LISTEN: Justices question how Trump trial could separate official acts from unofficial acts

Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor asked former President Donald Trump’s lawyer Thursday whether the prosecution should be allowed to raise Trump’s “official acts” at trial.

Trump’s lawyer, John Sauer, argued that the official part of an act should not be considered, but Sotomayor said she was confused by how that would work.

She raised the example of a bribery scheme, whereby money is exchanged for an official appointment. “You would instruct the jury that there's no liability for the actual appointment - the liability is for accepting the bribe,” she said. Similarly, the problems with Trump’s case are not with his official conversations with the Justice Department, she said, but the allegations of his private conversations and acts.

Sauer disagreed. “It will be difficult for some of these prosecutions to proceed, and that is the implications of official immunity, which is dictated in the Constitution here by the executive vesting clause,” he said.

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