A former White House lawyer recently snubbed former President Donald Trump’s arguments for presidential immunity and labeled it “pretty weak” after the ex-president filed a petition with the Supreme Court on Monday.
It was last week that a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously ruled that Trump is not immune from prosecution over his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The former president was indicted by a D.C. grand jury last year. He is also under criminal indictment in three other jurisdictions.
“We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter,” the judges wrote. Doing so, they said, “would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the President beyond the reach of all three branches.”
A few hours after Trump’s lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court to ask the justices to stay the ruling, Ty Cobb, who served as an attorney in Trump’s White House, appeared on OutFront with Erin Burnett and weighed in:
BURNETT: I wanna start with the immunity filing from Trump, coming late today, I know you’ve had a chance to read through it. Obviously, I know you don’t think that he should have immunity, but now you’re seeing their full argument that they want to put in front of the Supreme Court. Is it persuasive?
COBB: Not at all, Erin. Nice to be with you again. This brief, this petition, for stay, is pretty weak. It’s repetitive of their briefs below which, the arguments that they presented were not only soundly rejected, but you know, eviscerated both in oral argument and in the opinion. I don’t think the Supreme Court is going to find those arguments compelling in any way. The Supreme Court can do a variety of things here. You know, they can grant or they can grant or deny the stay. If they’d grant the stay, you know, they will likely expedite consideration of the case.
Cobb went on to say he believes the Supreme Court is unlikely to take up the case, which would leave in place the lower court’s ruling.
