Trump immunity decision
By 6-3, Trump has absolute immunity for all his actions under his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority, and presumptive immunity for all his official acts.
TL;DR: No 1/6 trial before November, because it will take quite a bit of pre-trial proceedings to sort all this out.
Well done Merrick.
Whether the Tweets, that speech, and Trump’s other communications on January 6 involve official conduct may depend on the content and context of each. Knowing, for instance, what else was said contemporaneous to the excerpted communications, or who was involved in transmitting the electronic communications and in organizing the rally, could be relevant to the classification of each communication. This necessarily factbound analysis is best performed initially by the District Court. We therefore remand to the District Court to determine in the first instance whether this alleged conduct is official or unofficial.
Trump wins in the same way that he’s always won in court, which is by delaying judgment. Until the Day of Judgment.
. . . Yikes:
“On remand, the District Court must carefully analyze the indictment’s remaining allegations to determine whether they too involve conduct for which a President must be immune from prosecution. And the parties and the District Court must ensure that sufficient allegations support the indictment’s charges without such conduct. Testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing such conduct may not be admitted as evidence at trial.”
. . . I’m reading Roberts’s opinion and it’s not only worse than you imagined, it’s worse than you can imagine. Essentially, Trump’s autogolpe would have been legal per Roberts, CJ.
This is worse than Dred Scott. This is the darkest day in the long and infamous history of this institution. Richard Nixon’s claim that if the president does it it’s not illegal is now official Supreme Court doctrine.
Joe Biden needs to ask himself how many divisions this court has.