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Trump lawyers’ head-scratching legal filings just keep coming
Former president Donald #Trump’s legal team, in a Supreme Court filing this week, decided it would be a good idea to cite the past words of Justice Brett M. #Kavanaugh.
In doing so, though, they reinforced just how drastic what they seek is: absolute #immunity for broadly defined presidential acts.
Kavanaugh’s actual words cast that as unthinkable.
The filing is merely the latest head-scratching move from Trump’s lawyers.
And it’s not even the first time they have filed something to the nation’s highest court that fits that description.
The current example involves the lawyers’ citation of a 2009 Minnesota Law Review article from Kavanaugh
— almost a decade before his ascent to the Supreme Court.
To hear Trump’s lawyers tell it, Kavanaugh’s article reinforced the dangers of presidents being subject to criminal and civil actions.
“In short, ‘a President who is concerned about an ongoing criminal investigation is almost inevitably going to do a worse job as President,’ ” the Trump team’s brief says, quoting Kavanaugh.
It then adds, in its own words: “The same conclusion holds if that criminal investigation is waiting in the wings until he leaves office.”
Left unstated
— but soon noted by law professor Ryan Goodman of Just Security
— was that Kavanaugh in the same article actually took a different position from the one Trump’s lawyers advanced.
While Kavanaugh posited that presidents shouldn’t have to face criminal investigations or prosecution while in office, he took no such position on post-presidential indictments.
Indeed, he seemed to take the constitutionality of post-presidential indictments for granted.