In an interview airing on Sunday, US supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson lamented her conservative colleagues’ decision to grant broad immunity to Donald Trump and other presidents for official acts as essentially protecting “one individual under one set of circumstances when we have a criminal justice system that had ordinarily treated everyone the same”.
“I mean that was my view of what the court determined,” Jackson said in the pre-recorded conversation for the news program CBS Sunday Morning. And she added: “I was concerned.”
As interviewer Norah O’Donnell noted, Jackson’s remarks – first circulated by the network in a preview – hewed closely to the written dissent that the liberal justice issued alongside the 1 July ruling.
Jackson’s dissent read: “The court … declared for the first time in history that the most powerful official in the United States can (under circumstances yet to be fully determined) become a law unto himself.”
The justice joined fellow liberals Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor in voting against the immunity ruling, handed down as Trump sought a second presidential term while grappling with criminal charges that he oversaw a sprawling effort to illegally overturn his defeat in the 2020 election against Joe Biden.
However, their bloc was overruled by the supreme court’s conservative supermajority – Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts and Clarence Thomas. Critics of the decision have fumed that Trump appointed Barrett, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the supreme court during the Republican’s presidency.
O’Donnell asked Jackson whether she was “prepared” in the event that the supreme court is tasked with deciding the outcome of November’s White House race between Trump and Kamala Harris, his Democratic rival. Jackson replied with seemingly forced laughter: “As prepared as anyone can be.”
She added: “I mean, I think there are legal issues that arise out of the political process … and so the supreme court has to be prepared to respond if that should be necessary.”
Polls for the moment generally show Trump trailing Harris in key battleground states that could decide the election. Republicans nominated him as their candidate despite his being convicted in a New York state court of falsifying business records in connection with hush-money payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, who has alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with him about a decade before he successfully ran for the Oval Office.
Trump is also facing charges in three separate cases brought by federal prosecutors as well as a district attorney in Georgia over his efforts to nullify his 2020 defeat and his retention of government documents after leaving the White House. Many have perceived the supreme court’s presidential immunity ruling to be a threat to the viability of the federal prosecutors’ cases, if not all of them.
But in recent days the special counsel in charge of the federal cases – Jack Smith – took steps to shore up their respective positions.
Smith’s office obtained a new indictment against Trump in Washington DC’s federal courthouse emphasizing that the former president was acting outside the scope of his official duties when allegedly interfering with the outcome of the 2020 election.
Meanwhile, Smith’s office also asked a federal appeals court to reinstate the government secrets retention case, which a Trump-appointed trial judge dismissed in mid-July. The prosecutors maintained that Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of the case stemmed from an incorrect belief that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.
Trump is awaiting a sentencing hearing tentatively set for 18 September in the New York courthouse where he was convicted. Ahead of that proceeding, he has ambitiously requested that the case be transferred to the federal justice system, ostensibly to avail himself of an appeals process ultimately overseen by the supreme court. A similar pleading from Trump in advance of the New York trial failed.
No trial date has been set for the Georgia prosecution.
Jackson appeared on CBS to promote her memoir, titled Lovely One, being published on Tuesday. She became the first Black woman on the US supreme court after Biden appointed her in 2022 to replace the retiring Stephen Breyer.
