All posts tagged "Presidential Immunity"

Judge Juan Merchan has denied Donald Trump's latest claim of presidential immunity.

The New York election interference case about the hush money scheme involving Stormy Daniels may have unfolded before Trump was elected to the White House, but since he wrote the check reimbursing Michel Cohen while in the White House, he contends presidential immunity protects him.

"This Court finds that Defendant had myriad of opportunities to raise the claim of presidential immunity well before March 7, 2024. Defendant could have done so in his omnibus motions on September 29, 2023, which he filed a mere six days before he briefed the same issue in his Federal Insurrection Matter and several months after he brought his motion for removal to federal court on May 4, 2023," wrote the judge. ...

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is demanding a federal court grant him blanket immunity from prosecution for anything he did during his four years in the White House.

But even some of Trump’s top allies in Congress rejected Trump’s latest legal claim.

That doesn’t mean they didn’t try to take Trump’s side – until they inadvertently threw him under the proverbial bus during interviews with Raw Story....

In a new filing laden with politically-charged complaints, former President Donald Trump's legal team supported the automatic stay of the case before District Judge Tanya Chutkan.

"On behalf of the Biden Administration, the prosecution will do everything that it can to rush to an unconstitutional and fundamentally unfair trial to try to prevent President Trump from winning the 2024 election, which he is currently leading," stated the filing.

According to legal expert Bradley Moss, the stay is likely to be granted while the questions about presidential immunity are litigated....

A large group of Republican legal officials have filed an amicus brief with the D.C. Circuit, urging the judges to reject former President Donald Trump's claim of absolute presidential immunity shielding him from prosecution in United States v. Trump, the 2020 presidential election interference case.

The signatories to the brief include prominent officials like former Deputy Attorney General Donald Ayer, former Justice Department official and Virginia Congresswoman Barbara Comstock, former Missouri Attorney General John Danforth, former appellate judge Michael Luttig, and former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman.

"The vast immunity proposed by Appellant would encourage future Presidents who lose re-election to engage in criminal conduct, including deploying the military, in their efforts to prevent their lawfully-elected successors from commencing their exercise of the executive power," they wrote. "Such immunity would turn Nixon v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 731 (1982), on its head by encouraging the greatest possible threat of 'intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch,' id. at 754 — a losing President’s efforts to usurp the authority and functions of a lawful successor President."...

Judge Chutkan on Thursday issued a new order in response to Donald Trump's request to stay all proceedings in the 2020 election subversion case in Washington D.C., directing both the former president and Special Counsel Jack Smith to submit briefs on the contested subject.

Trump earlier in the day filed an appeal in the case, challenging Chutkan's rejection of his "presidential immunity" argument. The ex-president also asked that the court stay the entire case, until that appeal has been resolved.

Chutkan's response wasn't to make a decision, but to ask the parties to weigh in on it....