US presidents cannot be prosecuted for selling pardons or assassinating political rivals through SEAL Team Six, personal Trump lawyer John Sauer argued Tuesday
Advancing a sweeping interpretation of executive immunity, Donald Trump’s attorney told a federal appeals court on Tuesday that U.S. presidents could not be prosecuted for selling pardons or assassinating political rivals through SEAL Team Six.
Trump’s lead attorney D. John Sauer argued that only a president who has been impeached and removed from office in a Senate trial potentially would be subject to prosecution for those kinds of alleged crimes.
A three-judge panel appeared extremely skeptical of Trump’s vision of absolute immunity, sharply questioning and interrupting Sauer during the opening minutes of the oral arguments with the former president himself sitting nearby.
“Could a president order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival? That’s an official act–an order to Seal Team Six,” U.S. Circuit Judge Florence Pan asked Sauer.
“He would have to be, and would speedily be, you know, impeached and convicted before the criminal prosecution,” Sauer replied, setting a pre-condition for such prosecution in Pan’s hypothetical.
What the lawyer seems to have actually said is that to prosecute the president, you first have to impeach him and remove him from office. Maybe also crazy, but still not the same as saying prosecution is impossible.
I know that’s what he said, but is that actually written down anywhere that that’s actually the case? Seems to me, if it was actually the case, there shouldn’t be this much hand-wringing.
OK so what happens when the president assassinates the entire Senate.
Yes the logical conclusion here is definitely a violent autocracy and to pretend otherwise is a lack of imagination.
Heh yeah, that does complicate impeachment. Nixon still famously said “if the president does it, it is not illegal”. We didn’t give out because he got pardoned.
I haven’t read this yet but it looks interesting:
https://theconversation.com/trumps-arguments-for-immunity-not-as-hopeless-as-some-claim-220580
