Today, an

indictment was unsealed, charging Donald J. Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding.

But the specifics of that indictment were complicated because this is a complicated case. Nothing like it had ever really happened before in American presidential history. And there were a lot of uncertainties about, you know, constitutional issues, what the Supreme Court would think, and so on. So Jack Smith charged a kind of complex case. They charged him specifically with conspiracy and obstruction, that Trump was conspiring to get various others to do something illegal in trying to overturn the election results, and that he was trying to illegally stop the legal process of certifying those results. And so he threw a bunch of different things into that indictment. He threw into, oh, Trump tried to tell his Justice Department officials to pressure the states to not certify certain results because of the lie that there was voter fraud, and various other things that were basically all thrown into this indictment as part of this overarching conspiracy or attempt to obstruct the certification of the election. That case has been moving forward at the district court level in Washington, D.C., but Trump appealed saying, you can't prosecute me for this because this all happened while I was president and the president should have absolute immunity from prosecution. A president has to have immunity. You don't have a president. Or at most you can say it would be a ceremonial president. That's not what the founders had in mind. And they're not talking about ceremonial.

We want presidents that can get things done and bring people together. He

claimed that all of that fell under his presidential powers and that it would be a terrible precedent to prosecute a former president for official things he did while in office. It would limit the freedom and the authority of the president to govern later on. And basically the Supreme Court, the majority of the Supreme Court, I should say, the six conservatives, very strongly agreed with that analysis. They rejected the judgments of the district court and the D.C. Circuit Court that the president is not, fully not above the law, that he has no official immunity from prosecution, that basically, if prosecutors argue that certain acts are corrupt, he can be prosecuted for them. The Supreme Court said no. They said that the president does enjoy, in certain areas, absolute immunity from prosecution. But they laid out a three-part test. They said that any time you try to indict a former president, you need to analyze which of these three categories the conduct being indicted falls into. So category number one is core constitutional powers. They say you cannot ever indict a president for anything that relates to his core constitutional powers. He enjoys absolute and total immunity from prosecution for anything like that. The second category is official acts. Official acts are stuff that the president does that have to do with the presidency and being president, but are not necessarily his specifically granted constitutional powers. And so the Supreme Court said that in official acts, they're not entirely deciding how immune the president is yet. They say that he is presumptively immune from prosecution for official acts. He might be absolutely immune, they're saying, but we're not totally sure yet. And they say that at the very least, he gets the benefit of the doubt. And it's really up to whoever's prosecuting to make the case that prosecuting a former president for official acts would not cause serious impositions on the power of the presidency. And the third category is unofficial acts. They say there's no immunity at all for unofficial acts. And of course, the catch is, how do you decide what falls into each of these categories? And they basically say, we're not totally sure yet, and we're going to send it back down to the lower courts and let them come up with some answers, do some fact-finding, and then eventually it'll come back up to us, probably.

Did this decision today fundamentally change our understanding of the presidency? Or did we already know the president is immune when doing certain official things and probably not immune when doing certain unofficial things? This isn't a new and

novel decision. There were some precedents that could have been pointed to. But if you look at the dissents from the liberal justices like Sonia Sotomayor, they are extremely worried about this decision. Justice Sotomayor writes, the relationship between the president and the power he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law. Sotomayor is arguing, when the president uses his official powers in any way under the majority's reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival. Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold on to power. Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon. Immune. Immune. Immune. Immune. And

is that a fair characterization of the majority's opinion today? Are they saying Joe Biden could go out and, I don't know, shoot Donald Trump today and it would be okay?

Well, that's where you get to the vagueness in the majority opinion, because they lay out these three categories of core constitutional powers, official acts, unofficial acts, but they leave it very vague as to what falls in each category. The only straightforward answer that they gave was that the president talking to his Justice Department about certain things, prosecutions and so on, he should be absolutely immune from any prosecution based on that. But everything else, including a ton of the stuff that was charged in the Trump indictment, they say, we're not deciding on this yet. And we're going to send it back down and let other people think. So I don't think it's fair to say that they fully gave a green light for, you know, assassinations and coups and all those sort of things. They just simply, they gave the president more immunity and they're leaving it somewhat vague into what falls into each specific category they laid out. It

seems like if the country was waiting for some clarity on whether Donald Trump is guilty of a crime around his actions after the 2020 election, we didn't really get that clarity, that answer today. Instead, we got some sort of affirmations about presidential immunity and a punt back to the lower courts. Why did that take so long, Andrew? Couldn't we have used this information like months ago, because obviously this might have implications for our forthcoming

election? One thing that shines through in the majority opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts is that the conservative justices are very skeptical about the arguments that, oh, we need to settle this quickly or be totally clear on this before the 2024 election. They included certain digs at that because their position is that this is a core issue about presidential power. It's bigger than Donald Trump. It's bigger than 2024. It could resonate for decades or more, and that we need to figure out the answer to this question, not just make up our minds based on whether we think Donald Trump is good or bad, or should we kind of rush a decision before the 2024 election. They were concerned about the expedition of this case, the lack of factual analysis by the lower courts, the absence of pertinent briefings by the parties. That's basically a message of slow down this effort to, you know, hold Trump accountable before the 2024 election. They don't buy it. If I were to read into it, I would say that they probably agree with some of the arguments that this is a politicized prosecution, though they don't outright say that. they are at least open to that possibility and are not, they are not buying the prosecutor and the democratic establishment's narrative that this is tremendously important for the rule of law and the future of the country to have all these issues settled before the 2024 election.