'Constitutionally ineligible': Legal expert says Trump 'spitting on our sacred documents'

01 March 2024

A prominent legal expert recently accused former President Donald Trump's lawyers of making circular and self-contradictory arguments all in the service of shielding Trump from accountability.

During a Friday night segment on MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes, former US principal deputy solicitor general Neal Katyal — who helped argue cases on behalf of the Obama administration before the Supreme Court — laid out how none of Trump's arguments against being prosecuted make "any sense" when analyzed in full context.

"The common theme across all these cases... and indeed all of Trump's behavior, both before he was president, during his presidency, and after, is he's above the law," Katyal said.

Katyal reminded viewers about how Trump said during Robert Mueller's investigation that he couldn't be indicted as a sitting president and that investigators had to wait until he left office. After getting voted out of the White House in 2020, Trump continued to maintain in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection that his position as president prevented him from being arrested and charged with crimes.

Then, Katyal pointed out that after he became the first president to be impeached for a second time, both Trump and his defenders in Congress said an impeachment trial conviction was inappropriate, and that the US justice system was more than capable of holding him accountable in court. But after Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump for multiple felonies relating to January 6 and his alleged mishandling of classified documents, Trump cried foul and said that the DOJ shouldn't be able to indict him because he wasn't convicted in an impeachment trial.

"I mean, none of this adds up in any sense to anything that is anything but Soviet, and it's certainly not the American Constitution," Katyal said. "Forget about whether or not he did it or not, just these claims he's making make him Constitutionally ineligible to be president. He's spitting on our sacred documents."

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear Trump's argument for absolute broad presidential immunity, despite a scathing ruling from a DC Circuit Court of Appeals panel agreeing that Trump was not immune from criminal prosecution. Oral arguments are scheduled for April 22, though the Court may not issue a final ruling until its term ends in late June.

Watch Katyal's segment below, or by clicking this link.

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