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Supreme Court Trump Immunity Ruling Already Having Terrifying Effects
The work to undo Donald Trump’s criminal charges—and his recent conviction—in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity has already begun.Hours after the ruling Monday, the former president’s legal team requested that Judge Juan Merchan set aside Trump’s hush-money conviction and delay the sentencing scheduled for next week, citing the Supreme Court’s expansion of presidential immunity.Trump’s attorneys argued that some evidence presented in the case constituted official presidential acts, according to a copy of a letter obtained by the Associated Press. That could refer to some of the communication Trump had about his former fixer Michael Cohen, which...
Watch: Bill Barr’s Priceless Reaction as Steve Bannon Heads to Prison
Former Attorney General Bill Barr couldn’t help but laugh at the mention of Donald Trump’s erstwhile strategist Steve Bannon sitting in a federal prison cell. During an interview on Fox News’s Your World Monday night, host Neil Cavuto asked Barr what impact he believed that presidential immunity, which Trump was freshly granted by the Supreme Court earlier that day, would have on Trump’s behavior if reelected to the White House. Cavuto asked Barr if he thought Trump would even care about being punished if he’d be 82 years old by the time he left office. “Well, I would say, you...
Trump Rips Into Jack Smith in Late-Night Rant on Supreme Court Ruling
After the Supreme Court essentially gave him absolute immunity for “official acts,” Donald Trump decided to take aim at the man tasked with investigating his federal misdeeds: special counsel Jack Smith. In a Truth Social post shortly after midnight Tuesday, the former president and convicted felon reveled in the fact that Smith’s election interference case against him is all but dead. “A really bad day for Deranged Jack Smith, the wacko prosecutor used for Crooked Joe Biden’s attack on his Political Opponent. Today, as in the past, the Supreme Court gave the Deranged One a high level SPANKING!” Trump posted....
Watch: Mike Johnson’s Brazen Trump Defense Is Pure Gaslighting
House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared on Fox News Monday night to downplay the alarming implications of the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States, which grants Trump absolute immunity from federal prosecution for crimes he committed in office.“No one who is elected to that office [of the president] is going to be prone to this kind of crazy criminal activity,” Johnson argued in defense of the Supreme Court ruling, ignoring that the case was brought to the bench after the former president was charged with committing crazy criminal activity. “What the court is saying here follows common sense, and,...
An Insider’s Portrait of Obama-Era Hope—and Disillusionment
The 2008 election of Barack Obama electrified a generation of Americans, who projected onto him almost limitless meanings. It also spawned a cottage industry of public thinkers whose affiliation with the Obama administration helped launch their careers: the Pod Save America hosts, former foreign policy speechwriter Ben Rhodes, adviser turned political consultant David Plouffe.New Yorker theater and TV critic Vinson Cunningham is no Obamanaut but, in a roundabout way, owes his career as a writer partially to the Obama campaign. As a twentysomething fresh out of college, the quintessential young person energized by the future president, he found himself working...
How the Supreme Court Just Made a Second Trump Term More Terrifying
Yesterday the Supreme Court released its shocking new ruling in the case involving Donald Trump’s demand for absolute immunity from prosecution for insurrection-related crimes. The court gave Trump much of what he wanted, notably ensuring that his trial for the insurrection will be delayed indefinitely. But what’s really worrying is what this ruling could allow Trump to get away with if he wins back the White House. We talked to legal expert Richard Hasen, who just published A Real Right to Vote and regularly writes about Trump’s attacks on democracy, about why the case for alarmism is real and serious. Listen to this episode here.
The Supreme Court Turns the President Into a King
Five members of the Supreme Court of the United States want to take us back to seventeenth-century absolutism. In a stunning rejection of originalist interpretation, and in defiance of the single statement carved onto the front of the majestic building where they work (“Equal justice under law”), the justices ruled Monday that the president does not have to abide by the laws of the land. They agreed that presidents might be liable for purely private acts, such as Bill Clinton lying about engaging in oral sex in the Oval Office. But in the appropriately titled Trump v. the United States,...
Sotomayor Exposed the Court Conservatives’ Hypocrisy With One Line
The Supreme Court’s striking 6–3 ruling in Donald Trump’s immunity case on Monday means that it will be that much more difficult to use the criminal courts to hold a former president accountable, giving the president more power to act with impunity. The same justices who ruled to jail people who are homeless and sleeping outdoors even if there is no shelter, whose ruling in Dobbs turned millions of people’s abortions into a crime, now say that applying the same criminal justice system to the president as to the voters that elected him threatens the rule of law.After former President...
Fox News Hit With Another Lawsuit—This Time From Hunter Biden
Hunter Biden is finally making good on his threat to sue Fox News.The president’s son filed a lawsuit against Fox News on Monday, alleging that the conservative media company violated New York state’s revenge porn law by illegally publishing his nude photographs and videos, as part of a miniseries imagining his trial for charges that were never brought.The suit alleges that explicit photographs of Biden were included in the miniseries The Trial of Hunter Biden: A Mock Trial for the American People without his consent. The program depicts a fictionalized mock trial in which the president’s son is sued for...
Top Trump Adviser Reacts to Immunity Ruling With Three Alarming Words
With the Supreme Court’s ruling on immunity Monday morning effectively handing ultimate power to the presidency, and by extension, Donald Trump, it has opened the door to occupants of the Oval Office acting however they want. One commentator on X (formerly Twitter), Democratic influencer Harry Sisson, pointed out that given the new ruling, Joe Biden could in theory order Seal Team 6 to assassinate Trump, his political rival—a point that Trump’s legal team tried to defend during the case’s oral arguments. Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita soon quoted Sisson’s post with an ominous warning. There are a few ways to...
AOC Threatens Major Response After Supreme Court Immunity Ruling
In response to the Supreme Court’s disastrous 6–3 decision on Monday granting Trump expansive immunity from criminal prosecution, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez issued a stern condemnation of the court’s “corruption crisis beyond its control” and vowed to issue articles of impeachment against the Supreme Court once Congress reconvenes after Labor Day.“Today’s ruling represents an assault on American democracy,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in response to the Supreme Court deciding on Monday that presidents are above the law. “It is up to Congress to defend our nation from this authoritarian capture.” Ocasio-Cortez’s bold declaration prompted a since-deleted response from Representative Veronica Escobar saying, “Count...
Steve Bannon’s Podcast Somehow Just Got Even Worse
Political conspiracy theorist Steve Bannon is turning to establishment conservatives to guest-host his podcast while he serves his prison sentence—and they’re all too ready to take on the job.A couple dozen guest hosts are slated to take over Bannon’s far-right podcast, War Room, before he wraps up his stint in federal prison. The names filling up the time slots—and effectively elevating the fringe platform—include top conservative lawmakers such as Representatives Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert. They’ll join the likes of alt-right conspiracy theorist and white supremacist Jack Posobiec, Trump administration officials Kash Patel and Peter Navarro (who...
The Disturbing Footnote in Supreme Court’s Trump Immunity Ruling
As a part of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling Monday on presidential immunity, the highest court in the land officially determined that a sitting president cannot be criminally prosecuted, promising an abrupt end to some of Donald Trump’s remaining criminal trials should he be elected in November.While the Department of Justice has long held that a sitting president cannot be criminally prosecuted, the Supreme Court has never explicitly ruled on the issue—until now. In one brief footnote of his majority opinion granting sweeping protections to the president, Chief Justice John Roberts reaffirmed the department’s rule. “Our decision in Clinton permitted...
The Supreme Court Just Showed Why Biden Must Drop Out
“In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” That was the conclusion Justice Sonia Sotomayor drew in her piercing dissent from the Supreme Court’s conservative majority’s ruling in (the aptly titled) Trump v. The United States that the president has absolute immunity for “official acts” undertaken while he is in office. Happy early July 4th. The implications of this decision, as Sotomayor notes, are profound. “When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution,” Sotomayor wrote. “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team...
Steve Bannon Press Conference Outside Prison Ends in Total Disaster
As Steve Bannon turned himself in to Danbury federal prison in Connecticut on Monday to serve out a four-month stint for refusing to testify to Congress for his role in the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, demonstrators led by ruckus royalty Anarchy Princess carried signs reading, “Bleach blonde bad built butch body” behind Bannon ally Marjorie Taylor Greene and smirkingly chanted, “Lock him up” against competing chants of “USA,” which inadvertently aided in the cacophony.Demonstrators drowned out the MAGA press conference with cowbells and chants, making Bannon’s last words before heading off to the big house indecipherable."Lock him up! Lock...
The Most Chilling Line in Supreme Court’s Trump Immunity Ruling
With its ruling in favor of presidential immunity Monday morning, the Supreme Court has heavily undermined much of the evidence expected to be used against Donald Trump in his pending criminal trials. In the ruling, the court stated that “testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing such conduct may not be admitted as evidence at trial,” referring to anything a president does as an “official” act. Much of the evidence gathered against Trump in his January 6 trial, for example, relies on what he said to his advisers and to Vice President Mike Pence, as well...
Supreme Court Immunity Ruling Destroys Independent Justice Department
The Justice Department will no longer be an independent authority on the law, thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Donald Trump’s immunity case Monday. Instead, it will be an arm to be leveraged by the Oval Office, with open communication enabled between the federal law enforcement agency and the presidency for all future investigations.Chief Justice John Roberts slipped the allowance into his majority opinion, as the justices ruled 6–3 in Trump’s favor along ideological lines. In a quiet sentence, Roberts argued that the fresh take on the executive branch relationship would help the president carry out his constitutional duties.“The...
Supreme Court’s Trump Immunity Ruling Decimates Jack Smith’s Case
The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling Monday that the president is entitled to presumptive immunity from all official acts has severely undermined the case against Donald Trump for seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, making it even less likely he will face justice for his actions.In his majority opinion granting sweeping protections to the president, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that part of the Department of Justice’s indictment against the former president “alleges that Trump and his co-conspirators ‘attempted to enlist the Vice President to use his ceremonial role at the January 6 certification proceeding to fraudulently...
Trump Celebrates Supreme Court Giving Him Total Power in Immunity Case
Donald Trump is celebrating after the Supreme Court ruled Monday morning on partisan lines that presidents have “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all of his official acts.”On Truth Social, the former president and convicted felon immediately posted, “BIG WIN FOR OUR CONSTITUTION AND DEMOCRACY. PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN!”Of course Trump would be happy with this ruling. On Sunday night, Trump was practically begging the Supreme Court for a favorable ruling, and that is what he got from the six conservative justices on the court. The ruling throws into question whether there are any lines that a president can cross...
Donald Trump Jr. Mocks Jack Smith Over Supreme Court Ruling
Donald Trump Jr. cheered his father’s massive victory on presidential immunity that essentially puts him above the law.The Supreme Court handed Donald Trump a seismic win in his immunity case Monday, giving his legal team more than they asked for in terms of what qualifies as prosecutable official acts of the presidency while effectively killing Trump’s January 6 criminal trial. But that wasn’t enough for Trump’s eldest son, who was quick to amplify the news that the former president can’t be held accountable for some of his actions related to the effort to overturn the 2020 election results. And Don Jr. couldn’t resist throwing another dig at special counsel Jack Smith, whose January 6 case against the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is now in tatters.“Solid SCOTUS ruling today,” posted Don Jr. “I’m sure the corrupt prosecutors and DC judge will work overtime to continue their lawfare. It’s all they have left.”
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The New Republic is a liberal American publication focusing on various topics including domestic politics, news, culture, and the arts.
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