When Donald Trump's attorney argued that the former president should be immune from any prosecution as long as he wasn't removed from office over it, the world laughed, but a former prosecutor said Saturday that the argument could have had a purpose.
Trump's attorney specifically claimed that Trump could issue an order to have Seal Team 6 kill his political opponent and, as long as he isn't impeached over it, he can never be prosecuted.
That argument might not be as ridiculous as it sounds when you consider its purpose, according to former Brooklyn, N.Y., prosecutor Charles Coleman.
Coleman appeared on MSNBC's The Saturday Show With Jonathan Capehart, where he was asked about the controversial argument.
After calling the move "bad lawyering," Coleman says the judges were extremely skeptical.
"You should not have made that argument, and the justices -- the judges that were on the panel pretty much made that clear, with respect to the hypotheticals they threw at them, and their inability to respond," he said, before adding an additional wrinkle.
"I do want to point something out, people have assumed that this was automatically going to end up in front of the Supreme Court. The question has to become, how does it get there?" Coleman asked. "And at the point that they are in front of these justices, and this panel around an appeal, in front of that circuit, there is no constitutional question, or no reason that the Supreme Court actually has to take this up."
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He continues, saying the argument may have been a play to get in front of the top court.
"So as I am watching, this as I am listening, I am wondering how are they going to create a controversy worthy of the Supreme Court reviewing it, assuming that the appeals courts sides with Judge Chutkan, which I believe that they are going to do. So where is the controversy that the Supreme Court is being called into, with respect to what they were trying to do? This notion of separation of powers, even though they were trying to rely on Congress in a way that this statute was not intended to, it was something that I thought perhaps they could try and lean on to get in front of the Supreme Court. Because other than that, I don't see how it gets there. And even though people were assuming this is going to happen, they sought to make something that the Supreme Court would have to decide on. And up until that point, they hadn't done it. And I still they think they may not have. But this I believe may have been attempt."
