Presidential Immunity Quotes

Some individuals invoked their Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination and were not, in the Office's judgment, appropriate candidates for grants of immunity.

Most people hadn’t heard the rumors that a small branch of Special Forces had been officially detached from the military by a secret presidential directive—and therefore not even subject to the Posse Comitatus Act. There were also rumors that the directive granted the unit full legal immunity for anything it did inside the United States.

it’s so slow that it’s almost immune to presidential administrations.

Nothing was more embarrassing for this nation than the release of the president’s grand jury testimony. Starr’s investigators asked him to corroborate—or contradict—the sworn, often protected-by-immunity testimony of Monica, presidential staff members, Secret Service agents, and UD officers like myself. But his lies—and his earlier actions—trapped him in a painful, steel-strong web. Not even his elaborate legal weaseling could free him. For hours on end, a weasel did what weasels do, but a man was nowhere to be found.

In fact, it’s difficult to measure the impact of deceit on an election. By the same token, if you are going to argue that the impact was large for the 2016 presidential race, you need to muster convincing evidence. Merely to say, “But he lied—and he won,” though accurate enough as a description, says nothing about causation. The elite vision of a post-truth era ultimately rests on a fallacy. It assumes that there was once a time when voters acted on some sort of rational calculus based on “objective facts,” and were immune to “appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Consider Matthew d’Ancona’s condemnation of the tactics used by Brexit advocates: “This was Post-Truth politics at its purest—the triumph of the visceral over the rational, the deceptively simple over the honestly complex.”108 But that has always been the way. All the cunning dictators, like Hitler and Mussolini, persuaded by appealing to raw emotions—but so did the great democrats from Pericles to Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s how human persuasion works.

researchers like Dr. Eva Sapi have shown Lyme is like some other spirochetes—it has biofilms. These are very tough biofilms to defeat unless caught in the “acute stage.” A tough, “mature biofilm” allows organisms to “laugh at” many antibiotics. Some medical professionals interested in Lyme often ignore the immune suppressing Bartonella bacterium, which is more common than Lyme. Ignoring coinfections may increase the risk of fatality with Babesia and possibly FL1953. These healers also may not realize that the highly genetically complex Lyme spirochete appears to have a troublesome biofilm. Performing a simple direct test at laboratory companies whose testing kits have reduced sensitivity will probably result in more negatives for tick-borne diseases. The ultimate result is anti-science and anti-truth. Searching for tick infections with one test is like writing in “Lincoln” at the next presidential election.

Under applicable Supreme Court precedent, the Constitution does not categorically and permanently immunize a President for obstructing justice through the use of his Article II powers. The separation-of-powers doctrine authorizes Congress to protect official proceedings, including those of courts and grand juries, from corrupt, obstructive acts regardless of their source.

apart from OLC’s constitutional view, we recognized that a federal criminal accusation against a sitting President would place burdens on the President’s capacity to govern and potentially preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct.2 Second, while the OLC opinion concludes that a sitting President may not be prosecuted, it recognizes that a criminal investigation during the President’s term is permissible.3 The OLC opinion also recognizes that a President does not have immunity after he leaves office.4 And if individuals other than the President committed an obstruction offense, they may be prosecuted at this time. Given those considerations, the facts known to us, and the strong public interest in safeguarding the integrity of the criminal justice system, we conducted a thorough factual investigation in order to preserve the evidence when memories were fresh and documentary materials were available.

Now picture this on a national scale: under the next Trump, DHS might automatically respond to emergencies in red states but hold out on blue states unless they capitulate to White House demands. This was how Trump wanted to handle the disbursement of disaster aid to everywhere from Puerto Rico to California. The possibilities for corruption are limitless… Elected leaders should conduct an end-to-end review of DHS with an eye of insulating the Department from this kind of political abuse. No agency is fully immune to presidential misconduct, yet with such a long roster of White House appointees, the shield of American government is particularly susceptible to it. In particular, Congress should put career officials in charge of key agencies for multi-year terms, spanning presidential administrations and should pass legislation to reign in domestic security powers. 

The 2021 attack on the United States Capitol, which sought to challenge Joe Biden’s presidential victory, is a chilling reminder of the damage that a misinformed crowd can inflict.

In 1999, when Vladimir Putin came to power, many thought he was wonderful. He was young, he didn't drink like Yeltsin, and he seemed to be saying all the right things. That strengthened the hope that everything would at last be put right. This talk really annoyed me. I didn't like the idea of Putin as "successor"; I wanted a genuine presidential election, with competing candidates. If we imagine that Putin was a Communist who campaigned and won fairly, I would have been very upset, but I would have accepted the result. Now, though, Putin was being foisted on Russia as payment for his loyalty and willingness to provide legal immunity to the former president and his family. I knew that I couldn't believe a word Putin said. his appointment made me determined to resist. I didn't want someone of that kind to be the leader of my country. My feelings were very strong. I wanted to register my presence as far removed from Putin as possible, on the opposite side of the political arena, so that later, when I was a grandfather, I would be able to tell my grandchildren, "I was against it from the outset!" All that remained was to decide which party to join. The Communists still had the largest organization and were the obvious choice for someone who wanted to make it clear they were opposed to Yeltsin's successor, but for me the merest hint of the Soviet past was like a red cape to a bull. The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia seemed to be in opposition, but I did not trust its leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, to stand up to the new regime. In the democratic wing, there were the Union of Right Forces (URF) and Yabloko. The former included some well-known officials like Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemstov (both of whom seemed to me then to be Young Community League types). Yabloko, which bore more resemblance to a bunch of amiable nerds, was the only genuinely democratic party, overtly opposed to Putin, and that seemed preferable. My decision must have seemed odd to some people, and I might have hesitated longer, but I wanted my position to be absolutely clear: I would join the opposition. When there was talk that the electoral threshold to the Duma could be raised from 5 percent to 7 percent, and there were doubts as to whether a democratic party would be able to achieve the new minimum, that only increased my motivation. So I took myself off to Yabloko's headquarters in the center of Moscow. It was not at all how I had pictured the headquarters of a parliamentary party. It was a complete shambles.