Former President Donald Trump does not have presidential immunity from prosecution on criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, a federal appeals court unanimously ruled Tuesday.
“We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter,” a three-judge panel wrote in the 57-page opinion.
Trump is expected to quickly ask the Supreme Court to overturn the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The legal battle over Trump’s immunity claim stems from the criminal election interference case being prosecuted by special counsel Jack Smith in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
Trump is charged in the case with four counts of crimes including conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. He has pleaded not guilty.
In its ruling, the appeals panel rejected three separate immunity arguments Trump’s lawyers made “both as a categorical defense to federal criminal prosecutions of former Presidents and as applied to this case in particular.”
“For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant,” the panel wrote.
“But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.”
The ruling by Judges Florence Pan, Michelle Childs and Karen LeCraft Henderson noted, “We have balanced former President Trump’s asserted interests in executive immunity against the vital public interests that favor allowing this prosecution to proceed.”
“We conclude that ‘[concerns] of public policy, especially as illuminated by our history and the structure of our government’ compel the rejection of his claim of immunity in this case.”
While the ruling mostly struck a measured, dispassionate tone, the judges at times sounded alarmed as they warned that Trump’s view of…
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