Legal experts shocked by Supreme Court’s 'inconceivable' arguments in Trump immunity case

Although former President Donald Trump's absolute immunity argument has been rejected more than once in the lower federal courts, it remains to be seen what the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately decide on the matter.

Trump claims that because he was still president in late 2020 and early 2021, he enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution in special counsel Jack Smith's election interference case — a claim flat-out rejected by Judge Tanya Chutkan, who wrote, in December 2023, that U.S. presidents do not enjoy a "divine right of kings." And a panel of three judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit later shared that view, also rejecting Trump's immunity argument in no uncertain terms.

But on Thursday, April 25, the U.S. Supreme Court listened to opposing oral arguments on Trump's immunity claim. And some legal experts are troubled by what the Court's GOP-appointed justices had to say.

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ABC News' Alexandra Hutzler, in an article published on April 30, explains, "When Donald Trump began to claim presidential immunity from criminal prosecution related to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, many legal analysts ABC News spoke with considered it a weak argument. But last week, in nearly three hours of oral arguments, several Supreme Court justices seemed open to some limited protection for former presidents from criminal liability for official acts they undertook while in the White House. It was a shocking turn of events, according to some veteran court observers."

One of the legal experts who was surprised by what he heard on April 25 is Michael Gerhardt, who teaches constitutional law at the University of North Carolina.

Gerhardt told ABC News, "It was surprising to hear, at least from some of the justices, the possibility that a president could somehow commit criminal misconduct for which they could never be held liable in court. I think that has struck many people as just, up until now, inconceivable."

David Schultz, a constitutional law specialist at the University of Minnesota, was also taken aback on April 25.

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Schultz told ABC News, "That's exactly the part that I think most of the American public is going to find fairly incredulous — the idea of saying that the president of the United States is above the law compared to the rest of us…. That is a whole new territory for the Court that we've never seen before, and will make major new law in the United States."

Ray Brescia of Albany Law School in Upstate New York believes that Justice Samuel Alito "upset" a "delicate balance" on April 25.

Brescia told ABC News, "The fact that we haven't had something like this happen before is consistent with the government's position that there are institutional norms that have largely held. So, to upset that delicate balance because, in the words of Justice Alito, we can't hold the president accountable for trying to subvert democracy in the fear that a future president might try to subvert democracy, is just totally 'Alice in Wonderland.'"

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Read ABC News' full report at this link.