The US Supreme Court ruled on Monday that Donald Trump cannot be prosecuted for actions that were within his constitutional powers as president in a landmark decision recognising for the first time any form of presidential immunity from prosecution.
The justices, in a 6-3 ruling authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, threw out a lower court’s decision that had rejected Trump’s claim of immunity from federal criminal charges involving his efforts to undo his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
The six conservative justices were in the majority, while its three liberal members dissented.
Trump is the Republican candidate challenging Biden, a Democrat, in the Nov. 5 US election in a 2020 rematch. The Supreme Court’s slow handling of the case and its decision to return key questions about the scope of Trump’s immunity to the trial judge to resolve make it improbable he will be tried before the election on these charges brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith.
“We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of presidential power requires that a former president have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office,” Roberts wrote.
Immunity for former presidents is “absolute” concerning their “core constitutional powers,” Roberts wrote, and a former president has “at least a presumptive immunity” for “acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility,” meaning prosecutors face a high legal bar to overcome that presumption.
Trump, 78, is the first former US president to be criminally prosecuted and the first former president convicted of a crime. Smith’s election subversion charges embody one of the four criminal cases Trump has faced.
