Special Counsel Jack Smith on Monday urged the Supreme Court to reject former President Trump’s claim that he can’t be prosecuted for allegedly attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
In prosecutors’ final brief before justices hear arguments in Trump’s case on April 25, Smith’s team argued lower courts were right to deny Trump’s immunity claims.
“The President’s constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed does not entail a general right to violate them,” they wrote.
Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, faces criminal charges for allegedly conspiring to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. He denied any wrongdoing.
The trial is on hold until the Supreme Court rules on Trump’s assertion that he should be immune from prosecution because the conduct he is accused of constituted official acts of the president. Both the judge presiding over the case, Tanya Chutkan, and a three-judge federal appellate panel in Washington have forcefully rejected that claim.
Trump appealed, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear his argument. In a brief, Trump’s legal team argued a denial of his claims would “incapacitate every future president with de facto blackmail and extortion while in office,” and would create “post-office trauma at the hands of political opponents.”
Smith’s prosecutors said the lower court rulings should stand and reiterated their argument that “federal criminal law applies to the president.”
“The effective functioning of the Presidency does not require that a former President be immune from accountability for these alleged violations of federal criminal law,” prosecutors wrote in Monday’s filing. “To the contrary, a bedrock principle of our constitutional order is that no person is above the law — including the President.”
They argued that the Framers of the Constitution “never endorsed criminal immunity for a former President” and said all former presidents have known they could be criminally prosecuted for acts committed while in office, even after leaving the government.
Prosecutors also said that even if the Supreme Court were to recognize some immunity for a president’s official acts, the justices should nonetheless permit the case to move forward because much of the indictment is centered on Trump’s private conduct.
Smith and his team suggested the court could rule narrowly against Trump without setting a broad precedent that could apply to other cases.
“A holding that petitioner has no immunity from the alleged crimes would suffice to resolve this case, leaving potentially more difficult questions that might arise on different facts for decision if they are ever presented,” they said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
