Harvard Law Professor Offers Scathing Summary Of SCOTUS-Trump Arguments

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe on Thursday slammed as “shameful” the U.S. Supreme Court’s arguments over Donald Trump’s “total immunity” appeal in which the justices kicked their decision — and subsequently a potential trial in the former president’s election subversion case — further down the road.

“Much of the argument was quite depressing in the sense that it really amounted to four [conservative] justices — Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas — in search of a lifeline for Donald Trump,” Tribe summarized to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.

“That was embarrassing,” Tribe continued. “And much of it seemed to be kind of like a congressional hearing. They didn’t want to talk about this case. They just wanted to spin hypotheticals in the air and almost draft a new law for some kind of immunity.”

At one point in Thursday’s hearings, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked why “isn’t it enough, for the purposes of this case […] to just answer the question of whether all official acts get immunity?”

Tribe said, “Jackson got to the point, ‘All we have to do is do our job, and our job is to decide the case before us, and on the facts before us, there is no plausible case for immunity.’ And if we take a step back, that’s something the court could and should have done in December so we could maybe in closing arguments in this trial.”

Tribe added, “It was a shameful performance by the court, buying the very time that Donald Trump wanted.”

Watch Tribe’s full analysis here: