When Trump lawyer D. John Sauer spoke before the Supreme Court last week calling for presidential immunity for “official acts,” he repeatedly argued that at least one revolutionary mind would be on his side: Benjamin Franklin.

But a leading legal historian pointed out that Sauer took a single sentence Franklin said at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 out of context – while completely ignoring that Franklin also called for “the regular punishment of the Executive where his misconduct should deserve it, and for his honorable acquittal when he should be unjustly accused.”

“Franklin would be horrified,” Holly Brewer, University of Maryland professor and legal historian, said in an X thread.

Brewer was an author of an amicus brief penned by the nation’s preeminent historians in the immunity case, which said “no plausible historical case” supports Trump’s contention that the original meaning of the Constitution infers his argument for “permanent immunity from criminal liability for a President’s official acts.”

“Once again, Trump’s lawyers are trying to turn a president into a king,” she said. “That they pretended that Franklin meant that Presidents should not be tried for high crimes— is somewhat shocking to this historian.”

Related

Former President Donald Trump is fighting charges of “conspiring to thwart the peaceful transfer of power following the 2020 election,” notes the historians’ brief.

Sauer has centered Franklin in his argument for presidential immunity, writing........

© Salon