You also missed the part where SCOTUS said official acts can’t be admitted as evidence. So what if a President gets $5B from some company so regulators look the other way. A jury would only hear, at best, that a President received money for an act that never occurred.
The court only has to “presume” it was an official act. That presumption is rebuttable. The prosecutor would present an argument that such a bribe was not an “official” act; the judge is free to accept that argument.
In ordinary situations, you’re presumed innocent until proven guilty. When you’re the president, according to SCOTUS, it’s presumed that the law doesn’t even apply to you because of immunity. And proving that it applies to you requires proving that what you did was or was not a nebulously defined “official act.”
This ruling will make it virtually impossible to convict a former president of anything.
The ruling specified he was absolutely immune for conversations with his Justice Department officials, who would either be the people he was instructing to not act or a pretty exact match to whatever other department is being told not to act.
Funny, because Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor and the other two dissents disagree and specifically warned it will be used to execute political rivals.
You also missed the part where SCOTUS said official acts can’t be admitted as evidence. So what if a President gets $5B from some company so regulators look the other way. A jury would only hear, at best, that a President received money for an act that never occurred.
The court only has to “presume” it was an official act. That presumption is rebuttable. The prosecutor would present an argument that such a bribe was not an “official” act; the judge is free to accept that argument.
In ordinary situations, you’re presumed innocent until proven guilty. When you’re the president, according to SCOTUS, it’s presumed that the law doesn’t even apply to you because of immunity. And proving that it applies to you requires proving that what you did was or was not a nebulously defined “official act.”
This ruling will make it virtually impossible to convict a former president of anything.
The official act is telling a department to give special treatment to a company. That’s out of bounds for trial.
That is presumptively out of bounds for trial. That is a rebuttable presumption.
The ruling specified he was absolutely immune for conversations with his Justice Department officials, who would either be the people he was instructing to not act or a pretty exact match to whatever other department is being told not to act.
Funny, because Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor and the other two dissents disagree and specifically warned it will be used to execute political rivals.
But you’d know better, I’m sure.