A Giant Awakened

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson raised concerns about granting the president absolute immunity, suggesting it could foster criminal activity in the Oval Office. She questioned Trump's lawyer, D. John Sauer, on why presidents should not be required to follow the law when acting in their official capacity.

Donald Trump is on trial in Manhattan facing 34 counts of falsifying business records as part of another crime: conspiring to influence the 2016 election. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg argues that, to squelch negative publicity that might hurt Trump’s 2016 campaign, Trump directed the creation of fake records to hide hush-money payments to women who claimed they’d had extramarital sex with him.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court held oral arguments over former President Donald Trump’s claims that he enjoys absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for engaging in what he contends were his official duties while in office. And one justice, Samuel Alito, offered a particularly wild theory about how to preserve American democracy and the rule of law. The case centers on whether special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election can proceed or whether—as Trump contends—he is above the law when it comes to his conduct leading up to the January 6 insurrection.

Can a President order a political rival’s assassination and avoid criminal prosecution? What if he sold nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary or staged a coup? These are some of the hypothetical questions posed during oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Thursday as the Justices wrestled with the practical implications of what could happen if they grant former President Donald Trump immunity from criminal prosecution in special counsel Jack Smith’s election interference case against him. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “This case has huge implications for the presidency, for the future of the presidency, for the future of the country,” said Justice Brett Kavanaugh. During nearly three hours of arguments in Trump v.

Former Edgewater police officer McKinzie Rees hopes to serve and protect again, but first she must get her name removed from a so-called “bad cops list” maintained by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office. It landed there, she said, as retaliation after she reported sexual assaults by a supervising sergeant. That sergeant went on to work for another police department until this year, when he pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual contact and misconduct and was sentenced, more than four years after the assaults and retaliation against Rees. She testified to the state’s House Judiciary Committee this week that, even after her attacker was exposed, her complaint about still being listed as a problem police officer “is falling on deaf ears every time.” Rees’ testimony, echoed by other frontline police officers from Colorado Springs and Denver about retaliation they faced after reporting misconduct, is driving state lawmakers’ latest effort at police oversight.

Just what we need, Scary Poppins, to tell us which information is good for us as election-time approaches.