WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s lawyer argued that presidential immunity would protect him from lawsuits even if he had urged his supporters to “burn Congress down” while in office.
Trump has asserted sweeping immunity against suits by both police officers and Democratic members of Congress accusing the former president of inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol in his final days in office. A federal judge in Washington previously rejected Trump’s claim, but his lawyer, Jesse Binnall, on Wednesday made a renewed argument before the D.C. Circuit US Court of Appeals.
The three-judge appellate panel probed the outer limits of the immunity that Trump was claiming, posing a series of dramatic hypothetical scenarios to Binnall. The lawyer denounced some of the conduct the judges posited but held firm in maintaining that a president would be immune for undertaking such actions.
