Good to know
According to the DC Circuit, congressional reps can foment coups and there’s nothing anyone can do about it:
A top House conservative’s conversations with allies in Congress and the Trump White House about overturning the 2020 election are off-limits to special counsel Jack Smith, an appeals court ruled in a newly unsealed court opinion.
A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that prosecutors’ effort to access the cellphone communications of Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) with colleagues and executive branch officials violated his immunity under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate clause, which shields members of Congress from legal proceedings connected to their official duties.
“While elections are political events, a Member’s deliberation about whether to certify a presidential election or how to assess information relevant to legislation about federal election procedures are textbook legislative acts,” Judge Neomi Rao wrote in the opinion issued last week.
The decision breaks new ground in a decadeslong tug-of-war between Congress and the executive branch. For the first time, an appeals court has held that lawmakers’ cellphones are subject to the same protections as their physical offices. And it is the first significant legal setback for Smith in his bid to obtain evidence about involvement by allies of then-President Donald Trump in his effort to subvert the 2020 election.
It’s unclear whether Smith will appeal the decision to the full bench of the D.C. Circuit or to the Supreme Court. His office declined to comment, as it did last week when the court released an order broadly outlining the outcome of the fight.
The decision from Rao, a Trump appointee, was joined by another Trump appointee, Judge Greg Katsas, and by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, who was nominated by President George H.W. Bush. However, Katsas filed a separate concurring opinion saying he viewed the privilege for lawmakers more narrowly than the other judges on the panel, but the disagreement wasn’t meaningful in Perry’s case.
The FBI seized Perry’s phone under a court-approved search warrant in August 2022, before Smith was tapped as special counsel but as the Justice Department had ramped up its investigation of Trump’s actions preceding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Prosecutors, however, did not immediately access Perry’s phone and instead sought a second search warrant governing its ability to review Perry’s communications with other members of Congress, the executive branch and others related to the 2020 election.
In the new ruling, the three-judge D.C. Circuit panel overturned a lower-court ruling by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell that had largely sided with the Justice Department’s effort to access Perry’s phone. Howell argued that Perry’s “informal” fact-finding about the 2020 election was not protected by the Speech or Debate clause and could not be shielded from DOJ’s review.
These are the worst judges on the court. They know Democrats are not going to do this. They are allies in the coup plot now.
Perry was intrinsic to the plot to overturn a legal, legitimate election. He was one of the primary organizers. And he is immune from legal accountability. When Trump told the acting Attorney General to just sent a letter saying there was fraud and he and “his Republican congressmen” would take care of the rest he knew what he was doing.