Supreme Court gave this 'dangerous tool' to a president bent on 'revenge': analysis

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Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump attends a press conference at Trump National Golf Club, in Rancho Palos Verdes, U.S., September 13, 2024. REUTERS/David Swanson/File Photo

Former Acting Assistant AG Mary McCord and former FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann said Chief Justice John Roberts appeared wary of a president being “free to prosecute his predecessors” when he helped extend absolute immunity to the president. But in the year since, rather than preventing the weaponization of prosecutions, “the court has unleashed it.”

“Trump’s direction of the prosecutions of his perceived enemies — notably James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general — has illustrated the folly of Chief Justice Roberts’s rationale,” they said. “Between the court’s dissolving potential liability for bogus fraud investigations and Mr. Trump’s neutering of executive branch rules governing the independence of the Justice Department, the court has seemingly left the president free to target anyone he wishes.”

During their tenure, McCord and Weissmann argue that “there were internal rules limiting the White House from communicating with department prosecutors about whom to investigate and prosecute criminally.” When Loretta Lynch, who was overseeing an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account and server, bumped into Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac in 2016, it caused an uproar among Republicans who now sit by as Trump openly calls for the prosecution of his perceived enemies and forces out his own appointed prosecutor “for standing in the way.”

“The Supreme Court’s immunity decision enabled [Trump’s] boldness on two fronts,” they said. “It perversely helped to legitimize the idea … that as president he can do pretty much anything he wants — even try to overturn the results of a free and fair election. It also signaled that the president need not fear criminal liability for charging a political enemy with a crime, even where the facts and law do not support it, in violation of that person’s constitutional rights.”

The Roberts court argued that “an astonishingly vast scope of immunity for all but purely unofficial acts” was necessary to avoid enfeebling presidents. But the court “brushed aside that for nearly all of our history, presidents have assumed themselves bound by criminal laws” and it gave “a dangerous tool to a president who clearly does not care about the evenhanded administration of justice.”

“By granting presidents absolute immunity to order the attorney general to do essentially anything, the court seemingly would permit Mr. Trump to go further than he has already, and command even a groundless case against former President Joe Biden — precisely the tit-for-tat factionalism that the majority decried,” they said. “Whatever the result in the Comey and James cases, the Supreme Court has ensured that Mr. Trump has no fear of being held accountable for dictating investigations and grand jury proceedings that carry an odor of retribution.”

Read the New York Times report at this link.

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