Trump Lawyer Tells Judge Trump Could Order Assassination Of Political Rival And Get Away With It

During Tuesday's hearing on whether or not Donald Trump has "absolute immunity" from prosecution, his lawyer John Sauer was asked by a judge if immunity would prevent a President (like Trump) from being prosecuted for ordering the assassination of one of his political rivals. The lawyer, without even hesitating, said "YES" to that question. Sauer claimed that the only way a president could be criminally prosecuted is if they had been successfully convicted during an impeachment, but the judge didn't seem to buy that argument. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what happened.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Tuesday was the first day of the hearings for whether Donald Trump has immunity from prosecution or not with the DC appellate court. And it immediately got off to a really horrible start for Donald Trump. And that is because his lawyer, John Sauer, did a terrible job in front of, uh, uh, judge Florence Pan. Here's what happened. To just kick things off at that hearing on Tuesday morning, judge Pan asked Trump lawyer sour, uh, basically asked him point blank if he believed that an impeachment and conviction in the United States Senate would be necessary before prosecuting a president for ordering the military to murder an opponent.

And Mr. Soer answered in the affirmative. In other words, he said, oh yeah. So if the President weren't convicted in the Senate during an impeachment for ordering the military to murder his political opponent, then guess what? You can't prosecute him. In other words, John Sauer is telling us that if Donald Trump had told the military, go kill this person because I don't like them because they criticized me in the media, they wrote a mean tweet about me, or they're running against me. If Trump had done that, you couldn't prosecute him. Sour says, because he wasn't impeached for it or at least convicted in the Senate.

This is taking presidential immunity to the absolute most absurd extreme. But that is all Trump lawyers have. Th this was almost a gotcha question, by the way, by that judge, because there's no good answer to it. Even if he had said, oh yeah, you can prosecute him, the judge would be like, okay, so we can prosecute him for this too. But if the judge, by using that very extreme example, got Trump's lawyer to say, no, you can't prosecute him, then obviously you're looking at, okay, well immunity is ridiculous then, and it shouldn't exist either way. The judge put sour in an impossible position and sour performed just as poorly as you would expect. But here's the thing, then later on in the day, I mean like an hour later, really, uh, the judge was once again talking to sour because sour admitted that yeah, if they get convicted in the Senate, then you could have a criminal trial against them. You could actually prosecute them outside of politics. So the judge pointed out like, hold up, dude. You're telling me that there are certain circumstances where immunity does not apply because you're arguing that he has absolute immunity no matter what. But then also at the same time that yeah, under certain circumstances, immunity doesn't exist. So big argument that absolute immunity does exist is negated by your own talking point that Abso

Absolute immunity does not exist. So the judge is like, you're not making any sense, dude, to put this all in another way to kind of wrap it up with a nice little bow on top. Trump's got no argument. His lawyer is floundering. He is not going to be given absolute immunity. His only hope, as Alina Haba pointed out earlier in the week, is that, uh, the judges that he put on the Supreme Court come and save his. Outside of that, he is screwed. Not necessarily because his lawyers are so bad, but because what they're trying to defend and argue is so bad that there's simply no argument that even a good lawyer would be able to make in favor of it.