A three judge panel from the D.C District Federal appeals court rejecting Donald Trump's appeal in the January six election subversion case there. Unanimous decision laying waste to his claim of absolute immunity for crimes he may have committed while in o especially crimes to help him st Unless it is he'd already been i and convicted by Congress first, which sounds outlandish even to say now absolute criminal immunity, but was chilling to hear during oral arguments last month when Judge Florence Penn confronted a Trump attorney with the implications. Could a president who ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival who was not impeached? Could he be subject to criminal prosecution if he were impeached or convicte So your answer is, is he and Judge Penn's answer to that, along with her two colleag was unanimous and unequivocal, quoting now from their unsigned Presidential immunity against federal indictment would mean that as the president the Congress could not legislate the executive cannot prosecute and the judiciary could not revi We cannot accept that the office of the presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter. The court also put the former pr on an accelerated timeline, giving him until Monday to file an emergency stay with the Supreme Court, after which the clock would start running again on his trial before Judge Tonya Joining us now is Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, constitutional s Supreme Court litigator and author, most recently of To End the Presidenc The Power of Impeachment. So, Professor Tribe, can you just put into further pe the importance, the magnitude of this ruling? Anderson, I think today's ruling was historic, to put it mildly. It's the first time an appellate has had occasion to consider the rather extravagant claim that being president puts you above the law, enables you to commit crimes, at least when they are within th perimeter of your office. But actually, in Trump's case, he was making the even more remarkable claim that he could commit crimes regardless of whether he was doing it in his official capacity. All of those arguments that he m to put himself above the law were dismembered piece by piece, methodically in this historic opinion, which, as you've indicated, is l to be studied by law students for generations, especially because there's very little reason for t Supreme Court to weigh in. Why do you say that? Well, the argument is airtight. It's bullet proof. It's not in conflict with the decision of any other c And it establishes a principle based on widely agreed upon ideas about the separation of powers and the proposition that crimes committed by anyone, including a president when in office, especially the crime of trying t deprive the voters of the abilit to replace you with someone else those crimes must result in trial and either an acquittal or a conviction. They can't simply go into the ashcan of history, and there's nothing the Supreme Court of the United could add to that if there were a gap in the reasoning of this opinion if it left important issues unan If it was ambiguous, it was over the top in some way. If it didn't take seriously all of Trump's arguments, then maybe there would be reason for the Supreme Court to weigh i Now, the only reason to weigh in would be delay. And everyone knows that in this justice delayed could well be justice denied. The ruling also said, and I'm qu It would be a striking paradox of the president who alone is vested with the constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, where the sole officer capable of defying those laws with impun So if the Supreme Court, you don't think has any grounds to take up the a and there's this accelerated dea for him to appeal, what sort of I mean, how soon do you think what happe Well, what happens next is that the former presiden to get his motion for a stay, accompanied by a petition for su for review by the Supreme Court into the court a week from today The Supreme Court then proceeds to deny review probably within a week or at mos or three weeks. If it were to grant review, that would slow things down, but not necessarily so much as t the trial before the election. But it would slow things down en to create a real risk that this case would never come because if Trump assumes office in January of 2025, the first thing he's going to do is get rid of the federal criminal pros against him by the court, decides whether or not to to do a review Well, the Supreme Court will make that decision quite quickly But there's, as I say, no reason to think it would grant review. Most of the experts agree with with me that the odds are better than 50 that the Supreme Court would just let the remarkably ca thorough, respectful decision of this unanimous three judge pa let it be the last word. There's no reason for it to revi If it were, as I said, to decide to review the case, it could put it on an accelerate Either way, we're going to get an eventual decision in this cas unless the Supreme Court basically disgracefully just lets it drag out. Now, you know, there are people who thought that the three judge district and the three judge court of App was acting unfairly by letting it drag out just for thi But I must say, even though I wa one of those who was impatient to get the result, it seems to me that it would have been almost humanly impossible to write as careful, thorough, decisive and bulletproof an opinion as this court did in less than a month. It seems to me it did a remarkab I can't imagine it having done a If it had rushed to judgment. The former president said in reaction to the ruling that without immun the presidency would lose its po and will be, quote, consumed by the other branches of governm Does that make any sense to you? It doesn't make any sense to me, and it made no sense to this thr judge court. But again, they dealt with it respectfully. They said if that were the case, then we would expect prior presi to have run amok and committed all kinds of crime But because they assumed they were not immune, they were more restrained than this president. Former presidents assumed that they could be prose Gerald Ford certainly assumed that Nixon could be prosecuted. That's why he gave them pardon. Same thing in the case of other presidencie Yeah. What this court did was basicall that Donald Trump is announcing that if he becomes president again, he wants the freedom to commit a that advance his own interests. Undeterred by the prospect that he is just citizen Trump when he leaves office, he's basically announcin as this court described it, announcing an intention not just to be a dictator, but to be a criminal in chief. That's not a very appealing posi to be taking. Laurence Tribe, appreciate your Thank you. Thank you, Anderson. Here now with more reporting on the react in Trump World Senior's Kaitlan who anchors the source at the top of the hour. The former president already been fundraising off this. What are you hearing? They expected this decision. They didn't think that it was going to go in their favo especially the how that day went when the judges were kind of a bit surrounding every argument that SEAL Team six, which didn't go well. A lot of them would argue privat that that argument, the way he handled that, saying that hypothetically, yeah that could happen unless he was impeached and then convicted by the Senate didn't go well. What surprised them was how they got boxed in by the tim because that is almost as import as the substance of this ruling from these three judges, including Democrat and Republican appointees, I sho is they say that Trump's team has until next Monday, not very much time to respond to the Supreme Court and filed that emergency request to basically pause this decision And if they don't take that, obv then we could potentially see th start back up again. But they're basically saying you only have a few days. They're kind of eliminating this that Trump and his team have been using all the time to delay, delay, delay, make these appeals that they don't even know if they'll went on. But just making them do they seem confident that that the Supreme Court would take up the case on appeal You know, it's interesting because I have been talking to a lot of people in his orbit about this. Lawyers, non-lawyers, previous lawyers alike, they sounded confident that the Supreme Court, before it came out today would take it up. It seems to have been a shift since this has come out. A question now that is being raised of whether or not it is, as Mr. Trump said, there are going to be such a sou ruling that this he says it's bullet proof. Yeah. That they look at it. George Conway saying it's airtight, that they look at it and say, we maybe that's what we would write or we wouldn't disagree with tha I think the big question for Trump's team tonight, they will definitely appeal this by Monday. It's not clear when exactly, but they have to do it by Monday What argument do they make before the Supreme Because if you read through this 57 page ruling, they eviscerate every single arg that his attorney made in front of the federal appeals
