George Conway and ex-Trump lawyer Ty Cobb join Jack Smith in arguing against immunity – Raw Story
Kathleen Culliton is Raw Story's assistant managing editor. She's been covering local and national news for more than a decade for outlets that include the New York Post, Al Jazeera, DNAinfo New York, Bustle, the New York Daily News, WNYC, NY1, City Limits and the New York City Patch. Kathleen is a proud alumna of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Here's a shocker; she is from New York City.
George Conway, a conservative attorney, and Donald Trump's former lawyer, Ty Cobb, threw their support behind Special Counsel Jack Smith Friday with a new filing slamming the former president's immunity defense, court records show.
Conway, a vocal critic of the former president, and Cobb are among 16 former prosecutors, government officials, and constitutional attorneys who added their names to an Amicus Brief filed in the D.C. Circuit's Court of Appeals.
"[We] have an interest in the proper scope of executive power and the faithful enforcement of criminal laws enacted by Congress," the group writes. "The immunity defendant seeks in this case is inconsistent with our Constitution and would subvert the bedrock principle that no person is above the law."
The 36-page motion adds to a pile of mounting paper filed in Trump's appeal to dismiss his federal election interference case on the grounds of presidential immunity.
ALSO READ: Trump visit to South Dakota puts Gov. Kristi Noem in a tax jam
Smith accuses Trump of defrauding the U.S. by attempting to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power and overturn a presidential election. Trump has pleaded not guilty.
While a victory in the D.C. appeals court would force Smith to dismiss the Washington D.C. case, experts say it's not looking likely.
In their Friday filing, the group argues Trump's demand for immunity from federal criminal prosecution "can't be squared" with the Constitution.
They say Trump's actions between the Nov. 2020 election and the riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 fell outside his presidential duties and are therefore not protected.
"He repeatedly invokes implied separation-of-powers principles, contending that the imposition of criminal liability on him would unduly impair the Executive Branch," the group writes.
"But it is defendant’s claimed immunity—not his prosecution— that would undermine those principles."
Several of the attorneys named in the brief served under President George W. Bush, including former Associate Counsel Bradford Berenson, former Nevada U.S. Attorney General Gregory A. Brower, former Illinois U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and former Washington U.S. Attorney John McKay.
Former Republican lawmakers include Reps. Tom Campbell (R-CA), Tom Coleman (R-MO), Claudine Schneider (R-RI), as well as Vice President Dan Quayle's chief of staff William Kristol and Olivia Troye, who served as Special Advisor, Homeland Security and Counterterrorism to Vice President Mike Pence.
"The alleged criminal activity here raises a uniquely dangerous constitutional threat," the group concludes.
"Such activity threatens our constitutional structure at its core and, by its very nature, eviscerates one of the primary constitutional checks on presidential misconduct—rebuke by the people at the ballot box," the brief states.
As Nikki Haley's position in the 2024 race for president becomes more contentious, she's sending out messages that — while she thinks Donald Trump's behavior has been reckless — she'd be inclined to pardon him of any convictions if she's elected president.
At a campaign event Thursday, Haley was even more specific — saying she would outright pardon Trump because it would "be in the best interest of the country."
“What’s in the best interest of the country is not to have an 80-year-old man sitting in jail that continues to divide our country. What’s in the best interest of our country is to pardon him so that we can move on as a country and no longer talk about him," Haley said.
Also read: Flashback: These GOP senators suggested Trump could be criminally prosecuted after Jan. 6
Florida governor and Haley's fellow 2024 contender, Ron DeSantis, has echoed a similar position.
According to MSNBC's Steve Benen, the problem with such rhetoric is that Haley is mistaken if she thinks a pardon for Trump will cause Americans to stop talking about him.
"It’s not as if he would simply slink away to Mar-a-Lago, with a Haley-endorsed pardon in hand, to enjoy retirement," Benen wrote.
He added that waiving any convictions would be a dangerous precedent to set.
"The idea that it’s “in the country’s interest” to simply let a suspected felon get away with dangerous and unprecedented alleged crimes is highly debatable," he wrote.
"The more future presidents are told they’ll be pardoned for serious felonies, creating an accountability-free dynamic, the less they’ll be restrained."
Benen adds that he is struck by the fact that serious contenders for the presidency are even considering such scenarios.
"That’s generally because, as a rule, those charged with multiple felonies don’t seek the presidency."
January 6 was just a “rehearsal” for what Donald Trump has planned for his next administration, two experts warned Tuesday.
And they sounded the alarm that the country is now in much worse shape to survive Trump than it was three years ago.
“Our democracy is more fragile now than it was then,” states the article in The Bulwark written Jeffrey Tulis, a government professor at the University of Texas, and the website’s Editor-at -Large William Kristol.
“Three years of normalizing January 6th by the likely Republican nominee has created an unprecedentedly dangerous situation.”
They went on, "This is why we are in important ways in greater peril in January 2024 than we were in January 2021."
Since January 2021, many of the Republicans who broke with Trump and were willing to blame him for the insurrection have gone, been marginalized or have been taken back into the MAGA fold, the writers state.
“If he were returned to the White House, he would have only sycophants around him and none of the so-called “adults in the room” who, however ineffectually, tried in his first term to check his worse impulses,” they wrote.
“The pro-insurrectionists, joined by anti-anti-insurrectionists, are in control of the Republican Party. And the forces marshaled behind Donald Trump to subvert and overthrow important features of our constitutional democracy are stronger than they were in January 2021 — or for that matter in January 2017.”
ALSO READ: Why 'it’s the economy, stupid' no longer applies
And they wrote that Trump has been open about the authoritarian and vengeful agenda he intends to fulfill — which he is likely to be able to achieve now that opposition has been quelled.
‘[He] would tilt the federal government radically toward lawlessness, and would seriously, perhaps critically, wound our constitutional democracy,” they warned.
“January 6th, it turns out, was a rehearsal for the true upheaval, the far deeper insurrection, that Trump now intends to lead if re-elected. January 6th was prologue. The election year of 2024 will be the decisive drama on the main stage, and its outcome is very much in doubt.”
Former Attorney General William Barr blasted his one-time boss Donald Trump in a column for The Free Press on Tuesday — even as he proclaimed the state decisions in Colorado and Maine to remove the former president from the ballot are "unconstitutional."
"I am firmly opposed to Trump’s candidacy," wrote Barr. "While I think it is critical the Biden administration be beaten at the polls, Trump is not the answer. He is not capable of winning the decisive victory Republicans need to advance conservative principles. And his truculent, petty, and toxic persona — unconstrained by any need to face the voters again — will damage the country."
However, he continued, he also believes attempts to disqualify him from the ballot will be "destructive of our political order" — and urges the Supreme Court to nullify the decisions quickly.
"As a legal matter, states do not have the power to enforce the disqualification provision of the Fourteenth Amendment by using their own ad hoc procedures to find that an individual has engaged in an insurrection," said Barr. "If the Justice Department, in pursuing its criminal case, had found that Trump had engaged in insurrection, it would be another story. But it has not."
The exact mechanism for the Insurrection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and whether state officials have power to execute it, has never been settled in court. However, Barr's interpretation that a criminal conviction is necessary to rule a candidate disqualified is itself controversial and disputed by many other legal authorities, including conservative jurist Michael Luttig.
Other legal scholars have noted that none of the Confederate defectors disqualified from holding office when the amendment was originally passed in the 1860s were criminally convicted for their roles in the Civil War.
Barr, who previously served as attorney general under George H.W. Bush before reprising the role in the Trump administration, was an early proponent of "unitary executive theory," or the idea that the president's powers aren't subject to checks by the other branches. He was frequently accused of weaponizing the Justice Department for Trump's political ends, including distorting the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election; however, he broke sharply with Trump over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, after which the former president turned on him.
Copyright © 2023 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 | Masthead | Privacy Policy | Manage Preferences | Debug Logs
For corrections contact corrections@rawstory.com, for support contact support@rawstory.com.