Donald Trump’s request to have election conspiracy charges dropped on the basis that he is entitled to immunity for action he took while in the White House was denied by federal prosecutors on Thursday (Oct. 19, 2023).
In a 54-page motion submitted to the judge overseeing the historic case, special counsel Jack Smith’s team stated, “No one in this country, not even the president, is above the law.”
Leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, Trump, is scheduled to go on trial in Washington in March of the following year on charges of plotting to tamper with the results of the November 2020 election, which Democrat Joe Biden won.
Two weeks ago, the former president’s attorneys moved US District Judge Tanya Chutkan to dismiss the allegations on the grounds that Trump is “absolutely immune from criminal prosecution.”
Prosecutors in the special counsel’s office dismissed that argument and urged Chutkan to deny Trump’s request.
“He is subject to the federal criminal laws like more than 330 million other Americans,” they said. “No court has ever alluded to the existence of absolute criminal immunity for former presidents. “The implications of the defendant’s unbounded immunity theory are startling,” they added.
“It would grant absolute immunity from criminal prosecution to a president who accepts a bribe in exchange for a lucrative government contract for a family member,” they said, or “a president who sells nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary.”
Legal commentators view Trump’s attempt to assert the presidential immunity defense as a long shot, but if the case makes its way to the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, it may cause a delay in the commencement of the trial.
Judges have rejected Trump’s attempts to invoke the “absolute immunity” defense in other cases, but the country’s highest court has never explicitly addressed the question of whether a former chief leader is shielded from prosecution.
The first former US president to be charged with a crime is Trump.
Trump’s attorneys conceded that the Nixon case they cited dealt with the civil liabilities of a former president rather than any alleged criminal activity, even as they argued that Trump cannot be charged. “The question remains a ‘serious and unsettled question’ of law,” they stated.
Chutkan is considering a lawsuit accusing Trump of conspiring to defraud the United States and to hinder an official action, namely the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, which was disrupted by a group of Trump supporters.
A trial in Florida scheduled for May 2024 is one of the criminal proceedings involving Trump. The other cases involve charges of mishandling top secret government information and racketeering in Georgia stemming from an alleged conspiracy to rig the election results in the southern state.
Trump and his two oldest sons are accused of misrepresenting the worth of their real estate holdings in order to obtain better terms on bank loans and insurance policies. They are currently facing charges of civil fraud in New York.
Ref: AFP
