The Biden Department of Justice (DOJ) argued in front of the Supreme Court that it's permissible to use drones to kill American citizens because the Obama DOJ said it was okay, and also said that questioning election results is not allowed.
The Supreme Court listened to arguments about presidential immunity after special counsel Jack Smith accused former President Donald Trump of should be jailed for questioning the 2020 election administration.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh posed a series of hypotheticals to DOJ attorney Michael Dreeben about the extent of presidential authority, asking if Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon in 1976 could have been investigated for obstructing justice.
Dreeben suggested that this specific case falls under “presidential responsibilities that Congress cannot regulate.”
“How about President Obama’s drone strikes?” Kavanaugh asked.
“So the Office of Legal Counsel carefully examined this and determined that, although the federal murder law applies to the executive branch, the aiding and abetting laws are broad, and a public authority exception built into statutes applied to the drone strike,” Dreeben explained.
“This is how the system should work. The Department of Justice takes criminal law seriously. It analyzes it with established principles, documents them, and then the president can act accordingly without risk of prosecution,” Dreeben continued.
In other words, Obama could not be charged for his use of more than 560 drone strikes that killed between 384 and 807 civilians because his own DOJ authorized it.
Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder admitted to Congress that at least four Americans were killed by the drone strikes, three of whom were not specifically targeted.
The other conservative justices expressed doubt about the lack of presidential immunity during the oral arguments, with Justice Samuel Alito stating that a president would be in a very precarious position if he could be indicted for actions taken while in office.
Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, argued that “the presidency as we know it” cannot exist without presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.
“No president was ever prosecuted for his official actions in 234 years of American history,” Sauer stated, arguing that the threat of being charged and tried for controversial decisions made while in office would distort a president’s decision-making when bold and fearless action is most needed.
