary Clinton with the slogan: “Lock her up.” In his current campaign, Trump has explicitly warned that he will attempt to use the justice system as a weapon of political revenge and has frequently stated that he might go following President Joe Biden and his family.
In fact, Trump has asked the Supreme Court to enforce a rule — that public officials in the United States should not participate in tit-for-tat political processes — that he has threatened to destroy for years. With the promise of inciting his Department of Justice once morest Biden, Trump has laid the groundwork for the very conditions that he was asking the judges to avoid when granting him immunity.
Trump maintains that it is Biden who has politicized justice by persecuting him on several fronts as they face each other in the electoral contest. However, in making that argument, Trump has wanted to avoid the reality that no former president has faced as many accusations, or as much evidence, of crimes as he has.
The two federal indictments once morest Trump were brought by a special prosecutor who works largely independently for the Justice Department, while the other two criminal cases once morest him were brought by local district attorneys in New York and Georgia. .
It is paradoxical that, if the Supreme Court decides that presidents should have a certain degree of immunity in the official actions they take while in office, this resolution would strip Trump of one of the main issues that he and his allies have promoted to throughout the current campaign: that Biden must be held accountable to the criminal justice system, despite the lack of convincing evidence that he violated any laws.
And if Trump wins in November, it will be much more difficult, if not impossible, for him to sue Biden for any actions he took while in office.
Last spring, Trump promised that if elected once more, he would appoint a special prosecutor to “go following” Biden and his family. And just two weeks ago, he posted on social media a not-so-veiled threat that if the Supreme Court rejected his request for presidential immunity, he would also “lift” Biden’s immunity.
Over the weekend, Eric Trump, one of his sons, spoke regarding a future lawsuit once morest Biden. In his appearance on Fox News, he commented that if the Court denied his father’s immunity, that would mean that “they”—he did not say exactly who he was referring to—might go following Biden for things like draining the country’s oil reserves. country.
History has already shown us that the former president and his allies have been willing to use the justice system once morest their apparent adversaries.
Trump’s Justice Department, under former Attorney General William Barr, appointed a special prosecutor, John Durham, to conduct an investigation into those who investigated connections between Russia and Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Likewise, Trump repeatedly promoted investigations into his political critics, including Clinton, James Comey, whom he fired as director of the FBI, and John Kerry, former senator and secretary of state under Barack Obama. (None of them were prosecuted).
According to one of Trump’s White House chiefs of staff, when he was president he wanted the Internal Revenue Service to investigate several of those he considered his political enemies, including Comey.
However, for all Trump’s promises to carry out some type of criminal investigation once morest Biden, it has been difficult to find real evidence of crimes committed by the president.
It appears that following more than a year of investigations, House Republicans have given up their attempt to bring impeachment charges once morest Biden. A separate impeachment trial once morest Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s Homeland Security secretary, was scrapped as soon as he arrived in the Senate.
In February, special counsel Robert Hur said there was insufficient evidence to charge Biden with illegally withholding classified documents following he was vice president.
Given the long-held acceptance of the American legal principle that no one is above the law, Trump’s immunity request seemed like a long shot when his lawyers took it to the Supreme Court.
It’s impossible to know how much protection, if any, the judges will ultimately grant Trump in the election interference case. Although none of them seemed to accept his most extreme idea (that he might not be prosecuted unless he was first found guilty in an impeachment trial), several apparently accepted that he may enjoy a limited form of immunity that would protect him from being charged for having taken official measures indispensable in his position.
As for Biden, all the reasons for bringing charges once morest him that Trump, his allies or his lawyers have suggested have had little legal basis. Those reasons would be even harder to support if the Supreme Court were inclined to limit prosecutions based on a former president’s basic official actions.
Eric Trump’s proposal to go following Biden over his handling of oil reserves, for example, would apparently fall squarely within the scope of a president’s official duties, as would Sauer’s idea of prosecuting Biden for his immigration policy.
Although some form of executive immunity might one day protect Biden from an attack by prosecutors under Trump, Michael Dreeben, a Justice Department lawyer, told the court that it was neither necessary nor desirable.
According to Dreeben, the criminal justice system already has “overlapping safeguards” to protect once morest what he called “a runaway train” of false accusations.
What was far more worrying, Dreeben argued, was creating a form of immunity that would allow a president to commit crimes with impunity.
“The legislators knew very well the dangers of a king being able to do no wrong, so they devised a system to control abuses of power, especially the use of official power for personal gain,” Dreeben said.
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