Law professors, attorneys and legal analysts have roundly dismissed Donald Trump’s claim to have “absolute immunity” from prosecution for any acts he committed when president.
Trump’s attorneys on Tuesday argued to a three-judge panel for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that presidents can’t be prosecuted unless they are impeached and then convicted by the Senate. The claim came as Trump’s legal team sought to nix felony charges against the former president for his role in inciting the deadly U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
The argument was greeted with skepticism from the panel.
As it was by legal experts commenting on the claim.
Harvard University constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell it was “a ridiculous argument.”
He said, “It would be absolutely astonishing if any panel of judges, let alone a panel as qualified and smart as this one, were to give the Trump argument the time of day.”
He added, “It’s not an argument that any real lawyer would have come up with” and “makes no sense.”
Watch the video here:
Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi the argument was “just so shocking to hear someone say that when it has been assumed for so long that a former president is not above the law.”
Watch the interview here:
Doron Kalir, a law professor Cleveland State University, told Business Insider that “if a student made the same argument, they would get anywhere between a C or a D for misunderstanding what the Constitution has said.”
Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley said Trump’s argument of “impeachment first, prosecution later, is a dead letter with the panel.”
“I don’t believe that the judges agree that you needed a conviction to ever prosecute a president,” he added.
Former Trump White House attorney Ty Cobb suggested it was just a delay tactic.
And conservative attorney George Conway told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins that Trump’s legal team had taken “a bad argument” and conflated it “with another bad argument, which is something based upon the impeachment judgment clause, and mixing them all together in the hope of getting a stronger together.”
The court has been given five days by the Department of Justice to rule on the argument.