CNN anchor presses Trump lawyer over questioning Kagan’s military coup

CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins pressed a lawyer for former President Trump on a line of questioning of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan in the former president’s presidential immunity case at the Supreme Court on Thursday.

“What are the circumstances under which ordering a military coup is an official act of the presidency?” Collins said, referring to a back-and-forth between Kagan and Trump lawyer D. John Sauer in which she questioned him about presidential immunity in the event a president orders the military to stage a coup.

“When you talk about official acts, you don’t look at the intent, you don’t look at the purpose, you look at their underlying character,” Scharf responded. “So if that were to happen — if that kind of situation were to unfold using the president’s official powers, you could see there’s an aspect of officialdom to it.”

The two went back and forth, and Collins later noted that Sharf was making “a pretty blatant argument that military coups could potentially be official acts.”

Sharf responded that the argument is not intended to justify such things, but to define the scope of immunity that presidents have served in office.

“Just because a military coup or any of these kinds of horrible parades could constitute an official act doesn’t mean they’re right, it doesn’t mean they would be allowed under a constitutional system and it doesn’t mean we’re somehow justifying it,” he said. . “What we are talking about here, however, is the scope of immunity that presidents need to be able to rely on to fulfill their primary article of responsibilities as president.”

When asked whether a president ordering “the military to stage a coup” is an “official act” by Kagan on Thursday, as the Supreme Court held a hearing on Trump’s immunity claims, Sauer responded that “it very well could to be”.

On the same day as the Supreme Court hearing, the former president was in court in New York for his silence case, which began last week. The case marks the first criminal trial of a former American president. He was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with reimbursements to his lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen, who paid an adult film star $130,000 before the 2016 election to keep silent about an alleged affair with Trump. , which he denies. .