Justice Alito Presses Jack Smith's Team on Trump Presidential Immunity Claim

Special counsel Jack Smith's office does NOT think that former American presidents should "enjoy some level of immunity that endures past the term of office."

Justice Samuel Alito isn't so sure about that.

In what could be a HUGE win for Donald Trump, America's Supreme Court seems ready to sympathize with our former president's argument that at least a some degree of presidential immunity extends past the president's time in office.

Lawyer Michael Dreeben of Smith's team claimed, "a former president does not have any form of immunity."

Dreeben and Smith's team that he represents are arguing against Trump's claim that he is immune from prosecution on charges of attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

As you may remember, in the days following the 2020 election, Trump and many of his fans refused to accept what we were being told the results of the polls were.

For quite a while, Donald Trump insisted that the election was "rigged," and enough of his supporters agreed that on Jan. 6, 2021, the country saw serious unrest at the Capitol on a day that many describe as one of the darkest in the history of this country.

Sure, Trump was probably wrong to say the election was rigged just because he lost, but there's no law against being wrong.

In fact, we have at least one law that protects American's right to be wrong, and it's called the First Amendment.

Alito was skeptical that Smith's people were trying to use semantics to deny Trump as much as possible:

All right. So this is more, I think, than just a quarrel about terminology, whether what the former president gets is some form of immunity or some form of special protection because it involves this difference, which I’m sure you’re very well aware of.

If it’s just a form of special protection, in other words, statutes will be interpreted differently as applied to a former president, then that is something that has to be litigated at trial. The former president can make a motion to dismiss and may cite OLC opinions, and the district court may say: Well, that’s fine, I’m not bound by OLC and I interpret it differently, so let’s go to trial.

And then there has to be a trial, the former president may be unable to engage in other activities that the former president would want to engage in. And then the outcome is dependent on the jury, the instructions to the jury and how the jury returns a verdict, and then it has to be taken up on appeal.

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