Dont go anywhere. I will be back with Rachel Maddow and the whole gang for special Coverage Of Trump On Trial that starts right now. The expresident of the United States. Two american courtrooms. Facing Criminal Trial in one. I will go in now and sit. And making a desperate case to avoid justice in the other. We will hear arguments this morning in trump versus the United States. Tonight, new testimony of the alleged criminal conspiracy to help elect donald trump. Reporter trump turned to the business at hand and asked david pecker, how is our girl . As his argument for absolute immunity finally goes before the Supreme Court. This court has never recognized absolute criminal immunity for any public official. A private attorney who was willing to spread false claims of Election Fraud what was up with the pardon for president nixon . If everybody thought president s couldnt be prosecuted, what was that about . If it fails completely it is because we have destroyed our democracy. Tonight, Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, joy reid, chris hayes, Lawrence Odonnell, ra melber, all here as msnbcs special Coverage Of Trump On Trial begins now. Who has the time . Who has the time . You are telling me that simultaneously weve got three hours of Oral Argument at the United StatesSupreme Court about the former president claiming he is totally immune from prosecution for any crime he did as president and at the exact same time he is being criminally prosecuted in a new york courtroom where the first star witness against him just had his first day of testimony. Who has the time . Literally there isnt time to Pay Attention to all of this, let alone Everything Else that is happening, too. Because of that we are here to help. I am Rachel Maddow. I am at msnbc headquarters with my colleagues, Nicolle Wallace and chris hayes and Lawrence Odonnell and ari melber. Katie was at the arguments today. Thanks for hustling back to talk about it. We know that you at home are a real person with a real life and you may not have been able to follow the proceedings in real time this morning and this afternoon. It is our job to come to these things and it was hard for us to cover all of this all at once. We did know it was coming. We prepped for it, we delegated, we listened to things that one. 5 speed, we skipped lunch and dinner, but we got it for you and for us. This is our Primetime Recap of todays events. We will jump right in and start tonight with the Supreme Court. Former President Donald Trump claiming he is immune from prosecution from all and any crimes he committed while serving as president. It is a claim so audacious it was widely perceived to be a shocking hail mary when his defense first proposed it. The Federal Court that first heard this claim just overhand smashed it, ruling against him comprehensively in words that were designed to be set to music, basically. Quote, this court cannot conclude that our constitution cloaks former president s with absolute immunity for any federal crimes they commit while in office. Nothing in the constitutions text or allocation of powers requires exempting foreign former president s. And neither the people who adopted the constitution, nor those who have safeguarded it across generations, have ever understood it to do so. Defendants fouryear service as Commander In Chief did not bestow on him the Divine Right Of Kings to evade criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens. No man in this country, not even the foreign president the former president , is so high that he is Above The Law. That was the ruling by the First Federal judge who considered this audacious claim that as president he was immune from crimes he committed while serving in the presidency. When trump appealed that ruling, the Appeals Proceedings also went poorly for him. The Appeals Court proceedings made headlines across the country after one of the three appellate judges who heard the appeal asked trumps lawyer in court a shocking hypothetical about whether he can order the assassination of a political rival and really not be charged for it. Trumps counsel said, indeed, that was their position. So all of the federal judges who reviewed trumps audacious Immunity Claim, all of them have seem not just disinclined to go along with it, they have seemed shocked by it and their decisions at the Trial Court Level and Appellate Court level, their Clarion Decisions against him on this Immunity Question really seemed like they would be the last word. But with this Supreme Court, never say never. The United StatesSupreme Court set on this issue for weeks and then finally announced that they wanted to take this case themselves. They announced they would take it today. What is probably the latest possible day on which they could have scheduled these arguments. To the extent that trumps best Defense Tactic is delay. The Supreme Court has already been an excellent accomplice in that defense. Even with that backdrop, the arguments today were legitimately, i think, stunning. Trumps counsel was grilled for about an hour. The Prosecutor Jack Smith and Justice Department was grilled for nearly twice that amount of time. But almost immediately at the start of proceedings, under questioning, we got confirmation that the Appeals Court hypothetical, that crazy hypothetical about trump being able to assassinate political enemies and never be charged, we got confirmation at the start that that was not a fluke. President trump maintains and his lawyers maintain that he really is immune from prosecution, specifically for killing his political rivals. Im going to give you a chance to say if you stay by it. If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or order someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts from which he can get immunity . It would depend on the hypothetical, but we could see that could be an official act. It could and why . That could be an official act, really . You might officially as part of his duties want to kill his domestic political rival and if it is an official act, trumps lawyers say he is immune from prosecution. In other words, yes, we think he should be able to do that. Anything else you want to clarify he should be able to do . It is not just assassinating individual domestic political opponents. It is worse than that. Over to you, justice kagan, again questioning trumps counsel. If a president sells Nuclear Secrets to a foreign adversary, is that immune . That sounds similar to the bribery example, likely not immune. If it were structured as an official act he would have to be impeached and convicted first. What does that mean . I dont know if it would be an official act. You would have to have more details to provide the analysis that weve been talking about. How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup . I think as the Chief Justice pointed out earlier, where there is a whole series of, you know, guidelines against that, so to speak, like the uc mj prohibits the military from following an unlawful act. Now if one follows the Fitzgerald Test that might be an official act and as i would say in all of these hypotheticals, has to be impeached and convicted. Well, he is gone. Lets say this president who ordered the military to stage a coup, he is no longer president. He was not impeached. He couldnt be impeached, but he ordered the military to stage a coup and you are saying that is an official act . I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act. If it were an official act what does that mean, depends on the circumstances . He was the president , he is the commanderinchief. He talks to his generals all the time and told the generals, i dont feel like leaving office. I want to stage a coup. Is that immune . If there is an official act, there needs to be impeachment beforehand because the framers if it is an official act on the way you described the hypothetical it could be, i just dont know, again it is a fact specific context. That sounds to me like it is an official act, but it sure sounds bad, doesnt it . It certainly sounds bad and that is why the framers have a whole series of structural checks that have successfully for the past 234 years prevented that extreme hypothetical. Has that extreme hypothetical always been prevented . Yes, your honor, that certainly sounds bad. You can see where he is going at the end of this when he calls that an extreme hypothetical. This is an important part, i believe, of how todays proceedings went. Trumps lawyer and most Conservative Justices today carried on with these proceedings at the Supreme Court as if it is a wild hypothetical, just a crazy pipedream, like a martian scenario that a president might try to use force to stay in power after he was voted out. Who can ever imagine Something Like that . Trumps lawyer today call that unlikely. He specifically called it, i quote, very, very, unlikely. That is the wisdom of the framers. What they viewed as the risk that needed to be guarded against was not the notion that the president might escape criminal prosecution for something very unlikely in these unlikely scenarios. They viewed it much more likely and destructive to the republic the risk of fractional strife. The framers did not put in Immunity Clause in the constitution. They knew how to. There were Immunity Clauses and some state constitutions. They knew how to give legislative immunity. They did not provide immunity to the president and not surprising they were reacting against a monarch who claims to be Above The Law. Wasnt the whole point that the president was not a monarch . The whole point of, you know, america, why we are a country. Justice kagan with the trump counsel. Basically what he is saying is the idea of anyone actually trying a coup to stay in power, a president trying that, that is crazy. That is so extreme, we dont have to worry about a hypothetical like that. It is really partisan strife, conflict between political parties, that is the biggest risk to the country, not this crazy idea. Justice kagan responding by saying okay, but maybe also a tyrant, unbound by law, running the country with impunity, maybe that would be bad, too. Maybe that is why we were actually formed as a constitutional republic. As a general matter, it is folly to extrapolate from Oral Arguments and say that you know how the ruling will come down based on comments from the justices when the case was heard. With that caveat, though, it seemed clear today that the most Conservative Justices were inclined to side with trump not just on a technicality, but possibly on the substance. Justice Clarence Thomas suggested today that president s are always committing crimes. Shout out to Operation Mongoose from Justice Thomas today. Other justices discussing prosecutors, judges, and even grand juries of citizens in terms that would be right at home in a trump social media feed about heather isnt really a rule of law in this country and that what looks like our legal system is really just corrupt people who are out to get donald trump. The Conservative Justices today were absolutely and consistently unwilling to discuss trumps alleged crimes as laid out in the indictment that led to this case, to the point that it became almost a comedic, gymnastic effort at avoidance between Justice Alito and the lawyer for Special Counsel jack smith. If the court has concerns about the robustness of it, i would suggest looking at the charges in this case. Im going to talk about this in the abstract. Conspiracies to defraud the United States with respect to one of the most important functions, namely the certification of the next president. I dont want to dispute that particular application. Conspiracy to defraud the United States of particular facts. It is difficult to think of a more critical function than the certification of who won the election. As i said i am not discussing the particular facts of this case. Stop, stop with the facts. Do not tell me about the things that whoever your client is did. Or the things in the indictment of whoever your client is that led to this case, whatever is about. I want to speak purely in the abstract as if particular facts of this case, facts of what donald trump did are actually an unimaginable hypothetical that i dont need to engage with. The widely held view of todays proceedings at the United StatesSupreme Court is that the conservatives on the court will likely succeed in using this case to further and fatally delay criminal Court Proceedings against donald trump before the election in november. Rather than reject his claims of immunity from prosecution, like all of the federal judges who consider this matter before them, they instead will carve out some newly specified class of actions that are immune from prosecution if you are a president and they will invent a test for deciding what counts is that kind of action by a president and then they will send trumps indictment, trumps federal january 6 case back through a whole new cycle in the lower Federal Courts to run his attempted overthrow of the government through the courts newly invented legal test that they are going to make for him in this case. Which, yes, will take forever, because in the meantime he will get a chance to get back in the white house in order to shut the whole thing down and in the meantime the American People will be asked to vote on whether he should take that seat at the white house without knowing what federal prosecutors have found and believe is criminal about his conduct when he tried to overthrow the government to stay in office the last time. We are going to have more ahead on that thing that i just described. On why it seems like the justices are going to send this case back to the lower courts. How it is that they sort of showed there cards on that today. But before we go too much further, lets talk about this. Lets talk about how it went. Actually i have a lot. Okay. Weve got a special. Start at the top. Well, i found it, viscerally i found it as one of those handful of moments that felt like genuine vertigo. Almost like a physical sensation like am i losing my mind . What is going on . There is something wrong about this and why did this give this sense of distress . I think the reason is this. Donald trumps framing of this prosecution is that what is extraordinary about it is the prosecution. Whereas the lower courts and the rest of us, i believe, what is extraordinary are the actions that took to warrant the prosecution. What are unprecedented are the actions at issue, the first peaceful it first attempt to stop the peaceful transition of power. Not that i not that an indictment was brought. But the court adopted the notion that what was new and extraordinary is the prosecution itself and in so doing what they did, as you said quite well, adopted the most cynical sort of authoritarian and relativistic view of all of this that trump himself adopts, which is that any prosecutor can prosecute anyone for anything. And we saw this in the colorado case as well. This assumption that everyone below this court is austere, generally, with their impeccable vision. Everyone below them are political hacks. Well, the colorado Supreme Court didnt want trump on the ballot. Any prosecutor could prosecute anyone and what happens next . A democrat gets prosecuted by a republican. All of these political hacks everywhere. We are the only ones who see clearly. We dont trust this process beneath us with the District Court and Appellate Court and prosecutor and Department Of Justice and president who appointed him and colorado Supreme Court. All of that, no, we get to say. Never considering that they are the political hacks. That the people actually engaging in regular order here are all of the lower bodies that prod