Special counsel Jack Smith urged the Supreme Court on Monday to reject Donald Trump’s claims of sweeping immunity and to deny the former president any opportunity to delay a trial on charges that he attempted to subvert the results of the 2020 election.
Trump’s position, Smith told the court, has no grounding in the Constitution, the nation’s history or Americans’ understanding that presidents are not above the law.
“The Framers never endorsed criminal immunity for a former President, and all Presidents from the Founding to the modern era have known that after leaving office they faced potential criminal liability for official acts,” Smith told the court.
Smith’s filing landed in what has emerged as the most closely watched case of the Supreme Court’s current term. A broad ruling for Trump could undermine not only the special counsel’s election subversion case, but a litany of other criminal charges pending against him.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments April 25, and a decision is expected by July. Trump’s written reply to Smith is due next week.
Trump filed his own initial written arguments last month, claiming that future presidents would be vulnerable to “de facto blackmail and extortion while in office” if the court denied him immunity. Past presidents, he said, could have been charged for all sorts of controversial actions they took in office.
Smith pushed back on that argument in his latest brief.
“The effective functioning of the presidency does not require that a former president be immune from accountability for these alleged violations of federal criminal law,” Smith wrote Monday. “To the contrary, a bedrock principle of our constitutional order is that no person is above the law – including the president.”
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