James Pearce, an attorney working on special counsel Jack Smith's team, seemed taken aback during an appeals court hearing on Tuesday after a lawyer representing former President Donald Trump argued that he could get away with ordering the assassination of his political rivals so long as the United States Senate didn't convict him for it.
"What kind of world are we living in if, as I understood my friend on the other side to say here, a president orders his SEAL team to assassinate a political rival and resigns, for example, before an impeachment, that's not a criminal act," Pearce said. "The president sells a pardon, resigns, or is not impeached, not a crime. I think that is extraordinarily frightening future."
Pearce was reacting to claims made by attorney John Sauer, who said that a two-thirds conviction vote of a president was necessary to then try to hold him accountable for alleged crimes he committed while in office.
Most legal scholars have argued that the United States Constitution makes clear that impeachment is a political and not a legal process.
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Therefore, a president who is impeached and removed from office is not also per se convicted criminally, as a separate trial to determine criminality would be necessary should the government decide to press charges against him.
In justifying their vote to acquit Trump in the United States Senate after his second impeachment trial, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and several other Republican senators argued that the criminal justice system would be the proper place to hold Trump accountable for any crimes he committed related to the deadly riots he incited at the United States Capitol building.
