The United States Supreme Court considers that presidents have criminal immunity for acts performed in the exercise of their office. In a ruling of great importance for the procedural future of former President Donald Trump, the judges do not grant him absolute immunity, but they do grant him partial immunity, related to official facts. The sentence comes just over four months before the elections in which Trump aspires to return to the White House and days after a television debate that has raised doubts about the state of form of the current president, Joe Biden, his foreseeable rival in the elections. polls on November 5.
“The nature of presidential power entitles a former president to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority; he is also entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all of his official acts; there is no immunity for unofficial acts,” the Supreme Court said in a ruling that is a victory for Trump. The Supreme Court overturns lower court rulings that denied Trump immunity and asks them to decide according to the criteria it now sets.
The sentence has been approved with the vote in favor of the six conservative judges, including the three appointed by Trump himself. The three progressive judges voted against. In total, between the introduction, the ruling and the individual votes, The judgment runs to 119 pages. “The president does not enjoy immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the president does is official. The president is not above the law. But Congress cannot criminalize the president’s conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the Executive Branch under the Constitution. And the system of separation of powers designed by the Founding Fathers has always required an energetic and independent Executive. “Therefore, the president cannot be prosecuted for exercising his principal constitutional powers, and is entitled, at a minimum, to presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts,” says the ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts. . “That immunity applies equally to all occupants of the Oval Office, regardless of their politics or party,” he adds.
The case is being referred to the investigating judge. She will have to decide what were official acts and what were not, but the Supreme Court has already expressly ruled on some: it shields communications between Trump and his attorney general, which were part of the evidence of the attempts to rig the election. This weakens the accusation.
The case that has reached the Supreme Court is that of Washington, in which the prosecutor accused the former president of four alleged crimes for trying to alter the results of the 2020 presidential elections, which he lost to Joe Biden, and clinging to power by cheating and preventing the certification of that victory.
Trump’s first triumph has been to delay the process, delaying the start of a trial initially scheduled for March 4. Now, it is almost impossible for him to sit in the dock before the presidential elections on November 5. If he wins the election, he will also be able to order that charges on federal crimes be dropped or even grant a pardon to himself.
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In parallel, another ruling from the Supreme Court itself has lowered the scope of the crime of obstruction of an official procedure. The four crimes for which the prosecutor charged Trump in Washington are: conspiracy to defraud the US Government, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction or attempted obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to violate civil rights. The second and third crimes correspond to the criminal figure that the Supreme Court disapproved and his decision complicates the success of these two accusations against Trump. The doctrine of the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has reduced this criminal offense to cases related to the destruction of evidence, documents, records, objects or other things used in an official procedure. Consider that it is not applicable to those who attacked the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021.
While this case was being heard in the Supreme Court, Trump has become the first former US president to be found guilty in a criminal trial. He is awaiting sentencing on July 11 after a jury found him guilty of 34 counts of falsifying checks, invoices and accounting records. He intended to conceal payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels and thus prevent the scandal of his relationship with her from breaking out in the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign. In that case, it was obvious that Trump was not carrying out an activity related to his office, so the sentence should not affect that conviction.
It is not so clear what the consequences are for the other cases facing the former president: the one in Florida for withholding defense secrets and obstruction of justice, for the confidential documents he took to his Mar-a-Lago mansion, in which Trump also claimed immunity; and the one in Georgia for his attempts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 presidential election against Joe Biden.
This is a historic case that can draw the contours of presidential power for the future. No president or former president has been indicted before Trump, so the Supreme Court had never ruled on the issue. “This case has enormous implications for the presidency, for the future of the presidency, for the future of the country,” Judge Brett Kavanaugh said at the oral hearing.
The Supreme Court’s judicial year has been marked by cases related to the former president. In addition to this Monday’s ruling on immunity and last Friday’s ruling on the crime of obstruction of an official procedure – in which Trump was not a direct party – there have been other cases that have touched him tangentially and a decision on whether He could be excluded from the ballots for having incited the assault on the Capitol. The justices unanimously concluded that he could run in the primaries—and by extension, the presidential elections—because a law of Congress would be required to be disqualified for insurrection.
Previous failures
Both the federal judge investigating the case and the Court of Appeals to which Trump initially appealed, flatly rejected his immunity. Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a harsh ruling in which she said that being president “does not confer a lifetime pass out of prison.” Trump’s lawyers appealed to the Washington Court of Appeals, which paralyzed the processing of the case, because what was at stake was the very essence of whether or not the former president could be charged and tried.
The Court of Appeals also rejected immunity with a unanimous vote of the three judges. “For purposes of this criminal case, former President Trump has become Citizen Trump, with all the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as president no longer protects him against this accusation,” the 57-page ruling said in its introduction. “It would be a surprising paradox if the president, who has the ultimate constitutional duty of ensuring faithful compliance with the laws, were the only position capable of challenging them with impunity,” the judges develop in the foundations of the decision. “We cannot accept that the office of the presidency places its former occupants above the law forever,” she added in another of her sentences.
The judges looked bac
k to the Watergate case to reject Trump’s claim to almost absolute immunity. “Recent historical evidence suggests that former presidents, including President Trump, have not believed themselves to be entirely immune from criminal liability for official acts during his presidency. “President Gerald Ford granted a full pardon to former President Richard Nixon, which both former presidents evidently believed was necessary to avoid Nixon’s impeachment following his resignation,” said his sentence.
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