I totally disagree with the Supreme Court’s Trump-friendly decision in the immunity case.

I believe that the text and structure of the Constitution, as well as the contemporaneous debates during its drafting, make clear that the president is not above the law. He is its servant, not its master.

But I accept the decision as the law of the land, as apparently does Special Prosecutor Jack Smith.

Thus, while I admire Smith’s deft attempt to maneuver his way through the labyrinth of Supreme Court verbiage, and prosecute Trump for those elements of his Jan. 6 conduct that were private and not official, I do not think it will likely work. It only pours old wine into new bottles.

Smith’s original 45-page indictment, filed in D.C. a little over a year ago, identifies Trump as the “forty-fifth President of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020.” The superseding 36-page indictment, presented to a new grand jury and filed Aug. 27, defines Trump as “a candidate for President of the United States in 2020” who “lost the 2020 presidential election.”

This is an obvious attempt to sever Trump’s official acts as president from his private acts, for which the Roberts Court said he would have no immunity. Smith wants to skirt the self-evident truth that the office Trump occupied had everything to do with his efforts to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

The distinction is born out of the Blassingame case in the D.C. Circuit, a civil action that severed conduct as “office seeker” from conduct as an “office holder.” The appeals court held that Trump might be liable for money damages because his Jan. 6 conduct was as a candidate for the presidency rather than as acts of the presidential........

© The Hill