Former President Donald Trump is unlikely to prevail before the Supreme Court in his bid to be declared immune from prosecution in the 2020 election interference case, argued former prosecutor and legal expert Andrew Weissmann on MSNBC Wednesday evening.
And the reason we know this, he said, is that courts already ruled against Trump on a very similar issue.
"It's clear that the reason they're doing that is that he's hoping to drag this out, become president and order his Justice Department to just throw the whole case out," said anchor Joy Reid. "We can see through what he's doing. The other argument that was in this briefing from the Trump side, which I found extraordinary, was that he's still making this fundamental argument that everything he did on January 6th and leading up to it was part of his job as president, and he cites, could George W. Bush be indicted for lying about the Iraq War? Like he's trying to essentially say, I'm just like every other president. But what he was doing was not even waging war. Which we can disagree with president's waging war. He was trying to stay president. Like, how is that your duties?"
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"Yeah, I mean, absolutely," agreed Weissmann. "And the D.C. Circuit, in a civil case, decided just a couple weeks ago, said not everything that you do while you're president is part of your presidential functions. When you are running for office, when you are seeking to become president again, that is not a presidential duty. So, if you are committing crimes as part of your campaign to stay in office, that is not something within the function of the office of the White House."
That court case, Weissmann continued, "bodes very well for Jack Smith, and not so good, obviously, for Donald Trump."
"You know, all of this I have to say is — you're probably looking at me going, doesn't this make a lot of common sense? And it's all dressed up in legal language," added Weissmann. "The answer to that is right, you know, it really cannot be the case that just because you're President of the United States, that you can kill somebody or you can just decide to — could you imagine what this would mean? Can you really have a second term where the president who was told, by the way, you have absolute immunity to commit crimes in office. Just cannot be the case."
Watch the video below or at the link.
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