'Our Guy Gets To Commit Crimes': Democratic Senator Slams Trump's Immunity Claims

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) on Thursday took to the Senate floor to condemn former President Donald Trump’s claims for total immunity from criminal prosecution, an unprecedented legal argument he said is “impossible to ignore and must cause alarm.”

“I don’t want everybody to wake up every morning freaked out about whatever Donald Trump says,” Schatz said, “but today, this week, it is worth marking what his lawyers said because it is an official position of a presidential candidate and it is a position that is antithetical to what we all believe in.”

“This is not a tweet. This is not a comment in a town hall,” he added. “What this is the official position of the lawyers of the [former] president of the United States.”

Trump’s attorneys argued in federal court this week that his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress, were official acts and that he is therefore immune from prosecution by the Justice Department, which has charged him with three conspiracy counts. They also argued that presidents may only ever be convicted if impeached by the U.S. House and then tried in the Senate.

Trump was, of course, impeached over the Jan. 6 insurrection, but he was acquitted by a majority of Senate Republicans, many of whom viewed Trump as responsible for inciting the attack. GOP senators relied on a tortured legal rationale that, in part, suggested the proper venue to hold Trump accountable was not in Congress but rather in the U.S. legal system.

Now, Schatz noted, with the legal system bearing down on Trump, his attorneys are arguing the opposite.

“Three years ago, Trump’s legal team said that it was the job of the criminal justice system to deal with statutory crimes, not the