Alert: Trump’s ‘license to kill or coup’ hits SCOTUS - See Ari Melber’s critical breakdown

We are watching history unfold right now at the Supreme Court, which heard arguments about putting a president on trial today, an unprecedented historic event. All words are true about this one. No other president has been accused like this. Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith memorably accused Trump of failed

coup

and the plots that led to January 6. Trump's lawyers argue that he should be basically totally immune because he was president during those efforts now that's a new relatively fabricated claim they lost unanimously before the respected DC appeals court. that in mind because that is the recent precedent in today's context and you may remember that was the now infamous hearing where Trump's lawyer openly stated that as president Trump could have a

license

to

kill

American opponents, that was the kind of chilling speech that many many people across the Spectrum were reprimanded so that kind of talk came back today with serious questions about the assassination and the

coup

and Trump's lawyer said okay or it all depends let's say this president who ordered the military to carry out a montage, orders the military or orders someone to murder. he is that within His official acts, I think it would depend on the circumstances, it would depend on the hypothetical, the case raises issues that go far beyond the special counsel's case, one could argue that it is not plausibly legal to order the SEAL Team Six still The president uses it in an absolutely scandalous way.

The court has to make decisions that not only apply to President Trump, but also decisions that will apply to future presidents. A president has the right, for his entire personal benefit, to use the attributes of his office without facing criminal liability. His novel. The theory would immunize former presidents from criminal liability for bribery, sedition, murder, here's what that means in plain language. I Donald Trump can do whatever he wants, there is nothing to suggest that presidents need immunity because they have managed to get it right for over 200 years. those are just some of today's highlights the constitution does not say that former presidents have immunity, never before

trump

did anyone even claim that after

trump

the courts are now full of prosecutions of his supporters and his AIDS, more accusations came last night and this is the obvious fact here that the Insurrection was a public crime wave, it was televised, it was livestreamed by some of its participants and now many of them are in prison or awaiting trial and those are related election plots that have been dismantled anyway, but many Today's judges seemed almost oblivious to the current reality and threat.

Today was a historic day for the Supreme Court in the sense that we will read about this in the history of their books, but I have to tell you from above tonight. I'm going to show you why and give you a

breakdown

today was also a depressing day on this Supreme Court as the Trump appointees and some other members seemed oblivious to this reality of this era of Insurrection oblivious to the victorious sedition convictions of the Department of Justice that not everyone can follow, except the judges and the Supreme Court. Judges are supposed to track that the people who stormed the capital had their day in court and many of them were convicted by juries of their peers.

Other judges, though, pressed Trump's lawyer on how the United States is supposed to deter or punish a coup d'état or military coup. If Trump's theory, if accepted, means some kind of total immunity, let's say this president who ordered the military to stay in the Jak coup, he is no longer president, he was not impeached, he could not be impeached, um, but he ordered to the military to carry out a coup d'état and you are saying that it is an official act uh I think it would depend on the time I think it would depend on the circumstances if it was an official act official act there is a substitute for them saying that it is okay it depends well by definition no okay a military coup would be against the official government of the nation if a coup can take place it can be assassinated that was the infamous part of the hearing in the lower courts I reminded them about today the judge appointed by Obama sotoor pressed the lawyer of Trump about that violent and shadowy authoritarian logic, if the president decides that his rival is corrupt and orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, it is that within his official acts, what Community can achieve would depend on the hypothetical but we see that he could very well be an official there you have him openly before the highest court in the country, the lawyer for the current Republican Party candidates defends the murder and murder of Americans and he simply puts the official word on it, that's how you know it they're defending when they say oh it's official official act and it says it should be something the president can do with

license

to remove full immunity so here we are let's not say they weren't warned we're hearing some of the most extreme authoritarian arguments never before the Supreme Court in the modern era I suppose you could score one for transparency and say that they are being quite clear and transparent about what they stand for in the past and what they would do in the future;

That's Trump's defense inside the courtroom today, prosecutor Jack Smith noted the veteran litigator he chose and sent for this pivotal case, probably the most important case on presidential power since USV Nixon, and that lawyer, when he was his turn, he took a two for 4 in this defense of Trump that I have been telling you about when saying this. invented immunity, if he did, would protect and therefore encourage murder, treason, sedition, and again, sedition is, of course, what those Gen 6 attackers were convicted of by his novel. Theory would immunize former presidents from criminal liability for bribery, treason, sedition, murder and here conspiracy to use fraud. annulling the results of an election and perpetuating oneself in power, that presidential immunity has no basis in the Constitution, that is true, the judges know that if they say that there is immunity here, it will be something new, not something originalist from the original understanding of the Constitution .

It's not a textualist thing from within the text of the Constitution that I mentioned, those are the prisms that many conservatives say they use in court, except that apparently when they don't there was no immunity under the law for Nixon, he accepted a pardon to avoid the accusation. basic type of high school history class Point against Trump that many people have thought about Judge Jackson put it very bluntly and you will be able to hear it here, while other judges also seemed to support Trump and reveal their leanings when reflecting on Your opinion. that pardoning Nixon may have turned out to be a good thing and remember your personal opinion on something a president could do if he chose to pardon Nixon, he couldn't have pardoned Nixon, that opinion is not supposed to be the way this court decides the narrow legal limits. question of whether the Constitution prevents the Justice Department from prosecuting Trump or not.

What happened to the pardon for President Nixon? I think if everyone thought that presidents couldn't be prosecuted, what was that thing about us saying my God, Nixon versus Fitzgerald? That's something the courts shouldn't get involved in because presidents have all kinds of motives. President Ford's pardon is very controversial at the moment. Yes, it is now considered one of the best decisions in presidential history. Won't the outcome be predictable as the presidents in the last couple? of days in office they are going to forgive themselves the last question is quite cynical. Alo says that if he allowed presidents to forgive themselves, wouldn't everyone do it?

Pardons are for criminals. No president has tried to pardon himself or even defended Trump, so it's strange. for a sitting justice to ask if that would be the norm strange is a diplomatic word also sounds like a level of yoga backtracking to find some way to get Trump off the hook again now that the Court's Republican-appointed majority was clearly warmer with Trump's arguments than those lower courts that rejected them unanimously on a bipartisan basis, critics say that shows the most obvious partisanship in this Maga Court overseen by Justice Roberts, who seems unable or unwilling to curb this red partisanship, but that does not mean that there were not good arguments in favor of legality. claim for some type of immunity, limited presidential immunity and I want you to understand the key points, today was 2 and a half hours, so we are not going to play everything, but I will show you one of the strongest arguments for that side. from a question also from Judge Alo, he asked if bad ideas and official acts of a president can be prosecuted correctly, that is what Jack Smith says, who should be able to be part of the case, he asked and then what about the acts in times of war like President Roosevelt interning innocents?

The Japanese Americans, an operation that at the time was considered legal for the first time, which is important for the context, were fighting the Nazis, they were fighting the Japanese, everything was at stake, but then the Supreme Court itself determined that It was illegal and when war tempers cooled. Over the decades, it has been widely viewed in civilized society as a racist and grave injustice, so Alo asked, given that history would not open the door to prosecuting FDR or virtually any president for such acts officers. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision toward Japanese Americans during the World War.

He could not have been charged today under 18 USC 241 with civil rights conspiracy. Yes, President Roosevelt made that decision on the advice of his attorney general. There was actually no threat of sabotage, since Jer Hoover's lawyers loved to be nerds, of course, the point is not what the attorney general said at the time or what Hoover said. The point is not whether it was approved but whether there is some external limit, no matter how far away. about prosecuting a president for those official acts that might have been taken in good faith in wartime at one time and later appear to be a war crime or a violation of civil rights; that's a good question now that Jack Smith's rebuttal is that this is not World War II and Donald Trump's efforts were not on behalf of the US, not even in good faith, but a misguided effort in matters of national security.

They went against the US and their legal election and their elected president and their incoming administration at that time, a big difference now is one of the lowest moments today. Also came Judge Alo who asked a question suggesting that maybe the United States should just appease the cou leaders, don't bother them because if you do or they are worried about being prosecuted for real crimes, they might try to stay at the stage of coup power and democracy. It's crazy, but I'm going to play with the extreme premise of this question where Judge Alo asks whether a president worried about impeachment might be more likely to hold on to power illegally.

It says that a stable democratic society requires a candidate who loses an election even by a close one, even a closely contested one, leave office peacefully if that candidate c is the incumbent, let's hear if an incumbent who loses a very close and contested election knows that A real possibility, after leaving office, is not that the president will be able to retire peacefully but that the president could be criminally prosecuted by a staunch political opponent. That will not lead us to a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy. , won't J He's also very smart So From my observation, I think it's more likely that he's trying to bring up this crazy idea rather than actually accepting it, because to accept the premise of that question and they ask all kinds of questions, but the premise of that question is, gosh, we better be really afraid of people who might cling to power if they don't like being held accountable after leaving office after losing a legal election, so let's not take this way, it is called appeasement, it is dangerous when you do it to national or foreign enemies, why Judge Alo is using his position in the Supreme Court to propose that today only he can respond, but it is literally the opposite of the oath that the judges to speak like this now, where is your head?

The court headed to the right. I just went over many of the key points. Based on this argument, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court seems willing to reduce the scope of the entire criminal case against Trump, which is how the New York Times saw it today when reporting on what happened and basically making it difficult to hold the trial sooner. of the election on the 24th. Also note that Trump's lawyer presented an extreme version of the former president's argument, claiming that presidential orders to assassinatepolitical rivals or stage a coup could well be immune from prosecution.

I quote that just to give you an idea of ​​how this is developing, this is where we are. In America right now we're almost normalizing or casually discussing discourse about assassinations and coups, and there are many places in the world in history and now less so in Russia, where that's just part of life and you go on, you try to be a soldier throughout life. knowing that Putin murders Russians, that's what he does, but where we want to be here, the delays alone will give Trump most of what he wanted from this case because he can rule this out after the election year and based on in what the court said in It seems that today the bank is going to receive at least that much according to what they said, but before we bring our guests tonight, I'm going to take a little longer than usual.

I hope that you think it's fine. I want to put this in a broader framework. of the problems we face because today is legally a dark day for this supreme court in what the justices did not say and did not address and did not focus on very few of the arguments today that dealt directly with the horrible insurrection in the center of this case, which is the case of the Department of Justice Special Counsel, Jack Smith, against the accused Trump, which relates to a now convicted sedition, so the more you hear these arguments today, the more you become.Far from this case and of this reality, because of all the hypotheses about the future or what would happen to future presidents and the whole story about presidents without the name of the accused Trump, the judges did not focus much on the main reason why there is a first prosecution federal. of a president, is the first to try to steal an election and stop the peaceful transfer of power.

You know this because he did it in public. He is legally presumed innocent. He deserves a trial. He could win the trial. That's how we do it here. the rule of law, but that is how we got here, not with assumptions about chilling a presidential act, nor with a wartime overreach done perhaps in the name of the United States, but mistakenly, not with a president in the middle of his term trying to govern, but he defeated a president who was waiting for an elected president and for the first time in our history don't forget, violently stopping the peaceful transition of power with a sedition that has now been condemned, those are some data that I have gathered for you, but I'm also going to quote From a longtime Republican judge, as you may remember, he testified on these same issues before Congress and had a connection with him urging following the Constitution when he was dealing with then-outgoing Vice President Pence.

He notes how the court largely avoided these points. I bring it up today with arguments that discussed everything but the specific question presented whether a former president can be prosecuted for attempting to remain in power despite the election of his successor by the American people and thus depriving his legitimately elected successor of the powers of presidency and preventing the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in American history is true and while the court spent hours, I mean literally hours, reflecting on how a coup could involve official acts. L knows notes of that attack, he knows it too, I should say, but he notes and wrote.

This today says that attacking Congress is not part of the president's job, to which we say duh and it's also sad that we have to make these kinds of constitutional calculations, but he wrote that it is not a central power or function of the president to ensure the appropriate certification. of the next president, the one who in this case beat President Biden in Congress, that central point is not very complicated, let me say it in English while I complete my report on today's case, breaking the law is not enforcing it, stealing elections it's not protecting them to commit voter fraud and voter fraud is not election integrity, again now someday there could be a tough case where the court weighs possible tax overreach against the president who was simply doing his job or waging a war difficult with subsequent doubts, but not A disinterested expert seriously thinks that is the case here today;

Some conservative judges have stated that they have to intervene because there needs to be a rule for the future, not to defend Trump, they said, but for subsequent hypothetical cases, that's what they have to do. Well, as a long-time court watcher whom I call Bull, there has never been an insurrection like this before the legal task at hand is how to prosecute it, not anxiously and neurotically pondering how to prevent possible subsequent overreach, this does not It's an overreach, but someday they could be. and so instead of dealing with this sedition, let's worry about this future overreach and, oh, the people worried about that are the people appointed by, oh, the guy who profited from this failed sedition, uh, and then they keep insisting on the bank today with some of the Trumps.

It's not about him they're bad at PR when you say it's not about the money it sounds like it's about the money and when you say it's not about the guy who appointed me to our alliance and we could help him get out of his rush and that he could be president again so we can have more Trump appointees on the court. Well, now it sounds pretty guilty in your mind, if there's a later case, this is the kind of court they'll probably take that case anyway so they don't even get stuck with some old rule like "it's worth prosecuting the hit, but the next one is off limits" and they say "oh, but we already made this decision." Does anyone really believe he will be left out in the future? big presidential cases will say what they said in this case and in the Trump ballot case, they take the case sometimes they take it right in the middle of everything and say it's too important to them not to intervene and finally they just unraveling your logic this evening, as you raised these points today, would you be bound by this case again if you said it's OK to prosecute the C hit, but we're worried about later overreach?

Oh we are bound by the previous more limited version of what we said they would be bound by this, who knows, they certainly didn't feel bound by ro v Wade and they testified under oath that they would uphold that precedent, so forgive me for going on for a while, the arguments were longer than usual, approaching 3 hours. and although I mentioned that there were some decent points, we raised some difficult questions in the background, what we saw today was the best, we were able to tell many members of the Supreme Court that they closed their eyes to the insurrection that we experienced, yes, Lady Justice has blindfolded, but justice is us.

A lot of things happened on set, but everything is fine. Lady Justice is supposed to be blindfolded, but judges are supposed to see the facts and if you can't see the facts in front of you about this era of Maga Insurrection, how can we trust you to prevent future coups? that they were said to be planning