Or is Giuliani really just that far out in left field? He gave an interview to HuffPo:
Candidate Donald Trump bragged that he could shoot someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue and not lose any support, and now President Donald Trump’s lawyer says Trump could shoot the FBI director in the Oval Office and still not be prosecuted for it.
“In no case can he be subpoenaed or indicted,” Rudy Giuliani told HuffPost Sunday, claiming a president’s constitutional powers are that broad. “I don’t know how you can indict while he’s in office. No matter what it is.”
Giuliani said impeachment was the initial remedy for a president’s illegal behavior ― even in the extreme hypothetical case of Trump having shot former FBI Director James Comey to end the Russia investigation rather than just firing him.
“If he shot James Comey, he’d be impeached the next day,” Giuliani said. “Impeach him, and then you can do whatever you want to do to him.”
Which is utter rubbish. The Constitution does not lend the President special protections for crimes committed in office, even if some believe that prosecution for some crimes should be deferred until the President leaves office. We are all equal before the law, and that means everyone. (It should even include foreign diplomats, who routinely receive passes for minor offenses.) Trump shoots Comey, he gets led away in handcuffs, no matter how much Giuliani and Trump’s other advisors huff and puff over it, and how much the Trump cult shakes its fists in anger and outrage over it.
And Giuliani knows this – or he should. That leaves me with two possible conclusions.
First, Giuliani’s gone right over the edge. Based on his behavior since being hired as Trump’s lawyer, this is not an unreasonable conclusion. He acts like a man with dementia who refuses to admit to it. He is confused, his reasoning is muddled and fallacious, he is ambivalent in the way of a man who cannot keep two thoughts in his head simultaneously. He lives on his reputation as a Mayor of New York City, not on any accomplishments since then. I think this conclusion is most likely.
Image credit: Ancient History Encyclopedia
But one cannot count out the possibility that Giuliani is deliberately making outrageous statements in hopes of making Trump yet more vulnerable to prosecution. In other words, Giuliani is trying to bring Trump down by suggesting the man desires Caesar-like powers – and, for those not up on their Roman history, I refer you to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for an illustration of the end of fools desiring absolute power. Whether or not Giuliani is wise in this approach to the abusive behaviors of Trump, it remains a distant possibility that it’s a true conclusion.
Personally, though, I agree with Norm Eisen, as reported in the same article:
Norm Eisen, the White House ethics lawyer under President Barack Obama and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the silliness of Giuliani’s claim illustrates how mistaken Trump’s lawyers are about presidential power.
“A president could not be prosecuted for murder? Really?” he said. “It is one of many absurd positions that follow from their argument. It is self-evidently wrong.”
Eisen and other legal scholars have concluded that the constitution offers no blanket protection for a president from criminal prosecution. “The foundation of America is that no person is above the law,” he said. “A president can under extreme circumstances be indicted, but we’re facing extreme circumstances.”
I don’t even think it takes extreme circumstances. We are all equal in the eyes of the Law, after all. Such was the judgment of the Founding Fathers. They saw what happened when that was not true – arbitrary evil inflicted upon the citizenry by the tyrants. There are many historical examples since then, and it’s perhaps an indictment of American sensibilities that we are not intimately familiar with them.
