So I’m watching some news on the MSNBC channel on YouTube on my smart tv and see a bit by Brian Tyler Cohen who is now apparently what amounts to an MSNBC ‘stringer’ reporter.
The issue?
Former president Donald Trump speaking on camera about why he is promoting the theory of “universal presidential immunity”, basically for any criminal acts while president regardless of their category (either official presidential duties or not).
Transcript not available, so I’m doing it here:
Donald John Trump,
“If a president of the United States does not have immunity, he’ll be totally ineffective ‘cause he won’t be able to do anything, because it will mean he’ll be prosecuted. Strongly prosecuted perhaps, as soon as he leaves Office, by his, by the opposing Party. So a president of the United States, I’m not talking just me, I’m talking any president, has to have immunity.”
Fact:
Of the 44 US Presidents before Donald John Trump how many former US presidents have been prosecuted for criminal acts while they are the sitting president?
ZERO
From the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute URL:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/indictment_of_presidents
A president or former president has never been charged with a crime before, which means that no court has been given the opportunity to rule on the topic. However, there have been a couple of close encounters. President Ulysses S. Grant is the only president ever brought into custody, but his arrest was over a speeding charge which resulted in release and a fine. President Richard Nixon’s likely indictment led his successor President Gerald Ford to pardon him. President Bill Clinton escaped indictment after negotiation with special counsel over false testimony given in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. However, no President has ever received an indictment. The closest the Supreme Court has come to addressing the issue was, in requiring President Nixon abide by a subpoena, stating that “neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high-level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances” (See United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683, 706 (1974). However, circumstances have rarely given rise to the opportunity for elaboration.
There has never, ever, been a such a person. Until 2023, and that person IS Donald John Trump. That final sentence is a quite lawyerly way of saying, “we ain’t never had such a criminal as president before, so we don’t have any precedent to look to”.
His premise that every single president will be prosecuted after they leave the Office is only his personal experience, to date; for the entire class of Americans who can or could have list[ed] “former president of the United States” on their curriculum vitae.
That he would espouse such an anti-American idea out loud, knowing it was being recorded and shared with the entire nation is rather obtuse, when you think about it.
How fucking obliviously stupid does he really think all of us are?
That we should expect not that presidents will face Congressional Impeachments from time to time, but that every single person who takes the Presidential Oath of Office to “faithfully execute the Office” and “will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” will be met at the beginning of their first day, post-presidency, with a criminal prosecution based on spurious political claims?
When no one in over two and a half centuries of the Republic existing, has ever faced such a situation until the year 2023 — when the nation was faced with a former POTUS who has been so publicly criminal that he now faces 3 separate criminal trials over his behaviors and actions while president, and a civil trial which addresses his actions both before and during his presidency regarding his family real estate business.
If that is the basis for his claim of presidential immunity, the US Supreme Court must rule against him. They have to.
It is baseless. The Constitution does not include language which supports the claim, and if the founders had meant a POTUS to have universal immunity for all actions while in Office, they would have said so. What they did include was a very easy way to remove a President the Congress had evidence of wrongdoing by, via impeachment, which was written right into:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleii#section4
Article II — The Presidency Section 4 — Impeachment
Who among us can read that article and section it is written into and NOT think that the reason for that is THAT is the way for Congress to deal with a president who has acted badly or even criminally.
That it would be up to the Courts and likely the Supreme Court to criminally charge that president, either while in Office (by way of the 25th Amendment, Section III & IV) or after they leave the Office.
There is absolutely no way in hell that the people who revolted against a corrupt Monarch and his corrupted Parliament and created their own, independent nation; meant for their elected executive leader in the form of a President to be thought or adjudged immune from his behavior while in the Office. Especially if that behavior appears to be criminal in nature.
That would have been bleeding and dying to create a King by another name; and George Washington wisely disabused them of that idea at the time, agreeing only to accept the Office of President and not a crown and scepter.