Supreme Court Assures Trump Will Get Away with Everything

It is astonishing to realize that, in the United States of America, where supposedly no one is above the law, the Supreme Court has effectively decreed that nothing will come of former President Donald J. Trump’s treasonous actions leading up to and on January 6, 2021. The Court has put prosecution for his inciting an insurrection to overthrow the election of his opponent and retain power for himself out of reach.

The Court's novel and radical law says a president cannot be prosecuted for breaking laws when doing so is an official act of the office, and that
Prophetic Time Magazine cover from 2018.

just about all presidential acts are “official”. “Unofficial” actions, those taken for a president's private purposes, can be prosecuted if illegal, but the Court went out of its way to make that difficult by throwing up roadblocks.

Although meant for all presidents, the Court's constraints rule out key evidence supporting the indictment against Trump (specifics later). The curbs make it unmistakable that the six conservative members of the Court are doing their damnedest to clear the path for Trump to be the next president.

Neal Katyal has argued before the Supreme Court over fifty times. He says:

“This Court’s decision goes way, way, way too far in giving the president carte blanche. This is not the Constitution that I have ever thought it to be.”

Nowhere in the Constitution can the self-described originalists at the right end of the bench find justification for their expansion of presidential power. They just made it up.

In the nation’s near 250 years, presidential immunity has neither been considered nor deemed necessary. The opposite is true. Every one of our 46 presidents has assumed that the criminal law applied to him and performed with that in mind. But now, this Court has bestowed immunity on the one potential president most likely to commit illegal acts.

Of course, the Court already contrived to give the former president de facto immunity by taking the appeal, letting the weeks go by, and delaying the decision to the final day of its term, making it impossible for Special Counsel Jack Smith to mount and conduct a trial before the election. The question Americans would like to know before voting — is Trump guilty or not guilty? — has been deliberately denied them. The district and appellate courts in D.C., in the context of only the January 6 indictment, had ruled against what they viewed as an outlandish claim of immunity by Trump’s lawyers. But the Supreme Court invited itself to go far beyond the case before it by taking up the question of overall presidential immunity “for the ages”, as Justice Neil Gorsuch heralded it.

Before that, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Colorado Supreme Court for keeping Trump off the state’s presidential ballot according to the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition of anyone who “shall have engaged in insurrection”. They took less than a month against Colorado to make certain Trump would be on the ballot in all 50 states and the territories. Where speed benefited Trump, the Court went fast; where it was detrimental, it dragged its feet.

It’s all dropping into place so tidily. In another momentous upheaval, the Supreme Court has just decreed that the government agencies are no longer free to develop the rules and regulations that implement legislation. "Project 2025", the Heritage Foundation's 920-page blueprint for an all-powerful presidency, speaks of "the obligation of the executive branch to use its independent resources and authority to restrain the excesses of both the legislative and judicial branches." The Supreme Court has done its part by now handing the presidency the power to do exactly that.

The foundation's president, Kevin Roberts, says,

“We are going to win. We are in the process of taking this country back. We are in the process of the second American revolution which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”.

That's a threat of a bloody revolution if the left resists. But Heritage has no army, so what are they telling us? It's not outlandish to speculate that they have lined up extremist militias such as the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, etc. And their ranks will be replenished when Trump follows through on his pledge to pardon the "warriors" imprisoned for taking part in the January 6th insurrection.

We are seeing come to fruition a forty-year plan for the right not only to take the country back, but to never allow it to be relinquished again. The left fears that if Trump wins, this will be the last election.

Chief Justice John Roberts says immunity is needed to enable the president to take ”bold and unhesitating action”, to “boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties”, “to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution”. Did Abraham Lincoln need immunity to take this country to war? Or Franklin Roosevelt into history’s largest war? Did Harry Truman ask first for immunity before ending the war against Japan with nuclear strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki? This is clearly a contrived shield to give free reign to a particular president who immediately said after the ruling that he intends to press the limits of presidential power the moment he resumes office.

Roberts writes in the majority opinion that the President “may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers”, which refers to the specific list of powers granted in Article II, but then adds that “he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts”. There lies the broad sweep of immunity – the inclusion of any action outside the listed powers but "within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility".

“The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding”, writes Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her blistering dissent. "In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law". We scoffed at Richard Nixon saying, "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." Now, we have Justice Clarence Thomas concurring with the majority (emphasis his):

"In this case, there has been much discussion about ensuring that a president ‘is not above the law’. But, as the Court explains, the President’s immunity from prosecution for his official acts is the law."

How is this license for the president to break the law, decree his own laws in effect, different from Mussolini's definition of fascism: "everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” where the dictator becomes the state. Justice Sotomayor elaborated:

"When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune."

On Fox News, Jason Chaffetz, a former Republican Congressman, called this "brazen, irresponsible fear-mongering":

"A sitting Supreme Court justice is undermining the Court’s ruling by claiming without a shred of evidence that this ruling would allow the president to commit such blatantly unconstitutional actions"

But assassination was floated as a hypothetical in the oral arguments in April; there was this dialogue:

Justice Elena Kagan: "If the President decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts from which he can get immunity?"
Trump attorney John Sauer: "It would depend on the hypothetical, but we see that could well be an official act."

It is noteworthy that Roberts's opinion for the majority made no mention whatever of the hypotheticals posed in the hearing. Leaving them unaddressed effectively says, yes, those are official acts that cannot be prosecuted. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson says it out loud:

"Thus, even a hypothetical President who admits to having ordered the assassinations of his political rivals or critics…has a fair shot at getting immunity under the majority’s new Presidential accountability model."

Liberal media, aghast at the tyranny the Court has granted their favored candidate, speculates other illegal actions Trump might take, freed from any possibility of prosecution. He can sell pardons for a million apiece and pocket the money. Bribes can become the price for ambassadorships. He can round up political opponents, critics, and journalists and detain them in camps. No charge, no complaint, no evidence, no due process. Those who execute such orders do not have immunity, but Trump will insulate them with pardons.

He can quash funding appropriations mandated by Congress or redirect them to preferred agencies and causes without there ever being legal challenges, as there was when he redirected Department of Defense monies to build sections of his border wall. Justice Jackson sees this coming, writing in her dissent:

"[T]his Court has effectively snatched from the Legislature the authority to bind the President to Congress's mandate, and it has thereby substantially augmented the power of both the Office of the Presidency and itself."

For that matter, what stops a president such as Trump from defying an order from the Supreme Court itself?

Andrew Weissmann, lead attorney of the Mueller probe, rues the irony that the 'take care of the laws' requirement of the president in Article II — "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" — is what now a law that gives Trump exclusive authority under immunity to violate the law.

“The President enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official. The President is not above the law”. So writes Roberts. But any case brought against a former president must peel away any overlapping official acts from an indictment. The Court doesn't leave it at that. It throws up three barriers aimed directly at Special Counsel Jack Smith's January 6 case:

1. Official acts cannot be evidence: An official act that may have been the precursor to an illegal unofficial, personal act cannot come into a case even as evidence. Only the bribe, in the example above, but not the official act of appointing an ambassador. The bribe is left afloat in evidence of a president's wrongdoing, unmoored to any reason for it.

Roberts himself must have been set straight by the extremists on the bench because in April's oral arguments, he found that befuddling:

" Well, if you expunge the official part from the indictment, how do you — I mean, that's like a — a — a one-legged stool, right? I mean, giving somebody money isn't bribery unless you get something in exchange, and if what you get in exchange is to become the ambassador to a particular country, that is official, the appointment…so, if you say you have to expunge the official part, how does that go forward?"

But now he has reversed himself.

Justice Barrett, while concurring with the majority, would not join that part of the Court's opinion that forbade reference to official acts at least as evidence:

"[E]xcluding from trial any mention of the official act connected to the bribe would hamstring the prosecution. To make sense of charges alleging a quid pro quo, the jury must be allowed to hear about both the quid and the quo."

2. Do not inquire into motive: The statutes under which Trump is being prosecuted require specific intent, that Trump had a criminal state of mind (mens rea) — the overthrow of the government. The majority opinion says,

"[C]ourts may not inquire into the President’s motives. Such an inquiry would risk exposing even the most obvious instances of official conduct to judicial examination on the mere allegation of improper purpose."

What about openly expressed motive? Is Roberts signaling that the Court, in an ultimate appeal, would reject the motives revealed by the former president who, in his lack of impulse control, sent thousands of early morning tweets in the months leading up to January 6? Is the Supreme Court setting up for what would be a corrupt obstruction of Smith's case, that even motives expressed in the public arena are out of bounds?

3. Communications between the president and government officials are off limits:

"Trump is therefore absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials."

The justices are here ruling out a particular communication between Trump, the active attorney general, and others at the Justice Department that is of smoking gun importance to the January 6 prosecution, the very reason why the Court says it must be expunged. It doesn't matter that the communication was about an illegal plot. The story in brief:

A high official at the Department of Justice, Jeffery Clark, had written a letter that he proposed to send to Georgia's governor and officials which lied that the DOJ was conducting an investigation of the 2020 election and that the Georgia General Assembly should convene in special session to look into irregularities in that state. The plan was to send the letter, an implicit threat, to all states narrowly lost by Trump. Neither Acting Attorney General Jeffery Rosen nor his second in command Richard Donoghue would co-sign the letter, a firing offense for Trump, who decided to replace Rosen with Clark. He backed off when he heard that firing Rosen would cause mass resignations at Justice.

Evidence of the attempt to overturn Georgia's election of Biden, Trump's intent to fire his acting AG for refusing to comply, is suppressed, cannot be used by Smith, Roberts says.

In the future, it means when Trump orders up sham prosecutions of his enemies from the Justice Department, or calls the IRS to have the agency investigate his critics, the evidence to his criminality is blocked.

And to protect Trump, Roberts moves to seal off his conversations with Vice President Mike Pence on January 5th and 6th:

"The indictment’s allegations that Trump attempted to pressure the Vice President to take particular acts in connection with his role at the certification proceeding thus involve official conduct, and Trump is at least presumptively immune from prosecution for such conduct."

Trump's illegal act was to repeatedly harangue Pence to go beyond his constitutional role of mere Electoral College vote counting and illegally disrupt certification so Trump could stay in power. How is that an official act? Roberts and his corrupt majority will surely snuff this evidence of crime in any ultimate appeal.

Trump's lawyers are challenging his New York conviction; part of the evidence overlaps into when he became president. They'll claim he stole the Mar-a-Lago documents while still president and is therefore immune; we may see Judge Aileen Cannon, anxious to do everything she can for Trump, move to throw out the case entirely. Trump's illegal election tampering by pressing the Georgia secretary of state to find enough votes to make him the winner?; Roberts spherically wrote that a president's conversations with "state officials" are official acts and immune.

All of these cases will have be re-worked, with narrowed indictments, possibly re-tried, meaning months of start-over delay, going nowhere. Two will be shut down if Trump is president again.

As expected, the Court has remanded the January 6 case to Judge Tanya Chutkan and the D.C. District Court, advising that she must conduct a hearing to sort out what in the indictment is official vs. private. The instructions are detailed, complaining, as example, that her ruling denying immunity contains "select Tweets and brief snippets of the speech Trump delivered on the morning of January 6, omitting its full text or context", all meant to stretch the calendar.

With a trial impossible before the election, the hope is that Judge Chutkan and Jack Smith will leap at the Supreme Court's mandate as opportunity to conduct an evidentiary hearing to do the sorting out, bringing forth the entire story including everything the Court prohibited from use at trial, with subpoenas flying out coast to coast to the full cast of characters — all in the hope of getting across to the American people what millions of them have never heard that it wasn't just a protest gone bad that day, but a months-long plot to overthrow the government.