> Good. If it were easy to bring charges against a President, then Presidents wouldn't be able to do anything they were elected to do.
Leaving aside the difference between "bringing charges" and "successfully bringing charges," there's a big gap between "easy" and "impossible." Nobody wants presidents to be criminally liable for the things they do in good faith. But this ruling makes good faith irrelevant; it doesn't matter why they do an official act, it's immune.
The fact is that a former president exerted pressure on government officials in a way that would halt a lawful election and coordinated to subvert its true results by presenting fake results. In determining whether that was an official act, we cannot reference his motivations according to the SC's ruling.
Allow the motivation for official acts to be taken into consideration for prosecution, and a lot of the problems go away.
I honestly can’t tell if you’re talking about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which many leaders of the intelligence community claimed was fake Russian disinfo, only to be recently admitted into court evidence as being real and factual. Who exerted pressure on those officials to lie to the public before the last presidential election?
Retired and former intelligence officers have opinions which cannot, in the US, be silenced (unless they are breaking an oath | NDA related to secrets).
~50 (out of how many tens of thousands?) former intelligence officers expressed the opinion that emails on Huneters laptop could not be trusted as absolute sources of truth.
50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said on Monday that the information on Biden’s laptop “is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign,”
These opinions, whether true or false, are insufficient to stop the laptop being admitted as evidence for a jury to consider - and the fact of that admission doesn't make the laptop "fake" or "not fact" ... liars give testimony in trials all the time and juries often hear and see conflicting "evidence", the reason for juries and lengthy jury discussions is for independant people to weigh up evidence and judge what they each believe to be true.
This is a technology forum: the vast majority of these emails contained valid DKIM signatures.
Did Russia snag those keys from Google and retroactively sign forged emails? Were the dozens of clear, repetitive images and videos produced by generative AI?
Leaving aside the difference between "bringing charges" and "successfully bringing charges," there's a big gap between "easy" and "impossible." Nobody wants presidents to be criminally liable for the things they do in good faith. But this ruling makes good faith irrelevant; it doesn't matter why they do an official act, it's immune.
The fact is that a former president exerted pressure on government officials in a way that would halt a lawful election and coordinated to subvert its true results by presenting fake results. In determining whether that was an official act, we cannot reference his motivations according to the SC's ruling.
Allow the motivation for official acts to be taken into consideration for prosecution, and a lot of the problems go away.