SCOTUS: Trump’s not guilty, but not the House committee

By BRUCE LOWITT

The United States Supreme Court, throwing out the findings by the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, said Tuesday that former President Donald Trump was not guilty of any of the criminal charges the committee referred to the Department of Justice because “he’s our guy.”

In a 6-3 decision, with Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting, the court ruled that Trump, “as president, was within his rights to incite an insurrection, obstruct official proceedings, and to conspire to defraud the nation and make false statements, and we don’t know what the hell the House committee was thinking when it overstepped its bounds.”

The majority decision was written by Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who cited what he called independent reviews by attorneys John Eastman, Jonathon Moseley and Virginia Thomas.

He said he had planned to include interracial marriage, voting limitations and animal rights in his decision but decided against it when Kagan showed up in his office wielding a machete.

In a concurring opinion, Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee to the court, wrote that he was “unsure about the ‘false statements’ thing because I’m not sure what that means.”

In justifying the decision, Thomas wrote that the court was basing its ruling on maintaining the tradition of upholding historical precedent. “In this case,” Thomas wrote, “the former president has been getting away with this kind of behavior not only since he took office but since he first showed up in the pages of the New York Post. That’s 40 years of precedence and that’s good enough for us.”

In its ruling, the court invalidated the House committee’s right to take Trump to task, stating: “Why doesn’t Congress stick to what it does best, fighting among itself, calling its opponents silly names, voting itself raises and doling out unbelievable amounts of money to its supporters and donors? What did the former president ever do to them that they should get should get all snotty and decide to sully his legacy?”

In the dissenting opinion, Jackson wrote, “When Clarence Thomas was appointed to this court in 1991, I was a junior at Harvard, Justice Kagan was a junior associate at a Washington law firm and Justice Sotomayor was in private practice in New York and even then the three of us knew this guy was going to be a threat to the Constitution. The opinion he and his clandestine colleagues have come up with would work really well – in Hungary or Saudi Arabia.”

Members of the House committee, hiding in their offices as members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers surrounded the Capitol, were unavailable for comment.

Trump, campaigning in Pennsylvania where he was still claiming the 2020 election was rigged, said, “Wait. What? I actually won something? … What about my taxes? Can I still hide them?” Told they were being released, the former president said, “They’re my taxes! Freakin’ Supreme Court. Why don’t they do their job?”