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Opinion | The Supreme Court has signed off on a Trump takeover of the DOJ

MSNBC – Opinion

The Supreme Court has signed off on a Trump takeover of the DOJ

Hayes Brown – July 3, 2024

In the process of granting former President Donald Trump immunity for at least some of his actions between Election Day 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021, the Supreme Court’s sweeping decision also provided a stamp of approval for one of the most dangerous parts of Trump’s second-term agenda: payback. In doing so, the justices rolled back one of the key post-Watergate reforms preventing presidents from abusing their vast power, freeing Trump, if he’s re-elected, to use the Department of Justice as his personal weapon.

The scheme Trump and his allies cooked up in 2020 involved enlisting the Justice Department to give their lies about widespread election fraud an official patina. Then-Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark drafted a letter to send to several states, including Georgia, that would falsely claim that “various irregularities” existed that cast those states’ election results into doubt. Had it been sent, the letter would have encouraged those state legislatures to convene special sessions to “investigate” and potentially send to Congress slates flipping the states’ Electoral College votes to Trump.

When the acting attorney general refused to send the letter, Trump threatened to fire him and replace him with Clark. He yielded only when a slew of top Justice Department officials promised to resign in protest. Apparently, though, according to the Supreme Court, there was nothing about that chain of events that falls outside the scope of the president’s “official acts.” As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the 6-3 opinion, “The President may discuss potential investigations and prosecutions with his Attorney General and other Justice Department officials to carry out his constitutional duty to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’”

The line seems innocuous compared to some of the other more dumbfounding statements within the decision, but the problem is that it’s written as though there was nothing wrong about the content of those discussions. A few paragraphs later, Roberts clarifies that sentence’s importance in explaining why the pressure campaign against Justice Department officials can’t be used to as part of the federal case against Trump:

Putting those two ideas together effectively signs off on ending the last 50 years of Justice Department independence. The way then-President Richard Nixon and his attorney general, John Mitchell, used and abused the DOJ and other law enforcement bodies to shield Nixon’s allies and harass his enemies was one of the most damaging revelations of Watergate. Following Nixon’s resignation and Mitchell’s eventual prosecution and conviction, subsequent attorneys general have all strived to keep the White House at arm’s length from the day-to-day decisions regarding investigations.

But there were few legislative reforms that safeguarded the Justice Department from being used as a political tool — it has almost entirely been the work of norms and precedents that have cut across administrations. Even Trump’s White House counsel Don McGahn issued a memo at the beginning of his term laying out the firewall between the White House staff and the Justice Department. It’s a standard that Trump’s allies, including Clark, have railed against, making no bones about the fact that, if given the chance, they intend to tear it down entirely.

If that happens, there will be little to prevent Trump from launching his promised revenge campaign against his enemies. Given the leeway Roberts has granted for the president to order even “sham” investigations, anyone could be subject to arbitrary probes, prompting unnecessary (and expensive) legal defenses and social stigma. It’s not absurd to imagine this resulting in the arrest and detention on made-up charges for anyone on the long list of people who’ve earned Trump’s ire.

Conversely, this ruling also seems on its face to allow a president to order an investigation to end for any reason. Under Roberts’ test, there would be no means for a court to assess, for example, whether Trump’s corruptly ordering that a GOP megadonor be beyond Justice Department scrutiny was a criminal violation of the law. Instead, the court’s conservatives have chosen to write this opinion from a worldview that assumes every “official act” taken by the president within his authority is legal and constitutional.

Roberts attempted to give the illusion that opinion was written with anyone but Trump in mind, and in doing so, he obscured how far removed from the average president Trump is. What Roberts frames as a simple declaration of the president’s authorities under the Constitution is now poised to become Trump’s go-ahead to target the political opposition with impunity. Likewise, in granting presidents the broadest benefit of the doubt possible to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed,” the court has all but guaranteed that, if Trump is returned to power, he will do the exact opposite.

The Trump Decision Reveals Deep Rot in the System

The New York Times – Guest Opinion

The Trump Decision Reveals Deep Rot in the System

By Laurence H. Tribe – July 1, 2024

Laurence H. Tribe is a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School. Mr. Tribe taught constitutional law at Harvard for 50 years.

In front of the Supreme Court Building, a person holding up a sign reading, “Delay, delay, delay.” — Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times

On Monday the Supreme Court dispensed with the rule of law by effectively depriving the American people of crucial information we should have had before the November election.

The question before the justices in Trump v. United States: Was Donald Trump immune from prosecution for the crimes the special counsel Jack Smith accused him of committing while president? The answer should have been obvious: No, presidents cannot commit crimes aimed at obstructing the peaceful transfer of power without facing consequences. Indeed, to my knowledge, no court has ever held that a president could be criminally immune under any circumstances.

Instead of delivering that judgment many months ago and allowing the trial to proceed, the justices have given Mr. Trump the gift of delay piled upon delay. By taking nearly 10 weeks to deliberate before returning the case to the district court — and by sending it back not even for immediate trial but for preliminary determinations that could trigger yet another round of appeals — they have extinguished any realistic hope of getting a verdict in the Jan. 6 case before November. American voters will enter ballot booths to choose between Donald Trump and President Biden without knowing whether Mr. Trump is guilty of the crimes with which a grand jury of his fellow citizens charged him.

This decision may seem like a reflection of a rogue conservative majority that can, in time, be changed. But it is a sign of a much deeper problem — one that, when the time is ripe, will require constitutional reforms to solve and perhaps even a new branch of government.

Although the opinion features a high-minded disclaimer that the court is not granting Mr. Trump or any future president complete immunity, the practical effect of this decision is presumptive immunity for all future presidents and complete immunity by delay for Mr. Trump.

This prospect was not lost on Mr. Trump. He repeatedly obtained delays to avoid trial, turning the legal machinery of the court system against itself to buy what he needed most: time — time to distract, delay and spin his own version of the story as he sought to find a way to make these devastating charges disappear. If he becomes president again, he could have his new attorney general fire Mr. Smith and deep-six the entire prosecution.

Regardless of whether you think Mr. Trump would have been acquitted or convicted in a trial, immunity by running out the clock is justice delayed and thus justice denied.

So how did our legal system get tripped up by his persistent delay strategy? And why does it have such perilous ramifications for the rule of law?

The Constitution’s framers erected a structure they hoped would ensure, as far as humanly possible, that no person, including a president, would be above the law. But they also designed the prosecutorial arm of government — which now includes the attorney general and the special counsels — to be dependent on the president. As centuries passed, this has created serious problems.

Special counsels now lack even the autonomy of independent prosecutors past because the dissent of Justice Antonin Scalia in a 1988 case called Morrison v. Olson announced what is now the accepted judicial view: that the executive branch should have sole appointment and discretionary retention power. As a result, Mr. Smith is less equipped to cope with extreme corruption at the top than his predecessors.

The attorney general, for his part, serves at the president’s pleasure. That probably explains why Merrick Garland waited about 20 months to appoint a special counsel in this case. The New York Times and other outlets have reported that in the early days of his presidency, Mr. Biden adamantly opposed bringing charges against his predecessor, most likely worried that they would backfire politically. An attorney general unconstrained by the political pressures of presidential politics might well have brought charges earlier, ensuring that we had answers before Election Day.

All this is generally accepted. But this case has exposed an even more insidious problem caused by the structural relationship between any president and the Justice Department. During the oral arguments, Michael Dreeben, the able Justice Department advocate, had to acknowledge that, because the attorney general serves at the president’s pleasure, any president can effectively secure the equivalent of immunity for whatever crimes he might choose to commit. All a chief executive must do is pick an attorney general who would give him a formal opinion stating that whatever he planned to do would be legal — up to and including a coup reversing his own election loss. That advice of counsel would, under settled principles of due process, give the president an ironclad defense every bit as good as judicially conferred immunity.

Should Mr. Trump return to the Oval Office, he could act with even greater impunity than he did in his first term, either by immunizing himself with an attorney general’s opinion (which would give him license to commit whatever crimes he chose to commit) or by using the Justice Department to engage in politically motivated prosecutions.

The American people can still vote this November to reject what would be a devastating blow to the survival of government by and for the people. But whatever one believes about the likely outcome, we can and should also begin talk of amending the Constitution to repair these structural flaws. Whether Trumpism implodes later rather than sooner, we must remember that over the course of our history, we have made progress toward a “more perfect Union” only by imagining a better future and struggling to embody it in our fundamental law. Sometimes we’ve amended the Constitution after a national upheaval as convulsive as the Civil War. At other times, however, less traumatic events affecting the presidency, in particular, have prompted constitutional reform.

To repair the profound and growing problem of presidential unaccountability, we must dare to design a separate branch of government, outside the existing three, charged with investigating and prosecuting violations of federal criminal laws.

The process of amending the Constitution is long and cumbersome and could take years. Although it requires no involvement by the president, it can happen only after our constitutional republic puts Trumpism behind it. But a decisive victory over the MAGA movement, either now or in the years ahead, could provide the political energy needed to make structural change possible, persuading a future supermajority in Congress to advance an amendment to repair the dangers embedded in our constitutional structure before it is too late.

Precedent exists for a prosecutorial arm separate from the presidency. In other nations and more than 40 states, the chief executive has no power to remove the head of the government’s prosecutorial authority. In a majority of those states, voters elect attorneys general who are independent of the governor. That would be one route for selecting an independent federal prosecutor to head the fourth branch. Another would retain appointment of the chief federal prosecutor by the president but ensure that official’s independence by preventing removal without good cause.

To be sure, there are risks. There’s no perfect system of government that individuals with insatiable thirst for dominance cannot corrupt or subvert. In the one I envision, an individual motivated less by justice than by greed for power could come to wield the immense authority of the federal prosecutor. What would prevent that person from going rogue? Courts? Congress? The people? The answer is all of the above.

By creating a fourth branch less powerful than the presidency and subject to checks and balances — both from the judiciary, with its power of judicial review, and from the legislature, with its power of the purse — we can fortify our system from the kinds of abuse we have sadly witnessed in our times and are likely to see repeated and amplified because of Monday’s anti-democratic decision.

More on Donald Trump’s plans for a second term:

Michelle Goldberg: ‘Lock Her Up’ Was Not Just a Slogan – June 3, 2024

Jacob Heilbrunn: The Real Danger if Trump Is Re-elected – May 21, 2024

Caroline Fredrickson: What Worries Me Most About a Trump Presidency – April 10, 2024

Washington Post: Justice Department to pursue Trump prosecutions past the election, even if he wins

CNN

Washington Post: Justice Department to pursue Trump prosecutions past the election, even if he wins

Piper Hudspeth Blackburn and Hannah Rabinowitz – July 2, 2024

Justice Department officials will continue to pursue the federal criminal cases against Donald Trump past Election Day, even if he wins, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The plan is due to a view that DOJ rules against charging or prosecuting a sitting president would not kick in until Inauguration Day in January, people familiar with the discussions told The Post.

The Washington Post’s reporting comes a day after the Supreme Court ruled that Trump may claim immunity from criminal prosecution for some of the actions he took at the end of his presidency.

The court’s decision is likely to further delay a trial on the federal election subversion charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith, leaving Trump poised to avoid pre-election trials in the most significant criminal prosecutions he faces after being found guilty in his hush money trial in May. (His sentencing in that trial has been postponed until September in the wake of the court’s ruling.)

Officials who were not part of the special counsel’s deliberations told CNN they believed the long-standing DOJ policy against criminally charging a sitting president does not extend to a president-elect.

The department policy applies to a “sitting president,” the officials told CNN – so even if Trump were to win reelection in November, he could still stand trial before he was inaugurated in January 2025.

A spokesperson for Smith’s office declined to comment to The Post.

Trump also faces dozens of federal charges related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents. The judge who oversees that case, also brought by Smith, indefinitely postponed the trial in May, citing significant issues around classified evidence that would need to be worked out before the case goes to a jury.

The Supreme Court Made a ‘Monumentally Awful’ Decision

The New York Times – Opinion

The Supreme Court Made a ‘Monumentally Awful’ Decision

Presidential immunity never existed in America. Until now.

By Jesse Wegman – Produced by Derek Arthur

On Monday morning the Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump and future presidents of the United States have immunity for official acts. “The entire idea of the American system of government and the Constitution was that the rule of law was king, the rule of law applies to everyone equally, including the president of the United States,” Jesse Wegman, a member of the editorial board, says. “The court blew all of that up.”

In this audio essay, Jesse explains what the ruling means for Trump and for the presidency in decades to come.

(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)

A photo illustration of the Supreme Court Building, shaded blue. — Credit…Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Walter Bibikow

This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Jesse Wegman is a member of The Times editorial board, where he writes about the Supreme Court, law and politics.

Transcript:

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.Jesse Wegman

I’m Jesse Wegman. I’m a member of “The Times” editorial board, where I write about law and politics.

So on the last day of its term, the Court ruled — I think shocking many of us — that presidents are basically above the law, much to the shock of those of us who thought they weren’t. They have, essentially, absolute immunity for most of their official acts, regardless of how egregiously they violate the law in carrying them out. And they may even have immunity for some acts that are on the edge of officialness. So it’s a decision that flies in the face of more than 200 years of American history, the text of the Constitution, and, I think, everybody’s settled understanding of presidents’ liability for criminal activity.

In the immediate term, what this means is that Donald Trump will almost certainly not face prosecution for inciting a violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to try to overturn an election that he had lost fair and square. I think the concern that the dissenters brought up was that this is not just Donald Trump but presidents going forward who will now feel, essentially, free to do whatever they want, knowing that it is going to be extraordinarily hard to hold them to account after their presidencies.

When this case first got to the court system, I think a lot of people laughed it off. It was Donald Trump bringing up yet another one of his off-the-wall, absurd legal arguments. In this case, he was saying everything that happened on January 6 and around January 6 I’m immune from prosecution for because I was the president, and I was doing my job as the president.

Just to be clear, there has never been any criminal immunity for any president in American history. This was, I thought, broadly understood. Everyone understood this. Richard Nixon understood it back in the Watergate era.

That’s why he accepted a pardon because he knew that, without the pardon, he could be criminally prosecuted. It’s why Donald Trump’s lawyers, during the second impeachment of Trump in early 2021, said, even if you vote to acquit him, don’t worry. You can still go after him in a court of law. That was the general understanding.

The court blew all of that up with its decision on Monday. And I don’t think we can overstate what a monumental, and monumentally awful, decision this was.

Look, the justices in the majority, which was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, who styles himself as an institutionalist — and I would say this opinion is about as anti-institutional as you can get — they argued that to expose presidents to criminal prosecution would interfere with their ability to do their job with the kind of energy and boldness that we require of presidents.

This is just laughable. First of all, no president in history before Donald Trump was brought up on criminal charges. The reason for that isn’t that presidents were tiptoeing around, terrified about being brought up on criminal charges. The reason is that presidents understood their role, and they didn’t break the law the way that Donald Trump did.

For a court that loves to talk about the importance of the text of the Constitution and the history and the tradition of this country, this is about as untethered from any of those things as you could imagine. If you could characterize this court in any way, it is a court that is entirely outcome-driven.

It has no principles. It does not rule on the grounds of any principle other than what it wants to do in a given case. And what it wants to do in a given case is, suspiciously, often correlated quite closely with the interests of the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote one of the two dissents from Monday’s ruling, she called it “atextual, ahistorical, and utterly indefensible.” And Sotomayor says in her dissent, “The court effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding.”

That’s what’s so shocking about this decision, right? The American Revolution was fought specifically to get out from under the power of a king who was unaccountable, a king who literally existed above the law.

The other way to think about the stakes of this ruling and of the impact it’s going to have is on Donald Trump himself. Look at what he did in his first term. Look at how much he disregarded the courts, Congress, all of the institutions of American government, when they didn’t go his way. He delegitimized them all.

So now think about Trump basically being unleashed by a Supreme Court that has said, it is going to be almost impossible to hold you criminally to account for anything that you’ve done. This is a man who does not see the law or the rule of law as something he respects or will follow. So now consider what it will be like if and when he retakes office and knows that nothing he does is going to come back to haunt him.

He will basically be immune in every sense for his actions. It is going to be very hard to say that almost anything a president does is not done in his official capacity. And I think, because of that, you’re going to see presidents feeling emboldened to take all kinds of steps that we didn’t think that they could ever take before.

Opinion | The Supreme Court wrote an immunity test Trump can’t help but pass

MSNBC – Opinion

The Supreme Court wrote an immunity test Trump can’t help but pass

Hayes Brown – July 2, 2024

It’s hard to see how the Supreme Court’s ruling on whether former President Donald Trump enjoys immunity from prosecution could be much worse. It’s true that the opinion in Trump v. United States doesn’t grant him the absolute immunity that he’d claimed. Instead, Chief Justice John Roberts authored a majority opinion as close as possible to finding that absolute immunity without making a complete mockery of the findings of the lower courts. In the end, the chief justice and his GOP-appointed colleagues determined that presidents are immune for “official acts” but may still be prosecuted for “unofficial acts” once they’ve left office.

With this decision, the six conservative justices left up in the air exactly what parts of the federal indictment against Trump are still constitutional. The opinion accordingly pats itself on the back for not making the determination straight away, leaving that to the lower courts to determine based on a test of the Supreme Court’s devising. But the caveats and examples that the court provides in its opinion makes it obvious that anything determined to be outside the shield it has erected around Trump will be at best a temporary setback for the former president.

In this brave new world, a president’s actions can be divided into three categories. The first are those official acts that are “conclusive and preclusive” — authorized through a power granted solely to the president under the Constitution. Such acts are now totally protected from prosecution. All other official acts, including presidential communications, are granted “presumptive immunity.” In those cases, prosecutors can still argue that executive privilege doesn’t apply but it’s up to a judge to make that call. Finally, “unofficial acts,” or those taken beyond the scope of office, don’t fall under the aegis of this newfound immunity — but exactly what counts is left undefined.

In setting this new precedent, Roberts draws heavily on the 1982 decision in Nixon v. Fitzgerald, which determined that the president enjoys immunity from civil cases even for acts that extend to the “outer perimeter” of their role. The same presumed immunity for those acts now applies to criminal cases, “so long as they are ‘not manifestly or palpably beyond [his] authority.’” With that very unhelpful guidance, Roberts has ordered the lower courts to do the work now of figuring out what exactly that entails, including whether the Trump-led pressure campaign against former Vice President Mike Pence fits the bill.

Accordingly, this ruling has wiped away entirely the assertion in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment that Trump leaned on the Justice Department to pursue false election fraud cases to bolster his efforts to overturn the election. More damaging, Smith is now blocked from even using those supposedly “official acts” as evidence to prove criminality for unofficial acts, whichever those wind up being. The overall effect is to tie prosecutors’ hands, cutting them off from one of the key factors in determining whether to bring charges against a person.

Importantly, Roberts also writes that “in dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives.” This new dictum applies even in instances of clear motive to act in their own personal interest, rather the national interest, putting such motivations beyond the reach of prosecutors. This determination also all but bars lower court judges from applying common sense to charges involving a president, as Monday’s ruling also blocks judges from deeming a president’s action unofficial “merely because it allegedly violates a generally applicable law.”

To top it all off, Roberts sanctimoniously forgoes driving the dagger into the heart of this case. After determining that criminal immunity exists for official presidential actions, he then writes that “the current stage of the proceedings in this case does not require us to decide whether this immunity is presumptive or absolute” for each of those given actions. No, those issues must be left for the future because, he writes, a single case “in more than ‘two centuries does not afford enough experience’ to definitively and comprehensively determine the President’s scope of immunity from criminal prosecution.”

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the federal case in question, is now tasked with adjudicating which of Trump’s actions are still subject to prosecution. What is left only implicit in the opinion, though, is that those decisions are subject to appeal by Trump or the prosecutors (though much more likely the former). So, too, are the decisions that the appeals court eventually makes, putting the final call right back where it started: in the hands of Roberts and his fellow conservatives.

In sum, this decision is a Roberts special, projecting neutral impartiality while thoroughly skewed toward a predetermined outcome. The supposed tests that are meant to give the veneer of wide applicability beyond Trump should instead be seen in the same light as the decision to allow him onto the ballot despite the 14th Amendment’s language preventing it: a fig leaf over a standard that applies to only one man.

Five SCOTUS Justices’ Comments on Prez Immunity Come Back to Haunt Them

Daily Beast

Five SCOTUS Justices’ Comments on Prez Immunity Come Back to Haunt Them

Owen Lavine – July 2, 2024

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

Collective amnesia seems to have struck the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, especially around the question: Is the president above the law?

Five of the six conservative justices who ruled to give the president absolute immunity for “core” presidential duties seem to have made contradictory statements during their Senate confirmation hearings.

“No man is above the law,” Neil Gorsuch told Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) during his confirmation hearing in 2017.

Gorsuch even doubled down, calling the court’s landmark 1952 decision in Youngstown v. Sawyer, which reigned in presidential authority, a “brilliant opinion.”

Similarly, Brett Kavanaugh told the Senate that “no one is above the law” during his 2018 confirmation hearing, according to CNN. Amy Coney Barrett concurred during her hearing, but like Kavanaugh, obfuscated on presidential pardons, according to The New York Times.

“That question may or may not arise, but that is one that calls for legal analysis of what the scope of the pardon power is,” Barrett told the Senate on the extent of the presidential pardon.

Kavanaugh told the Senate, “The question of self pardons is something I have never analyzed.”

In Samuel Alito’s confirmation hearing he told the senate that “no president, Democratic or Republican, no president is above the law, as neither are you, nor I, nor anyone in this room.”

Alito also praised the Youngstown ruling, adding that during Watergate it was “the responsibility of the judiciary to hold fast,” in forcing President Nixon to abide by subpoenas.

Chief Justice John Roberts concurred, citing Youngstown as binding the president to the law.

“Senator, I believe that no one is above the law under our system, and that includes the president,” he said in his 2005 confirmation hearing. “The president is fully bound by the law, the Constitution and statutes. Now, there often arise issues where there’s a conflict between the Legislature and the Executive over an exercise of Executive authority, asserted Executive authority. The framework for analyzing that is in the Youngstown Sheet and Tube case, the famous case coming out of President Truman’s seizure of the steel mills.”

Presidential pardons, Youngstown and presidential immunity were not discussed in Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing.

Justice’s dissent: ‘The president is now a king above the law’

BBC

Justice’s dissent: ‘The president is now a king above the law’

By Mike Wendling, BBC News – July 1, 2024

Three justices have issued a blistering dissent to the US Supreme Court opinion granting Donald Trump partial immunity from prosecution, warning that it will allow presidential power to be used “for evil ends”.

The 6-3 historic decision effectively strips out key parts of an indictment against the former president for allegedly conspiring to overturn his 2020 election defeat.

Six conservative-leaning justices signed the majority opinion, but the three liberals dissented, expressing “fear for our democracy”.

President Joe Biden similarly warned of a “dangerous precedent”, while one legal expert said this was not simply a case of “fear-mongering”.

Leading the liberals, Justice Sonia Sotomayor outlined hypothetical situations where the concept of immunity could apply.

“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival?” she wrote. “Immune.”

“Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

“Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

Justice Sotomayor was joined in her dissent by the court’s two other liberal justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.

Justice Jackson wrote in a separate dissent that the majority’s ruling “breaks new and dangerous ground” by “discarding” the nation’s long-held principle that no-one is above the law.

“That core principle has long prevented our Nation from devolving into despotism,” she said.

Justice Sotomayor argued that the majority had invented a notion of absolute immunity for a president performing “official acts”, even though it has at times been assumed that presidents could be prosecuted for things they did while in office.

She was visibly emotional as she spent more than 20 minutes reading out parts of her opinion on Monday.

She cited Richard Nixon getting pardoned by the president who succeeded him, Gerald Ford, for using his official powers to obstruct an investigation into the Watergate burglary – the scandal that eventually led to Mr Nixon’s resignation.

Those involved in the case were under the presumption that Mr Nixon did not have immunity and could be prosecuted after leaving office, Justice Sotomayor wrote.

Her opinion went much further back in history as well. She quoted US Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, who wrote that former presidents would be “liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law”.

But the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, argued that the dissenters “strike a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today”.

He wrote that the liberal justices were “fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals” and dismissed their legal reasoning as weak.

Normally, court dissents include the word “respectfully” but Ms Sotomayor signed off hers by writing: “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

And Ms Sotomayor’s dissent was echoed by President Biden’s campaign manager, Quentin Fulks, in a call with reporters.

“Immune, immune, immune. They just handed Donald Trump keys to a dictatorship,” Mr Fulks said.

Legal experts indicated that the scenarios laid out by the justices, as stark as they might seem, are open to further interpretation, particularly by lower courts.

Jeffrey Cohen, an associate professor at Boston College Law School, told the BBC that the opinion lacks clarity as to what counts as an official act.

“There’s language in there that suggests that official acts could bleed into unofficial acts really easily and render things presumptively immune,” he said. “It’s a problem that the court has left us all with this sinking feeling that they’re presuming almost everything is immune.”

Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said that on significant government procedure cases such as this one, the Supreme Court has usually come to a unanimous verdict, but failed to do so this time.

The decision, she said, “strongly places the thumb on the scale in favour of immunity.”

“I don’t think the dissent is being fear-mongering. At the minimum, it is unclear how a prosecution could proceed on several of the theories laid out in the majority opinion.”

Julie Novkov, the dean of Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany, said she was surprised at the broad definition of official acts.

But she noted that the decision raises complicated factual questions.

“I could imagine scenarios were we would have to get into this really careful analysis,” she added.

With reporting by Bernd Debusmann Jr at the Supreme Court and Rachel Looker in Washington

Sotomayor’s dissent: A president should not be a ‘king above the law’

Associated Press

Sotomayor’s dissent: A president should not be a ‘king above the law’

By Lindsay Whitehurst – July 1, 2024

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor attends a panel discussion, Feb. 23, 2024 in Washington. The Supreme Court allowed a president to become a “king above the law,” in the use of official power, Sotomayor said in a biting dissent Monday, July 1, that called the majority opinion on immunity for former President Donald Trump “utterly indefensible.” Joined by the court’s two other liberals, Sotomayor said the opinion would have disastrous consequences for the presidency and the nation’s democracy by creating a “law-free zone around the president.” (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)

Members of the Supreme Court sit for a group portrait in Washington, Oct. 7, 2022. Bottom row, from left, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Elena Kagan. Top row, from left, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Justice Neil Gorsuch, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. The Supreme Court justices will take the bench Monday, July 1, 2024, to release their last few opinions of the term, including their most closely watched case: whether former President Donald Trump has immunity from criminal prosecution. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)Read More

People protest outside the Supreme Court Monday, July 1, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)

The Supreme Court building is seen on June 27, 2024, in Washington. Supreme Court justices will take the bench Monday, July 1, to release their last few opinions of the term, including their most closely watched case: whether former President Donald Trump has immunity from criminal prosecution. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)

The Supreme Court opinion in former President Donald Trump’s immunity case is photographed Monday, July 1, 2024. In a historic ruling the justices said for the first time former presidents can be shielded from prosecution for at least some of what they do in the Oval Office. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Chesapeake, Va., Friday, June 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

WASHINGTON (AP) — In an unsparing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the Supreme Court allowed a president to become a “king above the law” in its ruling that limited the scope of criminal charges against former President Donald Trump for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol and efforts to overturn the election.

She called the decision, which likely ended the prospect of a trial for Trump before the November election, “utterly indefensible.”

“The court effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding,” she wrote. She was joined by liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who wrote another dissent referring to the ruling’s consequences as a “five alarm fire.”

Sotomayor read her dissent aloud in the courtroom, with a weighty delivery that underscored her criticism of the majority. She strongly pronounced each word, pausing at certain moments and gritting her teeth at others.

“Ironic isn’t it? The man in charge of enforcing laws can now just break them,” Sotomayor said.

Chief Justice John Roberts accused the liberal justices of fearmongering in the 6-3 majority opinion. It found that presidents aren’t above the law but must be entitled to presumptive immunity to allow them to forcefully exercise the office’s far-reaching powers and avoid a vicious cycle of politically motivated prosecutions.

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While the opinion allows for the possibility of prosecutions for private acts, Sotomayor said it “deprives these prosecutions of any teeth” by excluding any evidence that related to official acts where the president is immune.

“This majority’s project will have disastrous consequences for the presidency and for our democracy,” she said. She ended by saying, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

Trump, for his part, has denied doing anything wrong and has said this prosecution and three others are politically motivated to try to keep him from returning to the White House.

The other justices looked on in silence and largely remained still as Sotomayor spoke, with Justice Samuel Alito shuffling through papers and appearing to study them.

Sotomayor pointed to historical evidence, from the founding fathers to Watergate, that presidents could potentially face prosecution. She took a jab at the conservative majority that has made the nation’s history a guiding principle on issues like guns and abortion. “Interesting, history matters, right?”

Then she looked at the courtroom audience and concluded, “Except here.”

The majority feared that the threat of potential prosecution could constrain a president or create a “cycle of factional strife,” that the founders intended to avoid.

Sotomayor, on the other handed, pointed out that presidents have access to extensive legal advice about their actions and that criminal cases typically face high bars in court to proceed.

“It is a far greater danger if the president feels empowered to violate federal criminal law, buoyed by the knowledge of future immunity,” she said. “I am deeply troubled by the idea … that our nation loses something valuable when the president is forced to operate within the confines of federal criminal law.”

Associated Press writer Stephen Groves contributed to this story.

Lindsay Whitehurst is a national criminal justice reporter for The Associated Press, based in Washington, D.C. She covers the Justice Department, public safety and legal issues.

Liberal justices say Trump immunity decision ‘will have disastrous consequences’ for the U.S.

NBC News

Liberal justices say Trump immunity decision ‘will have disastrous consequences’ for the U.S.

The Supreme Court ruled that the former president has some immunity from prosecution in his federal election interference case, further delaying the trial.

Rebecca Shabad – July 1, 2024

Sonia Sotomayor speaks during a forum — Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority had invented an “unjustifiable” immunity that puts a president above the law. Jahi Chikwendiu / The Washington Post via Getty Images

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s liberal bloc issued blistering dissents Monday in the Trump immunity ruling, arguing that it “reshapes the institution of the presidency” and “makes a mockery” of the constitutional principle that no man is above the law.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reading her dissent from the bench, said that “relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom … the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more.”

She added that “because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.”

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on ideological lines that former President Donald Trump has immunity for some of his conduct as president but not unofficial acts in the federal election interference case. The court did not determine what constitutes an “official” act in this case, leaving that to the lower court.

The decision adds another hurdle and further delay to special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of the former president. Trump was indicted last year on charges he conspired to “overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election.”

Sotomayor said that the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, invents “an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law.”

Their ruling, she went on, makes three moves that she said “completely insulate Presidents from criminal liability.” Sotomayor said the court creates absolute immunity for the president’s exercise of “core constitutional powers,” creates “expansive immunity for all ‘official acts,'” and “declares that evidence concerning acts for which the President is immune can play no role in any criminal prosecution against him.”

Sotomayor warned that the ruling “will have disastrous consequences for the Presidency and for our democracy” and that it sends the message: “Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends.”

She added, “Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

In her own written dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said that the majority’s ruling “breaks new and dangerous ground.”

“Departing from the traditional model of individual accountability, the majority has concocted something entirely different: a Presidential accountability model that creates immunity—an exemption from criminal law — applicable only to the most powerful official in our Government,” she wrote.

Jackson warned that under the majority’s “new Presidential accountability mode,” a hypothetical president “who admits to having ordered the assassinations of his political rivals or critics…or one who indisputably instigates an unsuccessful coup…has a fair shot at getting immunity.”

The chief justice dismissed the dissents, suggesting that his three liberal colleagues had misinterpreted the majority’s opinion and were engaging in “fear mongering.” Roberts argued that they “strike a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today.” He wrote that “like everyone else, the President is subject to prosecution in his unofficial capacity.”

He also appeared to scoff at Sotomayor for what she included in her dissent, saying that her “most compelling piece of evidence consists of excerpted statements of Charles Pinckney from an 1800 Senate debate.” He continued, “But those statements reflect only the now-discredited argument that any immunity not expressly mentioned in the Constitution must not exist.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in a concurring opinion that she agreed with some of the majority opinion but not all of it. Notably, she said she agreed with Sotomayor that Trump’s immune conduct should still be allowed to be used as evidence in his trial.

“The Constitution does not require blinding juries to the circumstances surrounding conduct for which Presidents can be held liable,” she said.

Soon after the court issued the ruling, Trump celebrated the decision on his Truth Social account, writing in all caps: “Big win for our Constitution and democracy. Proud to be an American!”

A Biden campaign adviser, on the other hand, said that the ruling doesn’t change what happened on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Donald Trump snapped after he lost the 2020 election and encouraged a mob to overthrow the results of a free and fair election,” the adviser said. “Trump is already running for president as a convicted felon for the very same reason he sat idly by while the mob violently attacked the Capitol: he thinks he’s above the law and is willing to do anything to gain and hold onto power for himself.”

A John Wayne flop has been linked to high cancer rates. A new documentary aims to tell the community’s story.

The Hill

A John Wayne flop has been linked to high cancer rates. A new documentary aims to tell the community’s story.

Zack Budryk – June 30, 2024

The 1956 movie “The Conqueror” is infamous among cinephiles, both for its casting of John Wayne as the Mongolian warlord Genghis Khan and for a suspicious number of deaths that followed its filming downwind of a nuclear test site. Nearly 70 years later, the makers of the documentary “The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout” hope to tell the story of the affected “downwinder” community in St. George, Utah, near where the film shot as their federal compensation for radiation exposure is on the line.

At the time “The Conqueror” filmed in the Utah desert just outside the town, St. George was 137 miles downwind from the Nevada Test Site, where the federal government conducted more than 900 nuclear tests.

The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) for years insisted to locals there was no danger, and when ranchers’ sheep began mysteriously dying, the federal government blamed it on the ranchers’ negligence.

But after the movie was shot, observers noted the high rate of cancer among people involved with the filming: 91 of 220 crew members developed the illness, and 46 died. Director Dick Powell and stars Wayne, Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorehead all eventually died of cancer as well, while Pedro Armendáriz Sr., an accomplished Mexican actor and the only nonwhite member of the film’s main cast, died by suicide when his cancer became terminal.

Local Paiute Native Americans were used as extras for crowd and battle scenes, but no records were kept of cancer rates among them.

“The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout” director Will Nunez said at a panel discussion Wednesday that he had the idea for the documentary in 2020 during COVID-19 lockdowns, and that at the time, he was only aware of the movie’s infamy and the alleged cancer connection.

“What started as a lark about this terrible movie became something else as I was researching about atomic testing and all that, and my goal was to see how I can try and do this in the most entertaining way possible so that a general audience can understand what had happened,” he said.

He noted that many of the most absurd features of the 1956 movie — such as flowery, pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue written with Marlon Brando in mind that sounds extra ridiculous in the mouth of the Duke — added some levity to what could otherwise be a straightforwardly depressing story.

The movie notes that eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, who produced “The Conqueror,” may have exacerbated radiation exposure during filming by having 60 tons of the irradiated desert sands delivered to the RKO Pictures soundstage in Hollywood to film interior scenes.

Epidemiologists have warned of the difficulty of definitively identifying a single cause for one cancer. Wayne himself was skeptical of a connection between the filming and the disease striking the cast and crew, noting late in life that he, Powell and Armendáriz were heavy smokers.

But Hayward and Powell both died in their 50s — a notably young age to develop cancer — and, as the documentary makes clear, the residents of St. George who developed cancer during the same period included young children.

Hughes would later say he felt “guilty as hell” about the production of the movie, and as he became increasingly reclusive, he bought every print of it and watched it on a loop in his hotel suite.

Ultimately, questions surrounding Wayne’s death that first surfaced in People magazine led Utahns to begin investigating a potential connection to their medical histories. The declassification of internal AEC documents followed, and strenuous lobbying by downwinders won former Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) to their cause, culminating in the 1990 passage of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which recently expired.

The documentary incorporates a variety of perspectives on the movie and its legacy, from Wayne’s and Hayward’s sons to conservative talk radio host Michael Medved, who began his career as a film critic specializing in “so bad they’re good” movies. Its most emotional voices, however, are those of downwinders themselves, many of whom remember the movie production coming to town and continue their lobbying over the radiation to which it helped draw attention to this day.

In the film, Mary Dickson, a downwinder activist and thyroid cancer survivor, notes that the effects of the nuclear testing fallout were not considered an emergency until the Defense Department began to worry that they may have, as an internal document put it, “killed John Wayne.”

RECA was reauthorized in 2022, but its authorization formally expired earlier this year after lawmakers failed to agree on a further extension. A bipartisan bill sponsored by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), which would reauthorize the law and expand it beyond the 20 counties covered, as well as to children of downwinders, passed the Senate with 69 votes in March. However, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has declined to bring it to the House floor thus far, citing concerns about cost and whether it has the votes to pass in the GOP-controlled chamber.

Nunez’s documentary comes weeks after the authorization for RECA officially expired. Almost exactly a year ago, sponsors of the expansion bill hoped to take advantage of the buzz surrounding “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s biopic of the physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb. Nunez told The Hill he hopes his movie, while much smaller, can similarly help drive conversation about downwinders’ plight.

“What I’m hoping is, now that RECA’s expired and the downwinders want to expand it to beyond the 20 counties, that this movie will help spread the word,” Nunez said.

Ultimately, however, he credited the dedication of affected locals for both the original law and for any breakthrough on reauthorization.

Nunez compared the downwinder community to the locals in Love Canal, N.Y., who pushed for a federal cleanup after the neighborhood became the site of an environmental disaster in the 1970s.

“If you notice, it’s all the women that raise hell,” he said.