Former White House attorneys warned The New Republic's Greg Sargent that courts would be giving former President Donald Trump a free license to engage in nearly unlimited corruption were they to buy into arguments made by his attorneys this week about presidential immunity.
Although these lawyers did not believe that the courts ruling in favor of Trump in this case would let him get away with assassinating political opponents absent a conviction in an impeachment trial in the United States Senate, they did argue that Trump would nonetheless return to office with dangerously broad powers that would be ripe for blatant abuse.
"It really would permit him to be completely unconstrained if he were reelected,” Neil Eggleston, a former White House counsel for President Barack Obama, told Sargent.
Trevor Morrison, associate White House counsel under Obama, similarly warned of what would come of granting Trump such broad immunity from criminal prosecution.
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"If he is found immune from these charges, there is at least a great risk that the courts will have endorsed an immunity that could cover a number of otherwise criminal things the president might do in the future," he explains.
Among other things, Sargent imagines Trump using the FBI and DOJ to prosecute Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and obstruct her prosecution of Trump allies whom she alleges engaged in an illegal criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the election in Georgia in 2020.
Trump could justify such actions by claiming that such actions are part of his presidential duties to battle government corruption, and the courts will have given him carte blanche authority to do so, argues Sargent.
