Jamie Raskin Goes Scorched Earth on SCOTUS Trump Immunity Case

Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin took aim at a peculiar line of questioning brought by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in Donald Trump’s presidential immunity arguments on Thursday, during which one of the high court’s most conservative members seemed to claim that actually punishing Trump for any alleged crimes might only encourage him to break more laws.

“The most astonishing thing for me today was Justice Alito’s question. He actually asked whether holding the president criminally accountable for actual crimes committed, whether murder or coup or you name it, whether holding them accountable would actually encourage them to stage more violent coups to stay in office to avoid prosecution,” Raskin told MSNBC later Thursday.

“Which buys completely into Donald Trump’s narcissistic criminal worldview. I mean, for all of American history, we have said presidents are subject to criminal prosecution if they commit crimes. That’s why Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. That’s why Bill Clinton agreed to give up his law license with the bar for five years so he wouldn’t face criminal prosecution.”

“Now they say, ‘If you’re really mean to Donald Trump and you hold him accountable the same way every other American citizen is held accountable, then he’ll really overthrow the government, he’ll really bring out the big guns, and we can’t afford that,’” Raskin continued. “And that’s a kind of masochistic capitulation-ism of Donald Trump’s authoritarianism.”

“Of course we’ve got to hold the president accountable to the law,” he said. “It’s the basic premise of our law, that nobody is above the law, including the president.”

Raskin also went on to argue that a popular mode of thinking about how to hold Trump accountable—which is that you can “impeach and convict and then you can prosecute him”—defies the language of the U.S. Constitution.

“That twists the language and turns it upside down in the Constitution. It says, even if you’re impeached and convicted, ‘nevertheless’ you can still be prosecuted and tried and convicted and punished, presupposing, of course, that the president is subject to criminal law,” Raskin said.

The Supreme Court’s decision to take up the case has already significantly waylaid Trump’s D.C. trial, which hinges on whether the former president can be tried for his alleged involvement in the MAGA-led January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, disrupting Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election results.

Following a hearing on Thursday, the court appeared ready to reject Trump’s claims that he can’t be tried on alleged election interference, but their decision may still significantly delay a trial that was originally slated to be the GOP presidential nominee’s first criminal proceeding. The high court’s ruling is expected to be released sometime between late June and early July.