Will Scharf, former President Donald Trump’s lawyer, told Newsmax on Friday that the Supreme Court must decide if and to what degree U.S. presidents have immunity for actions taken in their official capacity as head of the executive branch.
"I think they need to decide what the scope of immunity is and how it applies here," Scharf said on "Wake Up America." "But, look, no lower court has addressed this. We had a liberal judge in the D.C. district who just said there's no immunity whatsoever. A liberal panel of the D.C. circuit then said the same.
"So, we really think the Supreme Court needs to set a rule, send this case back down to the district court and, once it's in the district court, I think it probably should be dismissed, because, really, all of the conduct that they're talking about in this case are things that President Trump did in his official capacity as president.
"We're talking about things like attempting to get the Department of Justice to investigate election fraud, communicating with members of Congress about election fraud. I mean, these are core Article 2 functions of the presidency, and we just think it's insane that President Trump has been dragged through the court on this spurious legal theory."
The Supreme Court is expected to deliver its ruling on the question of whether Trump has any degree of immunity within the next week, but a decision could come as early as Friday. Justices heard oral arguments in the case late April.
"The court could rule today, it could rule next week," Scharf said. "It could even push its rulings into early July. We're on tenterhooks waiting. ... We think that, at this point, a trial before Election Day is highly, highly unlikely, just based on the timeline, based on how long the court has taken to deal with this issue already."
Scharf said that Trump’s legal team is hoping "the Supreme Court adopts a vigorous doctrine of presidential immunity," because, otherwise, "the presidency itself … will be crippled for years to come."
"This idea that a president can be persecuted by his political opponents legally for his official acts in office is a totally novel innovation," Scharf said. "It's never happened before in the history of the United States, going all the way back to Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice John Marshall.
"Even before that, to the framers of our Constitution, there's been a shared understanding that for his official acts in office, not private conduct, but for official conduct, a president simply cannot be prosecuted.
"It's the Biden administration that's engaged in this radical innovation of attempting to prosecute a former president in a way that's just never happened before in American history."
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Nicole Weatherholtz ✉
Nicole Weatherholtz, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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