Supreme Court ruling could force Trump to backtrack on key attack line: legal expert

The Supreme Court's presidential immunity ruling could force Donald Trump to backtrack on one of his most controversial campaign talking points, a legal expert says.

The ruling has thrown a wrench in the works of Trump's promised $100 million lawsuit against the Justice Department, which can now only succeed if he contradicts one of his most prevalent "lawfare" claims, former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said Tuesday.

"You gotta love the Trump inconsistency here," Weissmann wrote on X.

Weissmann's analysis relies upon the comparison of three legal cases involving Trump: the Justice Department lawsuit, the recently dismissed classified documents case and the ongoing election interference case in Washington D.C.

In the lawsuit, Trump claims the Mar-a-Lago search in August 2022 — which found classified documents stored haphazardly in toppling boxes and showers — hurt Trump's reputation.

ABC News characterizes the Republican nominee's lawsuit as "an attempt to keep alive the narrative that the former president has been persecuted by a biased Biden administration."

It arrives a month after the Supreme Court ruled that Trump enjoyed limited immunitywhen the then-president pressured the Justice Department to investigate election results on baseless claims of voter fraud in 2020.

"Because the President cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority," the majority ruling states, "Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials."

Herein lies the rub, according to Weissmann.

"Trump prevailed in SCOTUS on his claim that a president is immune from prosecution decisions," Weissmann writes. "And he has claimed that President Biden was behind the MAL prosecution, yet he now says he is suing the [government] for the harm from that prosecution.

"To avoid ramifications of the new SCOTUS immunity decision, Trump now will have to say that Biden was not behind the prosecution at all."