This is the brief opening statement by John Sauer, attorney for criminal defendant/movant Donald Trump,setting the stage for moving the court to create a new doctrine that would protect the criminal ex-president from prosecution for any of the many crimes he committed while in office.
I have rebutted each of his asinine talking points.
Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court, without presidential immunity from criminal prosecution there can be no presidency as we know it.
This statement is a lie. It is also called rhetoric or puffery, part of the lawyer’s art of persuasion. At bottom it is plainly false. Asserting that a right that never existed has always been essential is a cynical and ballsy opening move. Claiming that a president’s preemptive and eternal immunity from accountability for criminal behavior is a precondition for preserving a centuries’ old institution is as perverse and audacious a lie as can be told.
For 234 years of American history no president was ever prosecuted for his official act.
That is because for 234 years, no American president, with the exception of Richard Nixon, was ever in danger of being prosecuted for any act, official or otherwise, committed while in office. All were constrained by law and the fear of punishment after leaving office. Trump was the first lawless, recklessly criminally inclined president in 234 years.
He insists now on his right to be an untouchable mob boss. And as for Richard Nixon, he accepted a pardon to shield himself from prosecution, even knowing as a lawyer that he was accepting the equivalent of a guilty plea in exchange for the pardon. Even though Nixon never accepted responsibility for his criminal activity in the White House, he knew the law, his criminal exposure and likelihood of conviction and took the necessary steps to protect himself. No previous president risked committing outright crimes because they knew they would be prosecuted for them, particularly by their political adversaries, once they were private citizens again. In Trump’s twisted little mind Nixon’s only crime was that his balls weren’t big enough to get away with whatever he wanted to do. If the president believes it’s right, it cannot be a crime. Dershowitz belched up that old Nazi chestnut one of the times they impeached Trump.
The framers of our constitution viewed an energetic executive as essential to securing liberty.
The framers of our constitution viewed the American chief executive as the opposite of a Divine Right right king, the unaccountable tyrant they had overthrown to form the new nation, the world’s first democracy. The crucial requirement for a democratic leader is being accountable to the constitution and the laws of the land. That would’ve been understood among the framers of our constitution as nonnegotiable. Nobody can make a coherent argument against that self-evident proposition, dig up fucking Antonin Scalia and he’d say the same.
If a president can be charged, put on trial and imprisoned for his most controversial decisions as soon as he leaves office, that looming threat will distort the president’s decision making precisely when bold and fearless action is most needed.
There is no threat whatsoever to any president other than the single one, Trump, the man making the argument before the Supreme Court. Only Trump openly employed criminal means to achieve illegal ends– in this case overruling the will of 81,000,000 Americans, and a robust Electoral College majority, to overturn their constitutional choice for president. It was bold and fearless of Trump to spend $50 million promoting the lie that the election had been stolen from him. The Big Lie he vigorously promoted he knew very well was a lie, he had been informed numerous times that it was a lie, he didn’t care.
It was bold and fearless of Trump to urge a mob of angry followers that he had stirred to violence, a mob directed from a war room manned by Bannon, Kerik, Giuliani, Eastman et al, coordinated with Roger Stone, Mike Q-Anon Flynn and the Proud Boys, among others, a mob it turns out Trump knew was armed, and sent to the Capitol to violently stop the certification of his electoral loss. These things are all indictable and very serious criminal offenses, part of an octopus armed conspiracy to violate the law and the constitution to overthrow the rule of democracy. They are bold and fearless crimes no sane president would dare contemplate.
Every current president will face de facto blackmail and extortion by his political rivals while he is still in office.
Also simply a lie. Additionally, Trump is the only kind of politician who routinely blackmails and extorts his political rivals.
The implications of the court’s decision here extend far beyond the facts of this case.
They will extend far into the future, and harmfully influence it. But as for the present and the past, they extend only to the facts of this case. The Nixon case is moot now. The only other case that is comparable to the hypotheticals in this case are the exact facts of the Trump case the prissy Nazis on the court are all dancing around daintily. To my chagrin, from the extended excerpts I heard, what I heard my most trusted legal pundits talking about, even the non-Nazi justices did not directly and thoroughly address the stinking 50,000 pound orange turd in the room. For some reason the underlying facts of the case that brought the controversy to the Supreme Court were barely alluded to in all the academic “hypotheticals”.
Could president George W. Bush have been sent to prison for instructing an official proceeding or allegedly lying to Congress to induce war in Iraq? Could president Obama be charged with murder for killing US citizens abroad in a drone strike? Could president Biden someday be charged with unlawfully inducing Come on immigrants to enter the country illegally for his border policies?
This Biden query, ostensibly added in fairness to the current president, is a particularly nauseating and gratuitous bit of Koch network “fuck you, Biden.” The other cases pose legitimate questions for democracy and both should’ve been investigated as criminal acts, or at least challenged as things future presidents would be on notice were out of bounds for presidents to do.
The answer to all these questions is no.
Wrong answer, moron.
Prosecuting the president for his official acts is an innovation with no foothold in history or tradition and incompatible with our constitutional structure.
False and false.
The original meaning of the executive vesting clause, the framers understanding and intent and unbroken historical tradition, spanning 200 years and policy considerations rooted in the separation of powers, all counsel against it.
They all counsel strongly for holding a criminal president to account, counselor.
I welcome the court’s questions.
We have no questions for you, nor will we hold your bald-faced lying against you, you’re one of us. We will give you everything you ask for because we’re all on the same team, buddy. And you have to love a man with balls as big as yours going for broke, brazenly doubling down on transparent lies and sweating it out to be a real bare-knuckle brawl winner like our indomitable sponsor Mr. Koch!