Transcript
Dahlia Lithwick (0:00)
Foreign hello, Dahlia Lithwick here, your host on amicus, which is Slate's podcast about the courts, the law and the U.S. supreme Court. And there's just too much legal news to chew on this week. Friday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the TikTok ban case. Also Friday, Judge Juan Merchan in Manhattan is due to sentence President elect Donald Trump. Trump has appealed that to the Supreme Court, claiming sweeping president elect sexual immunity. Meanwhile, Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida has decided that jurisdictions are just imaginary, and she has reached out and blocked the release of special counsel Jack Smith's final report on the two investigations that yielded federal felony charges against Trump. Oh, and Justice Samuel Alito, who is at the time of this taping presumably weighing Trump's claim of immunity for when you're almost the president again chatted it up with the president elect over the phone earlier this week over what is essentially a Trump transition HR matter. Too much legal news and we were worried that some really important information was in danger of getting lost in the melee. So we turned to the one and only Andrew Weissman to try to pick over the law of Trump of it all in a special bonus episode for our Slate plus listeners. Andrew Weissman is co host of the popular podcast Prosecuting Donald Trump, just rechristened Main Justice. He's a frequent legal analyst for NBC and msnbc. His memoir about the special counsel investigation, where Law Ends Inside the Mueller Investigation, was a New York Times bestseller. Here's a taste of our conversation hot off the presses. There are literally so many prosecuting Donald Trump kind of dangling stories that are swirling in this little interregnum between the certification of the election that just happened, the inauguration that's about to happen. And I fear we are going to miss some of these dangling threads. And that's why we wanted to pause to have this conversation. Can we just start with future President Trump's appeal to the Supreme Court, asking them to pause his sentencing in the hush money case. His lawyers repeatedly cited the decision in the immunity case, saying that this should extend to, you know, criminal, broad, broad, broad, sweeping criminal immunity for all things for unofficial pre presidential, all the acts. Can you just walk us through what the claim is that is supposed to stop this sentencing that's meant to happen Friday morning at 10:00?
Andrew Weissman (2:50)
Sure. Well, there's a grab bag of issues that have been raised. And so one is to try and get the Supreme Court to expand its presidential immunity decision. And a lot of people who are listening are going, what does this have to do with Presidential immunity, the New York case was about conduct that was personal and not presidential. And that is because part of the decision said not only are we going to sort of immunize presidents for criminal liability for official conduct, but we also said even when they're prosecuted for unofficial conduct, you can't use, in that case, official conduct to prove it. There were only five justices who signed on to that. Amy Coney Barrett dissented. And so that is one of the issues that Juan Merchand decided, which was that the bits and pieces of allegedly official act evidence was in fact, not prejudicial. It wasn't official act evidence anyway. And he had a lengthy decision about that. So that's sort of one argument that's made. Another is that although you decided official immunity with respect to presidents, you should sort of extend that to when someone's a president elect because that's an important phase. It's an, you know, and you shouldn't be distracted. So again, it's sort of this grab bag of issues that have been put in. And procedurally, many of those issues really are not technically ripe. I just think it's really important for people to know that a normal defendant that is not Donald Trump, they can get sentenced. In fact, they have to be sentenced before they raise issues. But let's assume there is a procedural problem in the case or substantive problem in the case. Somebody goes through trial, they get sentenced and then on appeal, they raise those issues. And a court of appeals may say, you're right and you get a new trial. You don't get to say, wait, wait, wait, don't even take me to trial or don't sentence me. I have all these issues I want to raise right now. The normal rule is things proceed, you know, in, in certain orders, the trial, the sentence, and then an appeal. And if there's a mistake, it goes back. And Donald Trump is trying to circuit that. And if the Supreme Court, in my view, grants this, it is a real sign that we have not just a two tiered system of justice, which, you know, many people have talked about in terms of race and class, but in fact, you'll have two tiers plus the Donald Trump tier.