President Donald Trump's SCOTUS team has looked into nominee Brett Kavanaugh's past comments questioning whether a sitting president can be criminally indicted, CNN's Jim Acosta reports.
"A serious constitutional question exists regarding whether a president can be criminally indicted and tried while in office," Kavanaugh, a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals judge, wrote in an article in 2009.
"One might raise at least two important critiques of these ideas," Kavanaugh acknowledged in his essay published in the Minnesota Law Review. "The first is that no one is above the law in our system of government. I strongly agree with that principle. But it is not ultimately a persuasive criticism of these suggestions. The point is not to put the president above the law or to eliminate checks on the president, but simply to defer litigation and investigations until the president is out of office.
"A second possible concern is that the country needs a check against a bad-behaving or law-breaking president. But the Constitution already provides that check. If the president does something dastardly, the impeachment process is available."
Trump is supposedly favoring Kavanaugh because of those views, per CNN. The president could be indicted in the Russia probe, some law experts say, while the Department of Justice is of the opinion that cannot happen.
Kavanaugh, a former clerk for retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, is the leading contender for the SCOTUS position. He also argued in his paper, presidents should be free of legal inquiries until after they leave office.