Donald Trump's claim of unlimited presidential immunity will, almost certainly, make its way eventually to the U.S. Supreme Court, but multiple legal experts have already predicted he will lose.
The former president has been indicted on 91 charges in four jurisdictions, and the Supreme Court is expected to review the immunity issue raised in special counsel Jack Smith's criminal investigation of his efforts to overturn the results of his 2020 election loss — though it ruled last week the case needed to be heard by the lower court of appeal first.
“It's kind of ridiculous,” Texas defense attorney Paul Saputo told The Daily Beast. “We're not even going to have a 5-4 decision. I don’t think it's going to be a close call. They realize that, in order for them to really keep the country together, it's got to be pretty unanimous.”
Although many Trump critics worry the court that includes three justices he nominated will rule in his favor, legal scholars are coming to the consensus that the Supreme Court will set limits on executive power that will eventually allow the former president to be held to account.
“There have been so few presidents as crooked as Trump,” said Michael Waldman, head of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. “It’s always been assumed you can prosecute someone after-the-fact.”
The justices will have a wave of recent court decisions — many of them involving Trump and his associates — that undercut the ex-president's immunity claims, and some of those rulings were made by deeply conservative judges.
ALSO READ: I’m an octogenarian suffering in the job market. I feel your pain, Joe Biden.
“We are aware of no authority suggesting that the Take Care Clause [of the U.S. Constitution] empowers federal executive interference with state election procedures based solely on the federal executive’s own initiative,” wrote Judge William H. Pryor, Jr., of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the election interference case in D.C., ruled at the start of this month that Trump's service as president "did not bestow on him the divine right of kings," which triggered the appeal that will likely land before the Supreme Court, and Waldman told The Daily Beast that he believes the justices will find a balance between having a strong executive and holding a dirty one accountable.
“Even if the Supreme Court doesn’t want a president always looking over his back... if they want to try to draw a line, what they can say is, ‘This was not just some random act he did while in office. This was his attempt to overthrow the Constitution,” Waldman said. “This was about the presidency. You can’t use presidential immunity... to cling to the presidency.”
