Trump's "Absolute" Immunity Argument Is Even Worse Than It Looks
If there’s one thing former President Donald Trump loves doing, it’s claiming that other people can’t hold him accountable. He argued for some form of presidential immunity while in office, often with little success. This week, he took it even further to argue that the Constitution had given him a get-out-of-jail-free card for his actions leading up to January 6, 2021.
Trump’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the charges in his federal trial in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, arguing that Trump enjoys “absolute immunity” as president for his alleged role in trying to overturn the 2020 election results. They claimed Trump’s comments and actions were actually part of his official duties as president and that therefore he couldn’t be held accountable for them.
“As the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and hundreds of years of history and tradition all make clear, the president’s motivations are not for the prosecution or this court to decide,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in their motion to dismiss. “Rather, where, as here, the president’s actions are within the ambit of his office, he is absolutely immune from prosecution.”
This is a profoundly flawed argument, but it’s worth enumerating the many ways in which it is so flawed. To make this claim, Trump’s lawyers not only had to misread the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and the contemporaneous debates about ratification—they also had to misrepresent a conservative Supreme Court justice’s own arguments along the way. This does not bode well for its success.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-absolute-immunity-argument-even-191939873.html
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