Ex-Generals Band Together to Fight Trump’s Immunity Claim In Court: ‘Would Threaten the Military’s Role’ In Society

Over a dozen retired four-star admirals and generals, and former secretaries of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard banded together on Monday to file an amicus brief to the Supreme Court urging that Donald Trump’s claims of presidential immunity be shot down.

The 38-page court filing is signed by 19 authors, including some of the most well-known and senior U.S. military leaders of the past several decades. General George Casey, Admiral Thad Allen, General Charles Krulak, General Robert Magnus, and General Carlton W. Fulford, Jr. were among those to sign the document that warned “presidential immunity from criminal prosecution would threaten the military’s role in American society, our nation’s constitutional order, and our national security.”

The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on April 25th regarding whether or not Trump can be prosecuted for having allegedly participated in a criminal conspiracy to retain power, despite losing the 2020 election.

“Petitioner’s [Trump’s] theory of presidential immunity threatens to subvert the careful balance between the executive and legislative branches struck in the Constitution,” warned the brief, adding:

For example, if emboldened by absolute immunity, the President might unsuccessfully seek authorization from Congress to undertake a certain action and then attempt to have the military carry out that action even though Congress rejected it. Moreover, our Constitution directs the people’s elected representatives in Congress to enact criminal laws that the executive is tasked with enforcing; allowing the President to violate those laws with impunity fundamentally distorts this constitutional allocation of powers.

Trump’s legal team has argued that criminally charging former presidents would “incapacitate every future president with de facto blackmail and extortion while in office and condemn him to years of post-office trauma at the hands of political opponents.”

The ex-military leaders strongly disagree, arguing that a president must still conduct him or herself within the bounds of the law. “Under this theory, the President could, with impunity, direct his national security appointees to, in turn, direct members of the military to execute plainly unlawful orders, placing those in the chain of command in an untenable position and irreparably harming the trust fundamental to civil-military relations,” argued the brief.

“Unless Petitioner’s theory is rejected, we risk jeopardizing America’s standing as a guardian of democracy in the world and further feeding the spread of authoritarianism, thereby threatening the national security of the United States and democracies around the world,” the former military leaders continued, warning the stakes of the decision could not be higher for both U.S. and global democracy.

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