Former President Trump’s legal team suggested Tuesday that even a president directing SEAL Team Six to kill a political opponent would be an action barred from prosecution given a former executive’s broad immunity to criminal prosecution.
The hypothetical was presented to Trump attorney John Sauer who answered with a “qualified yes” that a former president would be immune from prosecution on that matter or even on selling pardons.
Well, he was still President when he stole the documents - that’s how he got them.
Most of the charges kinda fall apart of it’s determined that Presidents have absolute immunity from prosecution for anything they do in office. It would make his possession of the documents legal.
But the judges yesterday were clearly annoyed that those arguments were being made in the first place. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them censure Trump’s attorneys after all this is done.
theft vs possession
I doubt that you could get the argument that current possession of the documents is legal just because having them in the past was legal. A surgeon who possesses cocaine at his house is still going to be in trouble, despite cocaine being legal to have at the surgery table (it’s a great tool for eye surgery).
Add on to that the fact that the national archives is the proper owner of the presidential documents once the president is out of office, and that trump lied about having them, lied about returning all of them, etc. etc. etc., and you have crimes that are not related to the actual theft of the documents, but their possession, which are all valid.
But if his theft of the documents was legal, then what’s to say he didn’t secretly declassify the documents without filing the correct paperwork, which, as President, he was legally allowed to do?
If the Courts rule he was above the law, it gets screwy.
But that’s all academic, because there’s no way the Court is going to rule that Presidents have blanket immunity from prosecution if they aren’t removed from office by a Senate conviction. There’s literally nothing in the Constitution remotely suggesting that. In fact, it specifically says that criminal conviction is an entirely separate process from political impeachment, and that an officer can be charged criminally separately from an impeachment.
The argument is so absurd his lawyers should be censured for bringing it to the court.