Trump Just Lost His “Presidential Immunity” Argument. Thoughts, Prayers.

A Washington, D.C., appeals court ruled Tuesday that Donald Trump most certainly does not have “presidential immunity” in the indictment against him for trying to overthrow the 2020 presidential election.

Trump has repeatedly insisted that he cannot be prosecuted for trying to change the election results because he has presidential immunity against criminal proceedings. His lawyers argued his case to a panel of three appellate judges in Washington in early January.

The judges, however, ruled unanimously that Trump is wrong.

“For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution,” the judges said in the ruling.

“We have balanced former President Trump’s asserted interests in executive immunity against the vital public interests that favor allowing this prosecution to proceed,” they wrote. “We conclude that ‘Concerns of public policy, especially as illuminated by our history and the structure of our government’ compel the rejection of his claim of immunity in this case.”

“We also have considered his contention that he is entitled to categorical immunity from criminal liability for any assertedly ‘official’ action that he took as President—a contention that is unsupported by precedent, history or the text and structure of the Constitution. Finally, we are unpersuaded by his argument that this prosecution is barred by ‘double jeopardy principles.’”

Trump will likely appeal the ruling, meaning the case will head to the Supreme Court. This will delay Trump’s trial, which was originally set to begin on March 4, the day before Super Tuesday. The judge presiding over that trial, Tanya Chutkan, called off the March 4 start date last week and said she would set a new schedule once the appeals court ruled on Trump’s immunity.

Now that the court has ruled, it is not clear when the trial could resume. Chutkan has previously kept things moving fairly quickly, but she predicted Monday that the trial could be delayed until much later in the year. If that is the case, then the next trial Trump faces will be in his indictment for his role in hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. That trial is set to begin March 16.

Trump was indicted in August for his role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection and other attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He faces one count each of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to corruptly obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against the right to vote.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges and has insisted the case should be dismissed altogether. He argues that former presidents can’t be criminally charged for actions related to their official responsibilities. He did not explain how overturning an election was related to official presidential duties.

While many critics say Trump’s immunity claim is a desperate attempt to avoid accountability, it could also be an attempt to ease his path toward increased power. As Greg Sargent wrote for The New Republic, “If he wins on this front, he’d be largely unshackled in a second presidential term, free to pursue all manner of corrupt designs with little fear of legal consequences after leaving office again.”

Trump’s own lawyer accidentally revealed as much while arguing why the former president should have immunity. During the hearing, Judge Florence Pan asked if a president would be immune from criminal prosecution if he had ordered Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival. She noted that an order to Seal Team 6 would be an official act. Trump’s lawyer John Sauer said the president could be prosecuted, but only if he had been impeached and convicted first—essentially saying that presidents should be able to order political assassinations in certain circumstances.

This article has been updated.

Never let anyone tell you Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t have a platform. On Monday, the MAGA lawmaker put a double whammy on record: that she doesn’t want the federal government helping families, and she actually loves airline fees.

After Joe Biden called for airlines to limit fees for families who want to sit next to each other on the plane, the Georgia representative blew a gasket.

“What’s next? Joe Biden using his power as president to demand kids eat free at all restaurants too?” Greene posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Why don’t you do your job and CLOSE THE BORDER instead of pandering for votes!!!”

Never mind that Greene’s own party is at fault for the lack of a border deal, as GOP leadership has spent months systematically killing any possibility of an agreement. On Sunday, the Senate unveiled a $118 billion bipartisan agreement to address security at the U.S.-Mexico border, offering exactly the kind of bill that Republicans had been requesting. And yet House Speaker Mike Johnson said the package would be “dead on arrival” in the lower chamber. Greene also rejected the 370-page deal just hours after it was announced, alleging that anyone who supports it must be a foreign agent.

“House Republicans have to decide. Do they want to solve the problem? Or do they want to keep playing politics with the border? I’ve made my decision. I’m ready to solve the problem. I’m ready to secure the border. And so are the American people,” Biden said in a statement on Monday.

“I urge Congress to come together and swiftly pass this bipartisan agreement. Get it to my desk so I can sign it into law immediately,” he continued.

Meanwhile, Greene has spent her own valuable time fruitlessly attacking progressives. Last week, instead of working with her colleagues to coordinate a border package that actually would pass muster in the Senate, Greene drew up a censure resolution against Representative Ilhan Omar, utilizing a bad-faith translation of one of her speeches in Somali to claim that the Muslim lawmaker is working as a “foreign agent.”

Georgia Republicans have introduced a bill they have dubbed the “Women’s Bill of Rights.” But in reality, the measure would expose women, both cis- and transgender, to increased violence and discrimination.

House Bill 1128 was introduced Friday by a group of six Republican state representatives, five of whom are women. The bill starts by defining sex as only biologically male or female.

“An individual’s sex can be observed or clinically verified at or before birth and in no case is an individual’s sex determined by stipulation or self-identification,” the measure states.

This would define transgender people out of the law, stripping them of many rights and protections. The bill also stipulates that everyone must use utilities such as bathrooms, locker rooms, domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, and sports teams that correspond to their gender assigned at birth.

Under the bill, “laws, rules, and regulations that distinguish between the sexes are subject to intermediate constitutional scrutiny.” This could affect measures aimed at eliminating gender discrimination, such as ensuring equal pay or barring discriminatory hiring practices.

The measure also changes state criminal procedure so that attacks based on someone’s sexual identity or gender no longer qualify as a hate crime. Trans people are over four times more likely than cis people to be the victim of violent crimes. If H.B. 1128 becomes law, trans people could no longer seek legal recourse if they are attacked.

Georgia’s bill is the latest in a years-long onslaught in Republican-led states attacking trans rights. There are currently 428 anti-trans bills working their way through state governments. About half of those bills were carried over from 2023.

Many of the measures passed in 2023 were aimed at banning gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary children, despite the fact that the medical community widely considers gender-affirming care to be life-saving treatment. In 2024, many Republicans have moved on to targeting trans adults.

Three days after taking the case off the docket due to months of grandstanding by Trump’s legal team, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is musing over the possibility that Donald Trump’s January 6 criminal trial could be postponed until August.

On Monday, Chutkan told attorneys in another case that she planned to be out of the country in early August, unless Trump’s trial had already begun, reported Politico.

“I hope not to be in the country on August 5,” Chutkan said during a press conference for another trial related to January 6, adding that if she is in the country, it will only be because “I’m in trial in another matter that has not yet returned to my calendar.”

That would push the case—which has been on hold since December while higher courts question the legitimacy of Trump’s presidential immunity claim—past the Republican National Convention on July 15 and possibly until the general election.

Sources close to the former president have said that in private, Trump is bracing for the possibility of serving jail time over the case if it comes to trial this spring. Instead, the delay might play out as a best-case scenario for Trump’s team, who are hoping that independent voters will be upset by the optics of a Democratic administration prosecuting the nation’s GOP nominee.

As Trump’s January 6 trial remains delayed, the next trial on the docket is Trump’s Stormy Daniels hush-money case in New York, which is set to begin in March.

If all else fails, Trump could still technically run for president from behind bars, and there’s a precedent for it. In 1920, the Socialist Party nominee, Eugene V. Debs, garnered nearly a million votes while serving a 10-year sentence for urging U.S. citizens to resist the World War I draft.

Meta’s Oversight Board decided Monday that a Facebook video manipulated to show President Joe Biden behaving inappropriately with his granddaughter can stay on the platform, because the company’s own moderation policy tied the board’s hands.

The video, which was posted last spring, shows Biden putting an “I Voted” sticker on his adult granddaughter’s chest. The clip was edited to make it look like he repeatedly and inappropriately touched her chest. When a user first reported the video, Facebook parent company Meta decided not to take it down. So the user appealed the decision to the Oversight Board, an independent agency tasked with moderating content on Meta’s platforms.

The board determined Monday that the video does not violate Meta’s manipulated media policy, which only applies to videos that have been manipulated with artificial intelligence to make it seem as if someone said something they did not. The policy does not apply to manipulated audio, however.

The rule is too narrow to affect the video in question, the board said, but that doesn’t make the rule good. In fact, the board warned that the policy is problematic in and of itself and could contribute to increased disinformation during the 2024 election cycle.

“The Board is concerned about the Manipulated Media policy in its current form,” the Board said in its decision, “finding it to be incoherent, lacking in persuasive justification and inappropriately focused on how content has been created, rather than on which specific harms it aims to prevent (for example, to electoral processes).”

“The policy should not treat ‘deep fakes’ differently to content altered in other ways,” the board said. “The current policy does not clearly specify the harms it is seeking to prevent. Meta needs to provide greater clarity on what those harms are and needs to make revisions quickly, given the record number of elections in 2024.”

As artificial intelligence improves, the number of so-called “deepfakes” is increasing. A deepfake is an artificially created form of media intended to make it appear that someone said or did something they did not.

During the New Hampshire primary in January, state Democratic voters received a robocall that used a digitally manipulated recording of Biden urging them to “save” their votes and not participate in the primary.

Representative Nancy Mace’s former staffers agree on one thing: The South Carolina lawmaker’s work culture is “toxic.”

As of Monday, every member of Mace’s staff had turned over since November 1, 2023, shortly after Mace joined hands with seven other House Republicans to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Eight employees turned in their resignations after Mace fired her former chief of staff Dan Hanlon, reported The Daily Beast. Hanlon is now running against her in the 2024 primary race for South Carolina’s 1st congressional district.

Those who tapped out on their own accord include her deputy chief of staff Richard Chalkey, her legislative director Randal Meyer, communications director Will Hampson, a financial adviser, a staff assistant, two legislative assistants, and her military legislative assistant.

According to former staff, Mace was “abusive” and “all about control,” utilizing staff not as people “but as property,” reinforcing that environment via unauthorized software systems to constantly “micromanage the office all day and into the night and early morning.”

“If she needed us, we had to answer within eight minutes,” one staffer told the Beast, clarifying that the eight minute mark was a “rule.”

“Nancy is delusional as a boss,” the unidentified employee continued. “She says nothing publicly without her consultants or senior staffers telling her to, but takes credit for everything. She’s a walking teleprompter.”

Another former staffer went further, taking a jab at Mace for recently onboarding disgraced former Representative George Santos’s communications director, Gabrielle Lipsky, to fill the void.

“All this is why pretty much every staffer and fellow member on the Hill thinks she’s a joke,” the staffer told the publication. “Also a big reason why she’s only able to hire former George Santos staffers right now.”

Mace’s new crew tried to brush off the massive turnover as a “non-issue,” according to the Beast.

“​​New coach, new team in the DC office,” Mace’s new chief of staff, Lori Khatod, wrote the outlet in a text message.

Senator James Lankford, the primary Republican negotiator on the Senate’s recently revealed border deal, is running out of patience with the rest of his party.

Lankford has been working for months on a bipartisan bill to address the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as funding for Ukraine and Israel. But the measure, which was revealed Sunday, was immediately met with Republican backlash.

And the GOP’s response is starting to wear Lankford down. The Oklahoma senator called out his party’s two-facedness on the border during an interview Monday.

“The key aspect of this, again, is, are we as Republicans going to have press conferences and complain the border is bad and then intentionally leave it open?” Lankford said on Fox News.

“Are we going to just complain about things, or are we actually going to address and change as many things as we can?”

The bill has received mixed support on both sides, with some Democrats saying that the immigration measures are too draconian. But Republicans have been quietly working for months to actually tank the bill entirely, out of loyalty to Donald Trump.

Republican lawmakers have repeatedly indicated that they don’t want to support the bill in case it ends up helping Joe Biden get reelected. Instead, they would rather continue to fearmonger about immigration in the hopes that Trump wins the 2024 election and can crack down on the border.

House Speaker Mike Johnson called the border deal “dead on arrival” in the chamber. Lankford noted Monday that Johnson had made that comment before he’d actually read the bill.

Lankford has been steadily losing his mind over Republicans’ response to the bipartisan bill. In late January, he said on Fox News that he was just trying to give his party what they have been demanding: a more restrictive border policy.

“Now, it’s interesting, a few months later, when we’re finally getting to the end, they’re like, ‘Just kidding, I actually don’t want a change in law because it’s a presidential election year,’” he said.

Republican Senator James Lankford is calling B.S. on House Speaker Mike Johnson’s newest excuse for killing the border deal.

After months of brutal negotiations, the Senate on Sunday unveiled a $118 billion bipartisan agreement to address security at the U.S.-Mexico border. The deal would tighten standards for asylum, send billions in long-awaited aid to U.S. allies like Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, and would create a standard for shutting down the southern border if daily benchmarks for illegal crossings are reached. So, in other words, it does exactly what a lot of Republicans wanted.

Johnson, who declared the bill “dead on arrival,” seems keen to continue to drag out the ordeal—this time, apparently, because he felt uninvolved.

“Well, when they began to do the negotiation, I suggested immediately after taking the gavel, I suggested to the Senate leadership that the House should be involved,” Johnson said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.

“We should be in the room. I wanted to send the chairmen of our committees of jurisdiction to be a part of that negotiation. And they said, ‘No, no. Let the Senate take care of it. We’ll send you something … that’s palatable.’ What we’re hearing right now is not,” he continued.

But Lankford, who served as the lead GOP negotiator on the bill, claims that’s completely made up.

According to Lankford, Johnson was asked “early on” if he wanted to be “engaged on this,” reported CNN’s Manu Raju.

“He said the House has already spoken,” Lankford said, referring to House Republican bill H.R. 2, an extreme asylum-limiting immigration bill that has effectively zero chance of passing in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Since then, Johnson has been “loosely briefed” on the Senate talks, according to Lankford, who added that if the Senate deal were already law, “the border would have literally been closed every day for the last four months.”

Johnson’s reluctance to meaningfully act on the border can be traced back to recent Republican confessions that dragging out the border crisis actively helps Donald Trump and hurts President Joe Biden in their race for the White House.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had his own two cents for Johnson on Monday, urging the leader of the lower chamber to “do the right thing.”

“I say to Speaker Johnson: Don’t let the 30 hard-right people in the House who are extreme — they wanted us to default, they wanted the government not to pay its debts, they wanted … the government to shut down. They’re extremists, and they’re running your show,” Schumer said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

“You know what the right thing to do is. You know we need to fix our border. You know that it has to be bipartisan,” he added.

Schumer has promised to hold a procedural vote to advance the package on Wednesday. It’s currently unclear if the deal has the 60 votes it needs to pass, however. A couple dozen Republican senators are expected to vote against the deal, according to Lankford, and several Democrats are also expected to torpedo the package.

“If you believe, as I do, that we must secure the border now, doing nothing is not an option,” Biden said on Sunday, throwing his weight behind the deal.

Senator J.D. Vance has essentially admitted he would have carried out a coup during the 2020 election if he could have, in a bald-faced attempt to be chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate.

The Ohio Republican has been floated alongside Representative Elise Stefanik as a possible Trump vice presidential pick. And in an effort to outdo his reported competition, Vance gave a full-throated defense of autocracy during an interview with ABC on Sunday.

When asked if, had he been vice president in 2020, he would have certified the election results, Vance said he would have done things a little differently.

“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said, referring to the fake pro-Trump electors that some states’ Republicans tried to send to Washington.

“That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that’s what we should have done.”

It’s unclear what Vance is basing that supposed legitimacy on, considering the Constitution makes no mention of this. Former Vice President Mike Pence has repeatedly stressed that he certified the votes in 2020, against Trump’s wishes, because he was loyal to the Constitution. There has also been no evidence that the election was fraudulent. Not even investigators hired by Trump have found issues.

Vance also said that the president can ignore Supreme Court rulings he doesn’t like.

“The Constitution says that the Supreme Court can make rulings … but if the Supreme Court said the president of the United States can’t fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling,” Vance claimed.

This is false: Supreme Court rulings must be obeyed by everyone. That is the whole point of the system of checks and balances established by the Constitution.

Despite being a Trump critic during his career as a writer, Vance quickly changed his tune once he entered politics. Trump even endorsed Vance when he ran for the Senate in 2022. Since coming to Washington, Vance continues to express his seemingly limitless support for Trump, such as by blocking judicial nominations to protest Trump getting indicted.

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith systematically dismantled Donald Trump’s newest defense in the classified documents case, as well as his revisionist retelling of the August 2022 FBI raid at Mar-A-Lago.

In a series of court filings on Friday, Smith refuted Trump’s claim that the Department of Energy had given him special clearance to personally retain more than 300 classified documents at the Florida estate.

Trump’s legal team had argued that the government had an obligation to search for Trump’s clearance in a database maintained by the intelligence community, Scattered Castles. So, Smith did exactly that.

“Smith pointed out that he had already produced a search in Scattered Castles, ‘which yielded no past or present security clearances for Trump.’ Same result in the Department of Defense system,” wrote Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor, in her Civil Discourse blog on Sunday.

The Department of Energy clearance, which Trump keeps referring to, was also retroactively terminated to the end of his presidency.

“That means that Trump’s ongoing possession of classified material and his failure to return them pursuant to a subpoena—long after the Q clearance was terminated—can’t conceivably be justified on this basis,” Vance wrote.

In the rest of the 67-page filing, Smith said that Trump’s defense had “cherry-picked” quotes from documents in order to fuel its counter narrative that the federal government was orchestrating a political crusade against the GOP frontrunner, “putting a nefarious gloss on innocuous events.”

“As the exhibits and an accurate timeline attest, the defendants’ narrative overlooks the fact that various federal agencies confronted, and appropriately responded to, an extraordinary situation resulting entirely from the defendants’ conduct,” Smith wrote.

“As [the National Archives and Records Administration] attempted to carry out its statutory responsibilities from 2021 into 2022, highly classified documents sat in a ballroom, bathroom, office space, and a basement storage room at a social club traversed by thousands of members, employees, and guests. NARA rightly involved other government agencies that had equities and authorities that it did not, as necessary to navigate an unprecedented situation.”

“That is hardly surprising, and it in no way, shape, or form supports the hyperbolic claim of ‘politically motivated operatives’ launching a ‘crusade against President Trump.’ ... The defendants’ legal problems are solely of their own making,” Smith continued.

Trump is on the line for 40 felony counts in the classified documents case, including 32 counts of willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding documents, and concealing records. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges.