Special investigator Jack Smith’s group has asked the US Supreme Court on Monday night to deny former President Donald Trump’s argument that he cannot be prosecuted in a case accusing him of plotting to change the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The prosecutors sent their request to the judges a little more than two weeks before they will discuss whether a former president can be accused of crimes for things they did while in the White House, which has never been tested legally.
“They said that the President’s plan to use his power to change the election and stop the peaceful transfer of power goes against the rules that protect democracy. ”
The result of the April 25 arguments will help decide if Trump will go to trial this year for trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power after losing the 2020 election.
Trump says that former presidents cannot be held responsible for things they did while they were in office. Both the judge in charge of the case, Tanya Chutkan, and a three-judge federal appeals panel in Washington strongly denied that argument.
The highest court in the US said it will consider the question, making it unclear if the case against Trump can go to trial before the election. Trump is facing four criminal prosecutions and is the likely Republican nominee for president.
In their recent report, Smith’s team repeated a lot of the same arguments from lower courts, specifically mentioning that “federal criminal law applies to the president. ”
The people who wrote the rules for the country did not say that a former President could not be charged with a crime. Every President from the beginning of the country to now knows that they could be charged with a crime for things they did while in office, even after they are no longer President.
The prosecutors mentioned that even if the highest court agrees that a president has some protection for their official actions, they should still allow the case to continue because a lot of the charges are about Trump’s personal behavior.
Smith’s team said that the court could decide that Trump is not protected from being sued in this case, without making a decision that would affect other cases.
“They said that if the person accused of crimes is not protected from punishment, then the case will be resolved. But there might be other difficult questions to answer in the future if different situations come up. “