BREAKING: Supreme Court RULES Trump Must Face Consequences Like Every Other Citizen!!

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]The US Supreme Court late this morning ruling former President Trump may claim immunity from criminal prosecution for some of the actions he took in the waning days of his presidency. Michael Persic on it for us. He's following the case and breaking it down for us this afternoon. Michael. Joel, that Supreme Court ruling recognizing former President Donald Trump's immunity claim for official acts as president. They rejected it for unofficial acts. The majority opinion delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts states, "While the president is not above the law that he may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers and he is entitled to at least presumptive prosecution for his official acts. Still it states that Trump is asserting a far broader immunity than the limited one we have recognized." Now in the dissent Justice Sonia Sotomayor countering that it makes a mockery of the principle foundational to our Constitution and system of government that no man is above the law. Hello, David Brown is here and it's happening right now. The Supreme Court ruled in binding precedent for the first time in history that the president is not above the law.

[00:01:06]Chief Justice Roberts put it in writing.

[00:01:09]But the ruling simultaneously wrapped official acts in protective armor so thick it left legal scholars stunned.

[00:01:17]Here's the paradox. Trump got a shield and the lower courts just ruled he never picked it up.

[00:01:24]For his most dangerous conduct, the rally speech, the pressure campaigns, the political scheming to overturn the election, courts found none of it qualified as official presidential action. The Supreme Court handed him armor, the lower courts ruled it didn't fit. Hello, thank you for joining us. We begin our report in Washington where a federal appeals court has rejected Donald Trump's claim that he is immune from prosecution in the 2020 election interference case against him. The panel of three judges unanimously turned back the presidential immunity argument. In their decision, they said Trump no longer has protections he may have had as president. Trump is expected to appeal to the Supreme Court, which could either decline to take the case or if they do, could delay the case by months as they consider it. CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford reports.

[00:02:17]The ruling by the influential DC-based federal appeals court was a stern rebuke of the former president's sweeping claims about immunity from prosecution.

[00:02:26]With the court saying the former president must face trial for efforts to subvert the 2020 election. For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump with all the defenses of any other criminal defendant. In court and on the campaign trail, Donald Trump repeatedly says he can't be prosecuted for his actions as president. A president has to be given immunity and this has nothing to do with me. I need you to look past the Twitter threads and the talking heads who glanced at a two-paragraph summary and declared total victory or total defeat because this ruling is a Swiss Army knife, not a sledgehammer. To grasp the sheer audacity of what the court has done, you have to visualize the complex machinery they just activated. This wasn't a flat ruling of yes, you can prosecute or no, you can't.

[00:03:19]Instead, the court constructed a three-tiered pyramid of presidential conduct, a sliding scale of invincibility that determines whether a president can be dragged into a courtroom to face the music. All right, well, you just heard that CBS News special report. An appeals court in Washington, D.C. has ruled that Donald Trump does not have presidential immunity in his criminal case stemming from January 6th. So, Katrina Kaufman is here in studio at 57 with us to break it all down. She's an attorney and a CBS News campaign reporter and you have been basically on Trump court cases this sort of whole time. So, this is what you've been waiting for. You've been sort of going through the decision. It's 50 odd pages. What's standing out to you?

[00:04:02]I've only had kind of a moment to have a cursory look at this, but I mean, basically they affirm that when Trump left left office, he lost the protection of the presidency. He lost the protection of presidential immunity. So, this claim that he made, it just no longer stands. And it felt very clear sitting in the courtroom when this appeal was going on in Washington, D.C.

[00:04:24]that the judges were were very skeptical of this argument.

[00:04:29]You know, President Trump's claim that almost no matter what he did, he would be protected. Let's dissect this architecture because it is the skeleton key to understanding every legal fight that will dominate the headlines for the next decade. At the very top, the court placed a halo of absolute impenetrable immunity. This covers the core constitutional powers that only a president can wield. The sacred duties like commanding the armed forces in a time of war, issuing pardons to the convicted, or firing executive branch officials. If an act falls into this category, the courthouse doors are welded shut. You cannot prosecute it.

[00:05:12]And chillingly, you cannot even use it as evidence to prove a crime that happened elsewhere. It's a legal black hole. The second tier is a murkier, wider circle of presumptive immunity for other official acts. This is the zone of the outer perimeter of the job. The day-to-day governance that isn't constitutionally exclusive, but is still part of the job description. Here, the court didn't lock the door, but they installed a vault that requires dynamite to open. Prosecutors can overcome this immunity, but only if they can prove that dragging the president's decision-making into the light of a criminal trial won't unduly chill the future functioning of the executive branch. Former President Donald Trump is hailing today's decision by the Supreme Court on presidential immunity.

[00:06:01]The justices ruled that former presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for their official conduct, but not for unofficial acts.

[00:06:11]The Supreme Court issued a landmark decision on presidential immunity in a case that directly affects former President Trump. In a 6-3 ruling, the conservative majority divided presidential conduct into three categories. Official acts that are part of the president's core constitutional powers, for which the president has absolute immunity. Other official acts outside the president's exclusive authority have presumptive immunity. And there is no immunity for unofficial acts. On the majority side, they I think very legitimately were concerned about the threat of future presidents possibly being prosecuted. It's a massive legal hurdle, a steep hill to climb. But it is the third tier, the ground floor, where the seismic shaking truly begins.

[00:06:59]The court declared that for unofficial acts, the president is stripped of his armor. He stands naked before the law, no different than you or me. This is the domain of the private citizen, the political candidate, the businessman who happens to sleep in the White House. In this zone, the prosecution is open season. And the earth-shattering development that has just landed is this. Federal judges have started sorting through the wreckage of January 6th, and they are tossing the most damning aspects of Trump's conduct right into that vulnerable, unprotected third bucket. They are labeling the pressure on Mike Pence, the speech at the ellipse, and the scheme to create fake electors as the desperate flailing of a candidate, not the sacred duty of a commander-in-chief.

[00:07:48]Let's take a moment to center ourselves in the long arc of history, because the text of this ruling will be hung on the walls of law schools long after we are dust. The debate over whether a president is a temporary monarch or a chief magistrate bound by the chains of the law is not a new cocktail party debate. It is the primal scream of the American Revolution.

[00:08:12]We fought a war to escape a king, and yet for 200 years we have danced around the question of whether we accidentally created an elective one.

[00:08:22]The Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel wrote internal memos decades ago arguing that a sitting president couldn't be indicted because the trial itself would the nation.

[00:08:33]Civil cases like Clinton versus Jones poked at the edges, allowing Paula Jones to sue a sitting president for private conduct, but a criminal case? A criminal case against a former president for how he used the machinery of government?

[00:08:47]That has always been the ghost that haunted the Republic. A theoretical danger that everyone whispered about, but no court ever slapped down in a binding way. Until now. The Supreme Court has walked into the hallowed halls of the ghosts of Madison, Hamilton, and Lincoln and has finally, definitively picked a side. By writing "The president is not above the law", the court didn't just settle a legal dispute. They closed the chapter on a dangerous vacuum. They transformed a political courtesy into a constitutional violation. The significance of this linguistic shift cannot be overstated. For Trump's most ardent legal defenders, the core argument was always a sweeping, almost monarchical claim. A former president is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for anything he did in office unless the Senate first convicts him in an impeachment trial. That argument has just been taken out back by the Chief Justice and shot. Roberts explicitly rejected the idea of the untouchable former president, calling the notion incompatible with the American DNA.

[00:09:51]The ruling is a masterpiece of constitutional boundary setting.

[00:09:55]It says to the executive branch, "You have a fortress to protect your legitimate work from partisan hack prosecutions." But, it also says to the American people, "That fortress does not extend to the gutters of a violent political campaign."

[00:10:11]Now, I want you to feel the weight of the gavel crashing down in the lower courts because the Supreme Court's philosophy is just abstract art until a judge applies it to the stains of reality. And that application is where the Trump legal strategy has essentially face-planted. The Supreme Court sent the cases back saying, "We did the theory, now you do the dirty work." And in a series of rulings that have dropped like hammers on a piano, the lower courts have done exactly that. The most cinematic of these is the finding by Judge Amit Mehta regarding the stop the steal rally at the ellipse.

[00:10:48]If you remember nothing else from that dark day, you remember the image of the crowd gathering, the rhetoric of fighting like hell, and the subsequent march toward the Capitol.

[00:10:58]Trump's lawyers argued that this was official presidential speech, an address to the nation about election integrity.

[00:11:06]Judge Mehta looked at the evidence, the private rally organizers, the campaign financing, the lack of executive branch machinery in its staging, and declared it a political rally, pure and simple.

[00:11:19]It was a campaign event. It was a candidate begging to keep a job he had already lost. Therefore, every word spoken into that frigid air is stripped of immunity. Trump can be sued for the injuries that flowed from those words.

[00:11:35]The Capitol police officers who were crushed in the tunnel, their bones broken by the mob, now have a legal spear aimed directly at Trump's personal fortune. This is not the government paying out a settlement in a quiet administrative move. This is personal accountability piercing the veil of the presidency. Are you absorbing the shock wave?

[00:11:57]The single most infamous speech of the modern political era, the audio track that accompanied the destruction of the Capitol, has been legally classified as an unofficial act. That is a mortal wound to the claim that Trump was acting as a defender of the Constitution when he directed the mob toward the certification. And if you think that is a narrow win, look at the consolidated civil case of Lee and Smith versus Trump, a legal labyrinth that just delivered another body blow to the fortress of immunity. In this arena, the target was the procedural maneuver known as the Westfall Act. Imagine a magic legal lever that, if pulled, swaps out the name of a government employee and replaces it with the United States of America as the defendant. If Trump was acting within the scope of his employment on January 6th, the lever would have been pulled and Uncle Sam, meaning the taxpayers, you and me, would be on the hook for the damages. The federal court rejected this substitution with prejudice. They refused to let Trump hide behind the flag. The ruling found that an act of insurrection, a violent attempt to decapitate a co-equal branch of government, simply cannot be categorized as an official duty of the person who took an oath to faithfully execute the laws.

[00:13:16]By keeping Trump as the defendant, the court ensured that the discovery process, the digging through emails, the depositions under oath, and the potential multi-million dollar punitive damages will target Trump directly.

[00:13:30]This is the stuff of nightmares for a man who has built a career on the threat of litigation, but rarely the finality of personal financial ruin. The Westfall Act rejection is a legal missile because it brands the attempt to overturn the election as a private criminal conspiracy cloaked in a suit and tie, not a policy dispute between branches of government. It confirms that in the eyes of the law, trying to steal an election is a side hustle. It is not in the job description of the President of the United States. Let's step back and process the raw visceral emotion of what that Supreme Court opinion physically represents. We are holding a document that defines the perimeter of tyranny in a democratic system. The fact that Chief Justice Roberts, an institutionalist obsessed with the reputation of the court, found a way to craft a unanimous or near unanimous framework on the separation of powers is staggering. By creating the absolute immunity tier, he protected the presidency from frivolous legal attacks. He ensured that a future President Biden cannot be sued for a drone strike decision, and a future President DeSantis cannot be indicted for a controversial pardon.

[00:14:46]That is the sugar that makes the medicine go down for the originalists.

[00:14:50]But the medicine, the bitter reality piercing medicine for Trump, is the creation of the unofficial zone. This is the zone that says a president's worst impulses, his greed, his private grudges, and his campaign trail hate speech are not the burden of the Republic to bear. They are his alone.

[00:15:11]What is so mind-bendingly clever about this ruling is that it weaponizes Trump's own defense. For years, his lawyers argued that everything he did was political or personal to shield him from statutory guardrails in his first impeachment. Now, to escape the weight of the criminal law, they had to pivot and argue everything was official. The courts have smashed that pivot. They are using the definition of official as a sieve. And it turns out that the planning of the fake elector scheme, the tweet telling the mob to be wild, and the call to Brad Raffensperger demanding to find votes are falling right through the holes because they weren't preserving the union. They were preserving a man's ego. This is the ultimate constitutional jujitsu. This is also a moment that will define the character of the American people for the next generation. We are a nation built on the premise that no one gets a crown.

[00:16:12]The not above the law principle is not just a legal precedent, it's a cultural reset. It tells every future occupant of the Oval Office that when they take that oath, they are not receiving a get-out-of-jail-free card for their private vices. It tells future staffers in the White House Counsel's Office that if the president asks you to do something campaign-related using the trappings of the government, you are wading into a minefield where you might lose your license and your liberty.

[00:16:44]The psychological impact of this on future executive power is seismic. The court has built a warning siren into the very structure of the office. They've said to the tyrant in waiting, "You can command the army and we won't question it. You can fire a diplomat and we won't prosecute it. But if you use your Twitter account to incite a riot against the legislature to keep power you didn't earn, the full crushing weight of the criminal justice system will collapse upon you the moment your term expires."

[00:17:16]This ruling strips away the ambiguity that bad actors thrive on. They can no longer claim to be operating in a gray zone. The map has been drawn. The boundaries are surveilled. The Chief Justice has effectively deputized the lower courts to be the gatekeepers of the official designation. And those gatekeepers just denied Trump entry to the safety of the keep. His supporters can scream witch hunt all they want, but the broom they are pointing at belongs to Article 3 of the Constitution, wielded by judges appointed for life who hold the collective power to define reality. Now, let's zero in on the immediate explosive fallout for the man at the center of the storm. Because this is where the legal rubber meets the raw, unvarnished political road. Trump is no longer just fighting a cultural war against the establishment. He is fighting a multi-front legal war where the enemy has been given the Supreme Court's field manual.

[00:18:16]The finding that the ellipse speech is unofficial creates a direct pipeline to civil liability for the Capitol Police, the Democratic lawmakers, and the staffers trapped under desks. This is their moment. Er, they are not just seeking a public apology. They are seeking a monetary judgment that attaches to Trump's bank accounts, his properties, and his real estate portfolio. The personal sting of a financial verdict is a language Trump has famously understood his entire career. Furthermore, the criminal dimension of the unofficial bucket is where the real peril ferments. The pressure campaign on state election officials, the cajoling of Vice President Pence to violate his constitutional oath, and the orchestration of the fraudulent elector certificates were not policy objectives.

[00:19:06]A judge applying the Supreme Court's microscope is looking at those acts and seeing the desperate mechanics of a candidate, not the solemn duties of a president. This means evidence can be gathered, grand juries can hear witnesses, and indictments can fly. The Supreme Court didn't dismiss the indictments, they just handed a checklist to the special prosecutor. The checklist reads, "Separate the policy from the politics. The politics are indictable." And looking at the mountain of evidence, the mountain of political scheming is towering. The entire narrative that Trump was solely acting to protect election integrity crumbles when the courts examine whether he used the Oval Office to direct a Justice Department investigation into a foreign conspiracy theory, or whether he used his personal cell phone to call up a state official and essentially extort them. The former might be an official act, the latter an unofficial one.

[00:20:02]And it is the latter behavior that fills up the majority of the timeline leading to the violence. We have to talk about the dissenters on the court.

[00:20:10]The voices of alarm who looked at the official act immunity and declared it a Trojan horse.

[00:20:17]Justices who view this framework with deep prophetic suspicion argued that creating presumptive immunity for the outer perimeter is like giving a president a loaded gun and a mask. They fear that a corrupt president will learn the legal lesson of this case too well.

[00:20:34]They will cloak their kleptocracy in the form of a briefing memo. They will issue a policy directive that secretly serves a bribe. And when the investigators come knocking, they will simply wave the flag of presumptive immunity and demand the courts weigh whether the prosecution is burdensome to the executive branch. This is a legitimate, bone-chilling scenario.

[00:20:57]The dissenters warned that this ruling potentially creates a law-free zone around the presidency if the lower courts become too deferential. But, here is the counterweight that history has just provided in real time. The lower courts aren't being deferential.

[00:21:16]The immediate reaction of the judiciary to the Trump cases has been skeptical, probing, and distinctly unawe by the title of former president.

[00:21:26]Judges like Mehta have shown a willingness to look past the title to the flesh and blood man seeking power.

[00:21:34]The dissent's nightmare scenario is predicated on courts being spineless, but the precedent being set right now is that when a president breaks the seal between governing and campaigning, the courts are ready to strip the immunity away.

[00:21:48]The Supreme Court built a fortress, yes, but they built it on a flood plane. And the lower courts are showing that the waters of January 6th rose high enough to drown the unofficial conduct that lived outside the walls. The not above the law clause is the tide that lifts the accountability boat, even if the official act clause is the anchor trying to hold it back. It's a dynamic tension that will keep the republic breathing.

[00:22:15]As we push toward the climax of this constitutional odyssey, consider the permanent scar tissue this leaves on the office. The presidency has been demystified by this ruling. For centuries, there was a magical aura, a penumbra of maybe he can't be touched.

[00:22:34]Every future president now operates in a glass house where the architecture is designed by the Roberts Court. They will have legal counsel in their ear not just about what is constitutional, but about which of the three buckets their current action is filling.

[00:22:47]Mr. President, if you make that phone call about a campaign rally donor, you are stepping from bucket two into bucket three, and you will lose your protections. That is a fantastic conversation for freedom. It is a terrifying conversation for executive efficiency, but this is the deal the founders struck. A messy, inefficient, gridlocked system where liberty trumps speed, and the clarity this ruling brings to the post-presidency is the final piece of the puzzle. Trump cannot claim he is a victim of a novel legal theory. The novel theory was his absolute immunity claim, and it was rejected. What remains is the established law that presidents are liable for their private crimes. The lower court cascade of decisions has clarified that a coup attempt is not a core constitutional power. It is a private criminal transaction.

[00:23:38]The pathway to consequences is now paved with judicial asphalt, not quicksand.

[00:23:43]The accountability architecture is complete, engineered by the highest court and assembled by the working judges of the district benches. The walls are closing in, not through a partisan process, but through the methodical, slow grinding gears of the judicial machine. Finally, let's anchor ourselves in the emotional and historical truth that underpins every word of this ruling. What does it feel like to live in a country where the Supreme Court finally officially declares that the people are the masters, not the temporary servants they elect? It feels like the snapping back of a rubber band that has been stretched to the point of tearing.

[00:24:24]For every frontline officer at the Capitol who limped home after defending the citadel, this ruling is a validation that the law sees their sacrifice and will extract a price from those who ignited the attack. For every future autocrat watching from the wings of American politics, this ruling is a chilling ice bath, a stark realization that the American legal tradition of accountability has a long memory and sharp teeth.

[00:24:54]The Supreme Court has written the definitive prequel to every future presidential crisis.

[00:25:01]By declaring that the president is not above the law, they have stripped the office of its monarchical mysticism while reclothing it in the armor of constitutional duty.

[00:25:13]The system has spoken.

[00:25:15]It has said that the roar of the campaign rally does not drown out the quiet whisper of the statute. The seal of the presidency is not a license for arson. And now, as the lower courts turn the crank on the machinery of justice, we are not just watching a legal proceeding. We are watching the ancient, sacred, and often painful process of a republic cleansing itself.

[00:25:40]The Supreme Court handed down the map, the lower courts are navigating the terrain, and Donald Trump is standing at the edge of a jurisdictional cliff.

[00:25:49]The next sound you hear will be the slamming of the cage door built with the gavels of justice that have just been swung with the force of history itself.

[00:25:59]The era of the untouchable executive has ended not with a revolutionary bang, but with a judicial signature. And that, my friends, is the most terrifying and beautiful thing that democracy can do.