In a new motion filed late Thursday in the DC federal court where he faces four federal criminal charges for his failed post-2020 election coup attempt disgraced former autocrat Donald Trump continued claiming that he had “presidential immunity” for his actions by citing scandals that dogged past administrations having gone unprosecuted to be some sort of defense for his own fuckery.
The Government argues that the fact ‘that no former president has been criminally prosecuted… reflects not a history and tradition implying the existence of criminal immunity but instead the fact that ‘most presidents have done nothing criminal, making it difficult to draw inferences from the absence of arrests and prosecutions.” On the contrary, American history teems with situations where the opposing party vigorously contended that a sitting President acted criminally in the exercise of his official responsibilities. Yet, when the opposing party took power, none of these Presidents was ever prosecuted, until 2023[…] President Nixon was widely accused of criminal obstruction of justice for the exercise of his official duties in the so-called ‘Saturday Night Massacre,’ when he ordered three subsequent Attorneys General to fire the Watergate Special Prosecutor. President George W Bush’s critics widely accused him of lying to Congress to induce the Iraq War on false allegedly pretenses by claiming that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was hoarding stockpiles of ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ which turned out to be non-existent.
President Obama was criticized for personally authorizing the extrajudicial killing of a US citizen located abroad through a CIA ‘kill list’ and a drone strike that killed both the citizen and his 16 year-old son, also a US citizen. History provides many further examples. Though many at the time believed these official actions were criminal, and their political opponents eventually took power in every case, none of these Presidents were ever charged with any crime for official acts. Our history thus reflects a strong tradition against prosecuting Presidents for their official acts.
First off, Nixon was preemptively pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, who wanted to move forward. We don’t know how close Tricky Dick came to getting prosecuted since it was just a month after his resignation. We would venture it was probably pretty close given that Nixon was already listed as an “un-indicted co-conspirator” in the federal criminal cases against his minions.
Which makes this already pretty fucking stupid even before we get to Bush and Obama. It’s fair enough to ask whether Obama should or could have gone after Bush for the Iraq shitshow. Whether the consideration was more political – as in was Obama simply thinking the same way as Ford and that it was time to move on – or was it more legal – like what kind of case could be brought and would it have survived Bush’s far more legitimate challenges on presidential immunity grounds – is a fascinating question that Trump’s lawyers no doubt have absolutely zero interest in pondering.
As for Obama and the CIA drones program, well, who was the president after him? Was that example supposed to be some kind of sly hint that Trump – via Jeff Sessions – showed restraint on his predecessor where Biden and Merrick Garland did not? They really wanted to go down this road?
It’s easy to imagine that what Trump wanted his dickhead lawyers to say was that Trump never went after Obama for “spying” on him in 2016, which would have been a complete lie. The fat fuck was obsessed with finding something, anything, that could’ve brought down his Black predecessor. That was really the whole point of the failed Durham Investigation, to put Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama behind bars somehow. That Obama is still a free man was not at all for lack of trying.
The lawyers hastily mollified their 77 year-old man-baby client by pasting in that shit about the CIA drones program when they would’ve been much better off just not mentioning Obama at all.
Or really even submitting this motion altogether. It’s not like his fanboys are going to read this article or his stupid “presidential immunity” defense based on past precedents, but the bottom line is that all they do is show that Trump exceeded them when he tried to illegally remain in power after the American people told him pack his shit and get the fuck out of the White House.