Watergate lawyer explains how Supreme Court handed Congress the keys to put Trump in prison

Watergate lawyer Nick Ackerman spoke with CNN Thursday after a late-night decision from the Supreme Court and said that former President Donald Trump is finally starting to face consequences for his actions. He even went on to suggest that if the evidence proves Trump intentionally tried to stop Congress then the former president could be on the hook for up to 20 years in prison.

"If you took it from Donald Trump's standpoint, he truly believes the three people he appointed to the Supreme Court have to be loyal to him. That they owe him," said Ackerman. "He looks at it as a quid pro quo type of arrangement he's used to in business. The fact of the matter is these Supreme Court justices stick to the rule of law and in this particular case what they did is they relied on the 1974 decision of U.S. v. Nixon where Nixon tried to do the same thing and conceal his office tapes from the prosecutors based on executive privilege. What the court did was essentially adopt the same decision that was given in Nixon. I mean, this was history repeating itself."

He went on to say that during President Richard Nixon's era, there was a concern that he'd appointed several Supreme Court justices too. That too was an 8-0 decision.

"Because the Court of Appeals concluded that President Trump's claims would have failed even if he were the incumbent, his status as a former President necessarily made no difference to the court's decision," the Court said.

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This excerpt of the decision essentially leaves Trump "nowhere," said Ackerman.

"There's no executive privilege they can assert here," he explained. "Because executive privilege as the Court said in the Nixon case, you can't use it for conversations in furtherance of criminal activity. With Nixon, it was in furtherance of the conspiracy to obstruct the Watergate case. Here it's relating to basically an insurrection that was perpetrated on the Congress. And there's no way under any circumstance that any court is ever going to say that those conversations are legitimate, executive privilege-covered conversations. The exec privilege relates to legitimate government business that the president is engaged in, most notably military actions, national security, and the like. This is certainly why they're saying it doesn't make any difference whether Trump is a sitting president or not. These conversations are not covered by executive privilege."

He continued, explaining that the key piece of the case is that Trump acted with a corrupt motive and all of the courts are going to say that privilege doesn't exist in those cases. These documents will now show the intent of his words on Jan. 6. In the second impeachment trial, the prosecutors didn't have access to documents or people who could prove Trump was intentionally attempting to cause violence.

"This really is going to answer the question, can they make a criminal case on Donald Trump for obstructing Congress, which is an extremely serious federal felony carrying imprisonment of 20 years."

See the video below:

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