It's been a tumultuous and unsettling time in the nation's capital a week after what could be one of the most important debates in American presidential history, the Supreme Court rules that Donald Trump is substantially immune to charges that he tried to overturn the last election.
Joining me tonight to discuss this, Dan Balz, the chief correspondent at The Washington Post, Joan Biskupic is the senior Supreme Court Analyst for CNN and the author of Nine Black Robes, Inside the Supreme Court's Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences, Jan Crawford is the chief legal correspondent for CBS News, and Charlie Savage is a correspondent for the New York Times.
Thanks all for being here.
Charlie, I'm going to start with you because you're the only person that doesn't have chief in your title.
So, you know, we want to get you in.
But before we get you in, I want you all to watch this just as a kind of a table setter.
RICHARD NIXON, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: By definition?
NIXON: Exactly, exactly.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, Charlie, historic week maybe understates, maybe it doesn't, but I want to ask you what does this ruling mean for the future of presidential power, not just for Donald Trump, but for the future of presidential power?
CHARLIE SAVAGE, Washington Correspondent, The New York Times: Absolutely important question.
Obviously, most of the attention here is going to be on the consequences of this for the January 6th case, and perhaps the prospect that if Donald Trump becomes president again, he will not feel constrained by criminal law and how he wields power the second time.
But this is long after Trump is gone and other people are president and other issues we can't imagine yet are facing our country.
This decision is going to reverberate.
It has unleashed the presidency from the any kind of inhibiting deterrent of maybe I better not use my official law powers to break the law because even if I can't be prosecuted while I'm in office, someday I won't be in office.
All presidents going forward will not have that inhibiting impulse thanks to what the Supreme Court supermajority has done this week.
And you know, you opened with that famous phrase that Richard Nixon used in the David Frost interview after he had left office, been forced to resign in the Watergate scandal.
But it's actually more than that.
Because, in context, that comment from Nixon was about when the president is acting in matters of national security.
Nixon's view was, the president can do no wrong.
This case -- this ruling is not limited to the exigencies of national security situations.
It is anything.
The president is immune when he uses his official powers from prosecution, especially if it's to his core powers.
But even this ambiguous middle category that the Supreme Court left open where he's presumptively immune if it doesn't go to his core powers, but it could be overcome.
The dissent, I think, rightly points out that the situation that would meet the standard to overcome immunity, even in that ambiguous category, it will be virtually impossible to show, because Chief Justice Roberts said there would have to be no chance, not just some chance or a small chance, no chance treating official act as a crime in that circumstance could be seen as intruding on or chilling the president's exercise of executive power going forward, very hard.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Jan, I want to ask you a question and this is going to be the schoolhouse rock part of our show.
JEN CRAWFORD, Chief Legal Correspondent, CBS News: I'm not going to start singing.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: No, no, no.
By the way, we'll pay you extra if you do.
I want to ask you this question.
Describe for us what the Constitution says the president is allowed to do and not do and frame it in the context of what John Roberts wrote.
JAN CRAWFORD: Well, I mean, when you're talking about the core powers, there are certain things like the pardon power, for example, that you have absolute immunity for.
And that's what the court ruled very clearly.
And then you have these other powers outside of that, whereas Charlie outlined, you're presumptively immune from prosecution, but not necessarily.
So, yes, your conversations with an attorney general, that would be considered an official act.
Your conversations with the vice president, yes, it would be considered an official act unless and I think this is why I kind of reject some of the framing of this, sorry, I don't believe it's accurate to say that Donald Trump is generally immune from prosecution for his actions around January 6 because the Supreme Court.
And I think this has really gotten lost in the this whole kind of overheated, rhetoric of what this opinion said.
I think it's important to remember that the Supreme Court rejected Trump's sweeping arguments that he was absolutely immune from prosecution for his actions around January 6th.
They rejected that.
And they said he can be prosecuted for his unofficial acts.
And much of what Trump did on January 6th, I believe, Jack Smith will be able to show was an unofficial act, not an action of an officeholder, a president, but in action of an office-seeker, a candidate.
And if you go back and look, there's a comparable case that the court in its opinion signs off on in the D.C.
Circuit called Blassingame, who sued police officer, sued Trump.
This is a civil case.
But the D.C.
Circuit in an excellent opinion by Sri Srinivasan, who was on Obama's shortlist for the Supreme Court, joined by Greg Katsas, who was Trump's Deputy White House Counsel, came together and agreed that large swaths of Trump's behavior on January 6th were unofficial acts.
The court cited that approvingly.
I think Judge Chutkan will take that analysis.
And so I believe this indictment will be narrowed potentially and certainly delayed.
But it still can proceed.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But, Joan, how dramatic a change is this?
JOAN BISKUPIC, Senior Supreme Court Analyst, CNN: I actually think of it as much more dramatic than Jan does, although -- JAN CRAWFORD: No, I don't -- it's a dramatic change.
It's new law, but I think that you have to remember the distinctions that the courts drew.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Go on.
JOAN BISKUPIC: I think that Chief Justice John Roberts really envisioned a much bolder executive than we had before Monday and he spoke a lot about the importance of the president being bold, fearless, can't be looking over his shoulder, can't fear the next successive president coming after him, and, first of all, just as a baseline, read so much into executive power.
And then secondly, though, when he did go through just not in a firm way, how all these facts would line up, but in just his rendition, really suggested in many ways that much of this indictment wouldn't be able to go forward.
You know, we'll have to see what happens.
But I do think just as expansively as he read executive power and as it, you know, narrowly as the idea of unofficial acts could be interpreted based on this opinion, it is very dramatic.
And I have to say, just stepping back and thinking of Chief Justice John Roberts, who I've watched for a very long time, and I've seen hedge in many ways, in many other cases, I felt like there was no hedging.
This could have been written in some ways by Samuel Alito or Clarence -- maybe not Clarence Thomas, because Clarence Thomas is so much further to the right.
But this just was, I felt, like a really bold opinion on the part of the chief here.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I want to come back to this, because Roberts obviously is known as an incrementalist and institutionalist, and this seems to be bolder than what we've come to expect.
Is that fair, Jan, or -- JAN CRAWFORD: Yes, but he's always had a very robust view of executive power.
And remember, five of the six justices who were in that majority worked in the executive branch.
So -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I want to talk to Charlie about that too.
But before we do that, I want to get into the politics of this a little bit.
And let's start by listening to what President Biden had to say about the ruling.
JOE BIDEN, U.S. President: Today's Supreme Court decision, once again, it will depend on the character of the men and women who hold that presidency that are going to define the limits of the power of the presidency, because the law will no longer do it.
I know I will respect the limits of the presidential powers I have for three and a half years, but any president, including Donald Trump, will no be free to ignore the law.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And here is what -- we'll put it up on the, on the screen.
Here's what former President Trump posted on Truth Social.
I'll read it.
It was in all capital letters, but I will read it in a modulated tone or voice.
The Supreme Court decision is a much more powerful one than some had expected it to be.
It is brilliantly written and wise and clears that stench from the Biden trials and hoaxes, all of them that have been used as an unfair attack on Crooked Joe Biden's political opponent, comma, me.
Many of these fake cases will now disappear or wither into obscurity.
God bless America.
Obviously, there's some daylight there and this is a lot about norms versus laws as well.
But, Dan, before we get to the question, the norms question, talk about the political impact of this.
Now, obviously at the outset, we say that anything that pushes Trump's trials or narrows Trump's trials, pushes them further into the future, is good politically for him, but is there benefits to the Democratic side as well?
DAN BALZ, Chief Correspondent, The Washington Post: There may well be.
I mean, obviously this was a victory for former President Trump for the reason you say, which is that it.
It's going to push the trial back.
He's going to be able to go through the election without having to face another trial, presumably.
And it gives him, if he were to be re-elected, freedoms and powers that he didn't necessarily have before.
It doesn't mean he wouldn't try to exercise them when he didn't have them.
So, for him, it's a big victory.
But I think the fact that the president, that President Biden came out that night to talk about this is an indication that he and his team believe this is also something they can use.
I mean, they want to make this election about the threat that they see Donald Trump facing the country.
And what this does is gives them more ammunition to make that case, that if Trump ends up back in the, in the Oval Office, he's going to be able to do whatever he wants.
Not that they weren't going to make that case anyway, but now there is a Supreme Court decision that they can point to that says he's going to be a much freer man to do whatever he wants.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Charlie, how much of the power of the president has, or how much of the power that the president chooses not to use, is just because the president -- a president is adhering to norms of behavior rather than the law itself, historically?
CHARLIE SAVAGE: I think that the Trump presidency that we already experienced really demonstrated starkly how much constraint on presidential power is a matter of self-restraint by the person who is in that office.
Huge numbers of laws that give presidents emergency powers for accident situations, leave it up to the president to decide whether those circumstances have been met.
And so Trump demonstrated you could just pretend that there's an emergency today that wasn't there yesterday that allows him to spend money on, say, a border wall with Mexico that Congress was unwilling to fund when he asked them to.
That's just one of myriad examples in which it turns out that constraints on executive power are as much or more about norms, even before this decision, than hard law.
I just want to add one thing to what Dan was saying about how this means there won't be a trial.
In a strange way, or not a strange way, but an important way to think about, it's right that, I agree there's not going to be a trial with a verdict before November.
But the thing the Supreme Court has done, specifically at this point, is ordered the District Court, Judge Chutkan, to sort through all the things that are in the indictment and decide, is this an unofficial act, is this a core executive act, is it another kind of official act that may or may not be the sort that can be prosecuted, and if so, can it or can it not.
And to do that, she's going to have to -- at least has the opportunity to hold something of a mini trial right away.
We'll see how extensively she does this.
Does she call witnesses, does she ask for evidence, the same sort of evidence we might have seen in an actual trial?
And so there may be an airing of what did Trump do when he tried to subvert his election loss leading up to January 6th and on January 6th, not unlike the January 6th committee's hearings, that, in fact, will be aired this summer or fall, even though it won't be the actual trial.
And I'm sure that Trump's legal team will do everything they can to try to put off anything like that as well.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But, Dan, talk about the impact of trials and trial-related activities on Trump's popularity with his base and with swing voters.
DAN BALZ: Well, everything we've seen is that it hasn't hurt him in the least.
Maybe there was a little bit of a hiccup after the conviction, that there were some people that pulled back a little bit.
But, in general, the race has been quite stable and steady throughout.
And we thought with the indictments a year ago that that might have an effect.
It didn't.
You know, he cruised through the primaries against all his opponents.
The conviction hasn't had any material effect.
And, you know, there's enormous attention given to these trials or settings.
I'm not sure that what Charlie is talking about.
I mean, I agree with him that there could be this potential airing out of the various actions and things.
I don't know that that will get the attention, say, that the Hush Money trial got where cable news was following it, you know, minute by minute.
So, that's another difference in terms of what voters are going to pick up.
JAN CRAWFORD: And he won't have to be in court.
DAN BALZ: Right.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Obviously, he won't have to sit there and fall asleep, as he did.
