Trump v. United States | |
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Argued April 25, 2024 | |
Full case name | Donald J. Trump v. United States |
Docket no. | 23-939 |
Argument | Oral argument |
Case history | |
Prior | United States v. Trump, No. 23-cr-257 (D.D.C., Dec. 1., 2023) (immunity memorandum opinion) United States v. Trump, No. 23-3190 (D.C. Cir., Dec. 8., 2023) (gag order) ContentsUnited States v. Trump, No. 23-3228 (D.C. Cir., Feb 6, 2024) (immunity) |
Questions presented | |
Whether 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. | |
Court membership | |
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Business and personal 45th President of the United States Tenure Impeachments Prosecutions Interactions involving Russia | ||
Trump v. United States is a pending U.S. Supreme Court case in which the Court will determine whether, and to what extent, presidential immunity from criminal prosecution exists. The case extends from an ongoing federal trial to determine whether Donald Trump, president at the time, and others engaged in election interference during the 2020 election, including events during the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
In Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1982), the Supreme Court held that the president is immune from civil suit for money damages in regards to official acts. The Court clarified in Clinton v. Jones (1997) that the president is liable for civil damages for actions committed prior to assuming the presidency. The Supreme Court cases United States v. Nixon (1974) and Trump v. Vance (2020) limit the president's privilege within the judicial process; in Vance, chief justice John Roberts wrote that the president is not "categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding". [1]
Three separate civil lawsuits (later consolidated in Thompson v. Trump ) against Donald Trump filed by several Congresspersons and Capitol police officers sought damages for Trump's actions from the United States Capitol attack on January 6, 2021. Trump asserted presidential immunity for that case. In February 2022, District Court for the District of Columbia judge Amit Mehta rejected former president Donald Trump's claims of immunity in reference to the January 6 Capitol attack, allowing the civil trials to proceed. [1] The D.C. Court of Appeals upheld Mehta's opinion in a unanimous decision in December 2023. However, the ruling also stated that Trump may argue the immunity question later in the civil trial. [2] Trump opted not to appeal this decision to the Supreme Court. [3]
By March 2022, the Department of Justice began an investigation into then-President Donald Trump's actions from the general election in November 2020 and during the United States Capitol attack on January 6, 2021. [4] Attorney general Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as special council to oversee the investigation into Trump in both the January 6 events and the handling of classified documents after his presidency. [5] Under federal district judge Tanya S. Chutkan for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, a grand jury indicted Trump on four charges released on August 1, 2023. [6]
Among other legal actions, lawyers for Trump requested the dismissal of those charges in October 2023 based on presidential immunity. Attorney John Lauro argued that Trump's claims of electoral irregularities and voter fraud were "efforts to ensure election integrity", a responsibility of the president. According to Lauro, Trump's attempts to validate his claims through the Department of Justice and the fake electors plot cannot be criminally prosecuted as "official duties" as president. [7] Federal prosecutors asserted that Trump's claims of presidential immunity were not supported by the Constitution or legal precedent. [8]
On December 1, 2023, judge Tanya Chutkan rejected Trump's claims of presidential immunity. [9] Trump appealed the ruling to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on December 7, seeking to pause the case; [10] Prosecutor Smith sought to bypass the appeals court, requesting that the Supreme Court decide the issue of presidential immunity directly and urging the Court to rule swiftly. [11] [12] The Supreme Court opted not to hear the case in an order issued on December 22, 2023, returning the case to be heard to completion by the D.C. Circuit. [13]
The appeals court ruled on February 6, 2024, that Trump did not have presidential immunity. The unanimous three-judge panel stated that the public interest in holding presidents liable "outweighs the potential risks of chilling Presidential action", and that allowing for presidential immunity would be an "unbounded authority to commit crimes". [14]
On February 12, 2024, Trump appealed to the United States Supreme Court to request a stay of the 2020 election interference trial while he sought an en banc hearing from the D.C. Circuit Court. [15] In response, Smith filed his own brief on February 14, 2024, urging the Supreme Court to deny Trump's request and citing the urgency of the pending 2024 presidential election. Smith also requested that if the Supreme Court took the case, to treat Trump's request as a petition for writ of certiorari , and put the case on an expedited schedule. [16]
On February 28, 2024, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, later setting arguments for April 25. The court also maintained the stay of the trial until their decision was made. [17]
On April 22, 2024, Liz Cheney, vice-chair of the January 6 hearings committee, published an essay in The New York Times urging the Supreme Court of the United States to quickly decide on presidential immunity to allow the legal proceedings of former President Trump to overturn the 2020 election to proceed in a timely manner. [18]
Oral arguments were held on April 25, 2024. [19] Trump's attorney D. John Sauer argued that if structured as an official act, the president could not be charged for selling nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary, accepting a bribe, ordering the military to stage a coup to retain power, or ordering a political assassination. Sauer argued that owing to absolute immunity, the president must be successfully impeached and removed from Congress first. Michael Dreeben, representing the special counsel, argued that there are appropriate safeguards to assure that a president could not be prosecuted for most acts done while in their official capacity. [20] Journalists observing the arguments reported that the court downplayed Trump's claim of having complete absolute immunity, with some line drawn between public acts performed as presidential duties and covered by immunity, and private acts that would not be. At the same time, the conservative justices appeared to believe it necessary to review whether the specific indictments against Trump fell into public or private actions, and that sending the case back to lower courts to make this determination prior to the jury trial would be an appropriate action. Should the court decide on this route, the main trial would likely be delayed past the 2024 election. [19]
Trump's claims for "absolute immunity" have been rejected by most political commentators and two lower courts. In a unanimous ruling by the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the court stated that if Trump's theory of constitutional authority were accepted, it would "collapse our system of separated powers" and put a president above the law. [21]
Charlie Savage of the The New York Times wrote that Trump's immunity claim challenged "a hallmark of American-style democracy: its suspicion of concentrated power." Further stating that "rather than a presidency at least theoretically checked by law, the country would be ruled by presidents who could openly commit official crimes with impunity, so long as enough allied lawmakers remained sufficiently loyal to block any impeachment." [22]
Writing for Politico , former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori wrote that Trump's claims were "ridiculous," criticized the Supreme Court for not dismissing them immediately and thus potentially delaying Trump's criminal trials until after the 2024 United States presidential election, and criticized the court for "issuing transparently political rulings that are clearly aligned with the political priorities of the Republican Party." [23]
Following oral arguments on April 25, reactions to the Supreme Court seemingly entertaining some form of presidential immunity for Trump was overwhelmingly negative from a variety of historians, journalists, commentators, political scientists, and constitutional scholars. Many referred to Trump's arguments as those of a "king"; heavily criticized conservative justices for seemingly expressing more concern for preventing hypothetical future prosecutions of presidents; accused court conservatives for appearing unconcerned and giving serious thought as to whether assassinations, bribes, and military coups were protected "official" acts; accused court conservatives of being pro-Trump and misinterpreting the Constitution; and accused the court of being on the cusp of losing all remaining legitimacy. [lower-alpha 1]
Particular criticism was raised towards Justice Samuel Alito, who asked during the oral arguments, "Now if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility 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?" [40] Journalists stated that in the history of the United States, the transfer of presidental power had been peaceful save for the events of January 6, making Alito's question a means to treat Trump as a new normal. [40] [41] [42] Other criticism was levied at court conservatives seemingly abandoning their professed belief in originalism that was used to overturn the right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973) to create a basis of presidential immunity that does not exist in the Constitution. [43]
Democratic Rep. Jaime Raskin responded to oral arguments by saying that "they should move the Supreme Court over to the RNC headquarters, because they're acting like a bunch of partisan operatives." [44] In an interview with Meet the Press , Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell stated that he didn't believe presidents should be immune from prosecution for actions committed in office. [45]
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on questions of U.S. constitutional or federal law. It also has original jurisdiction over a narrow range of cases, specifically "all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party." The court holds the power of judicial review: the ability to invalidate a statute for violating a provision of the Constitution. It is also able to strike down presidential directives for violating either the Constitution or statutory law.
Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. is an American jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated to the high court by President George W. Bush on October 31, 2005, and has served on it since January 31, 2006. After Antonin Scalia, Alito is the second Italian American justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
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The Roberts Court is the time since 2005 during which the Supreme Court of the United States has been led by John Roberts as Chief Justice. Roberts succeeded William Rehnquist as Chief Justice after Rehnquist's death.
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John Charles Eastman is an American lawyer and academic who has been criminally indicted, ordered inactive by the State Bar of California, and recommended for disbarment for attempting to keep then-president Donald Trump in office and obstruct the certification of Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 United States presidential election. Eastman has lost eligibility to practice law in California state courts, pending his appeal of the state bar judge's ruling that recommended him for disbarment. Eastman is also a co-conspirator in the federal indictment brought against Trump over his attempts to subvert the 2020 election results and prevent the certification of Biden’s election.
In United States law, absolute immunity is a type of sovereign immunity for government officials that confers complete immunity from criminal prosecution and suits for damages, so long as officials are acting within the scope of their duties. The Supreme Court of the United States has consistently held that government officials deserve some type of immunity from lawsuits for damages, and that the common law recognized this immunity. The Court reasons that this immunity is necessary to protect public officials from excessive interference with their responsibilities and from "potentially disabling threats of liability."
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Trump v. Vance, 591 U.S. ___ (2020), was a landmark US Supreme Court case arising from a subpoena issued in August 2019 by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. against Mazars, then-President Donald Trump's accounting firm, for Trump's tax records and related documents, as part of his ongoing investigation into the Stormy Daniels scandal. Trump commenced legal proceedings to prevent their release.
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Thompson v. Trump is an ongoing federal civil case filed in February 2021 on behalf of U.S. House Representative Bennie Thompson against former U.S. president Donald Trump. The lawsuit claims that Trump and others conspired to incite the January 6 United States Capitol attack. In February 2022, District of Columbia U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that presidential immunity did not shield Trump from the lawsuit. In March 2022, Trump appealed Mehta's ruling to the U.S. District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals. In December 2023, the Court of Appeals upheld Mehta's ruling.
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Instead, members of the court's conservative majority treated Mr. Trump's assertion that he could not face charges that he tried to subvert the 2020 election as a weighty and difficult question. They did so, said Pamela Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, by averting their eyes from Mr. Trump's conduct ... The conservative justices did not seem concerned that Mr. Trump's lawyer, D. John Sauer, said his client was free during his presidency to commit lawless acts, subject to prosecution only after impeachment by the House and conviction in the Senate.
The right-wing justices seemed thoroughly uninterested in the case before them, which involves a violent insurrection that was led by a sitting president who is seeking to return to office in a matter of months. Instead, they spent the morning and early afternoon appearing to be more worried that prosecuting Mr. Trump could risk future malicious prosecutions of former presidents by their political rivals.
Donald Trump's claim that he has absolute immunity for criminal acts taken in office as president is an insult to reason, an assault on common sense and a perversion of the fundamental maxim of American democracy: that no man is above the law. More astonishing than the former president's claim to immunity, however, is the fact that the Supreme Court took the case in the first place ... In other words, however the Supreme Court rules, it has egregiously abused its power.
The conservative justices have shown they are ready to sacrifice any law or principle to save the former president.
Yesterday's message from the rightwing justices of the Supreme Court, particularly the male justices, was shocking to any believer in true, conservative jurisprudence and the rule of law. Their questions at the oral argument in the Donald Trump immunity case signaled strongly that they really care more about enhancing presidential power than preserving democracy, and to that end, lean toward giving Trump the gift of even more delay.
It says everything about this Supreme Court—a radical right-wing bench that Trump reshaped with his appointments—that several conservative Justices hardly seemed bothered by this absolutist vision of the Presidency. And yet, notably, I did not hear any of them specifically defend Trump's indefensible conduct or the tremendous overreach recommended by his lawyer; instead, they invoked fears of unwarranted prosecutions against other former Presidents—not this one, they insisted somewhat sanctimoniously, but unnamed others.
But the one thing that seems most clear coming out of Thursday's argument is that the answer — and the broader legacy of the Roberts court — will ultimately be up to him.