On July 1st, the Supreme Court, or rather the conservative super-majority of the Supreme Court, handed down an opinion which arguably will go down as one of the most disgraceful rulings in the history of the Supreme Court. In the opinion written by the Chief Justice Roberts and joined by the rest of the conservative majority of the court, the president of the United States was granted three kinds of immunity from criminal prosecution:

1. absolute immunity for core presidential conduct,
2. presumptive immunity for non-core but official presidential acts, and
3. inability of the prosecution to use evidence from official conducts to prosecute and establish criminality of unofficial conduct.

The opinion, of course, says there is no immunity for unofficial conduct, but the last of the above three immunities makes even the unofficial conduct practically immune from prosecution, as most criminal unofficial conducts may have some components that lie within the outer perimeter of official presidential acts. Take for example receiving a bribe from someone and in return appointing them as the ambassador of US to a European country. The second action falls within official presidential conduct, so the act of appointment cannot be used as evidence to establish criminality of the bribe received. This makes the prosecution of the criminal act practically impossible. This aspect of the opinion was so outrageous that even the conservative Justice Barrette was not able to go along with it and sided with the dissent.

That opinion reads almost like an essay written by a teenager who is excited about discovering something new; in this case, the notion of presumptive immunity mentioned above. The Justices went to great lengths to protect this new made-up concept, by claiming that, e.g., if evidence from official acts is used to establish the criminality of an unofficial act, then the presumptive immunity will be violated, hence the third type of immunity listed above. It seems that it never occurred to the Justices, that maybe, just maybe, the real issue is not protecting this new type of immunity that they have invented, but rather contemplating the logic, necessity, and legality of the invention. One cannot read the opinion and not come to the conclusion that the main concern of the conservative majority was to protect the former president, at any cost. As Justice Thomas says in his concurring opinion (in which he also casts doubts on the legality of the appointment of special counsels) “few things would threaten our constitutional order more than criminally prosecuting a former President for his official acts.” Obviously, the Justice was not concerned at all about a president actually committing crimes while in office, only if, God forbid, someone tries to prosecute them for those same crimes.

One could imagine that the conservative justices felt very proud of themselves after handing down this opinion, being confident that they had created enough roadblocks to prevent their favorite former president from being prosecuted for the crimes he committed while he was president. Unfortunately for them, though, the same ambiguity and lack of clear definition of official and unofficial acts and the scope of the presumptive immunity, and the fact that they placed the burden of proving lack of immunity for some official acts on the prosecution, has resulted in a scenario which the former president and his lawyers dreaded from the beginning: public release of detailed evidence that the prosecution has collected through various means including grand jury testimonies. This evidence can be quite damning, as several people from the inner circle of the former president including his own vice president and chief of staff have likely provided incriminating testimonies to the grand jury. However, since now the burden of proof for lack of presumptive immunity is on the prosecution, the special counsel’s team have to be able to submit all the evidence that they have, so that the judge can evaluate each listed act against the vague guidelines provided by the Supreme Court to decide whether it was official or unofficial, and if official, whether it is protected by the presumptive immunity or not. They now have submitted a 180-page brief with hundreds of pages of attachments as evidence, and are also proposing certain redactions before release to the public. The defense team, obviously caught off-guard, is only complaining about the prosecution changing the name of a motion, not following some internal guideline of the DoJ, and not being consistent in his requests between the DC case and the classified documents case in Florida. Ironically, they claim additional parts of the documents should be redacted to protect the safety and security of the witnesses; the very same witnesses who have been under constant attack and intimidation by the former president and his followers; and for which the former president was placed under a gag order.

It remains to be seen how the judge in this case is going to rule on public release of the evidence provided by the prosecution team. It is, however, clear that the Supreme Court’s July 1st opinion, as outrageous as it was, has not been able to protect the former president the way it was intended. It is so sad to see that some Justices on the highest court of the land blatantly defied logic, reason, and common sense, and handed down one of the most disgraceful opinions in the history of the court that practically made president a king, yet they were not able to achieve the very same goal they set out to accomplish with that opinion.