As they seek to repress a revolt in their database on the files of Jeffrey Epstein, President Donald Trump and the national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard offered Maga voters an attractive alternative program: the prospect of invoice Barack Obama to orchestrate a betrayal plot to undermine Trump’s first presidency.
The biggest problem with this is the lack of evidence of any reprehensible act of Obama and other former civil servants. But even if the Trump administration has produced a smoking firearm, they should face the question of immunity for former presidents.
Sinting a second, the idea that Gabbard has promoted is that Obama pushed to manufactured information on Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections to undermine Trump before taking office. The whole is based on a series of misleading conflictions and complaints.
And the biggest conclusions of this intelligence have been confirmed repeatedly, including by the Republicans and including by the secretary of Trump’s state, Marco Rubio, in a big report by the Senate in 2020. If the people who said that this thing was engaged in a coup, was Rubio as accomplice?
But again, even if we put it all aside, there is the problem that Obama could well be immune to these prosecution – thanks in large part to Trump himself.
Trump and Co. spent a large part of 2024 arguing that the presidents should be safe from almost all the criminal charges. And they succeeded in a sufficiently large part of the Supreme Court that it seems unlikely that their allegations – even if they were deserved – could lead to criminal proceedings for Obama.
Despite Trump and Gabbard’s suggestions that Obama could be charged, Trump’s own lawyers argued that such threats of prosecution were unthinkable because they would be hamstrings with hamstrings.
“Without the presidential immunity against criminal proceedings, there can be no presidency as we know it,” said D. John Sauer, then Trump’s personal lawyer and now his Advocate General at the Supreme Court.
Sauer even left open the idea that a president could order his political opponents to be murdered and not to face accusations, because this act would be an official act of the president.
The Supreme Court did not go so far, but it gave the presidency a large new immunity subsidy.
So would this immunity apply to Obama?
The Supreme Court said that the measures taken under the main powers of the leaders of a president are safe. Beyond that, a president has the presumption of immunity for all actions “within the outside perimeter of its official responsibility”-that is to say actions which are “not manifestly or manifestly beyond [his] authority.”
It’s just the presumption, not real immunity. But chief judge John G. Roberts Jr., in the opinion, has established a high bar for when immunity will not apply. He said that, at least the official acts of the president’s “outside perimeter” must be immunized unless the government proves that his case “would present no” dangers of intrusion on the authority and the functions of the executive power “.”
What all this means precisely has been the subject of many debates. It was not clear what it meant for the proceedings linked to January 6 of Trump, which were the momentum for the decision. Prosecutors and judges rushed to count with what evidence and accusations remained valid, but business was never tried after Trump was elected.
“Assuming that this nonsense is true, if Obama acted in his official capacity to simply communicate with his people of intelligence on Russian interference, clear immunity,” said Harvard University Professor Richard Lazarus. “But if the allegation is that Obama came out of this role and acted in its personal capacity to help Clinton’s campaign, then not so clear.”
However, it would be easier for Obama to argue that the actions in question were one of his official functions than for Trump to assert his efforts to overthrow the results of the elections. The elections are largely carried out by the States and the president has no defined role.
In the case of Obama, the base of the allegations of Trump and Gabbard is that he participated in intelligence reports on manufacturing. But wouldn’t asking intelligence part of its central (and theoretically immune) powers? And even if it is not the case, would it not be in the “outside perimeter” of its official functions, where the bar to overcome immunity is higher?
“Communication with intelligence managers would seem to fall within the framework of official functions,” said UCLA law professor Rick Hasen.
Hasen has also noted that any theoretical accusation should overcome a major problem resulting from the decision of the Supreme Court in Trump c. UNITED STATES: They could not use official acts as proof to prove the crime.
The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was interviewed several times this Wednesday during a briefing, and she rejected several times if the immunity applied to Obama.
“I will leave this to the Ministry of Justice,” said Leavitt.
All this may seem academic. It always seems to be a distant possibility that Trump and his Ministry of Justice never continue by trying to continue Obama. Trump does a lot of these statements and they tend to fall. To judge by the way in which his media allies cover the allegations of Obama much more than the saga on the files of Jeffrey Epstein, it would seem that this served as temporary distraction.
But it is also so discordant. Trump and his lawyers argued that the presidents had to be fully immunized because he was absolutely essential for executive work. Then he turns around and, a little more than a year later, suggests that these standards should not be applied to his predecessor for actions that seem much more official than those of Trump.
According to the logic of Trump’s lawyers, Obama in 2016 could have done much more than massage intelligence reports; He could have released a hit on Trump, and maybe still shelter.
It’s almost as if Trump was still: immunity for me, not for you.
