This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachel with my colleague, Professor Richard Epstein

of the Hoover Institution, teaches law at NYU in the University of Chicago, writing

most recently about the special counsel case, Jack Smith's case, in the District of Columbia

for events on and around January 6 before and after, conduct by the President of the

United States, charged accordingly. The defense is that the professor identifies that we've

seen so far in editorial pages are one, freedom of speech, two counsel told me or advised

me that it was credible, and three, we now turn to immunity. Richard, as I understand

it, does the President have an immunity defense given his office at the time of these events?

First of all, the question you have to ask is why does anybody have any immunity? There's

a great phrase by Justice Robert Jackson talking about the great silences of the Constitution.

One of them is the question is what is the status of the President when he performs various kinds

of official acts, the same thing could be said of judges of prosecutors, and if you're going to

make all sorts of controversial decisions, and every time you make a wrong decision, somebody can

sue you, you'll never make any decision at all. And so what we do in effect is we erect the

series of immunities that are given to all sorts of people. There are two kinds of immunities. One

is absolute and one is qualified, overridden by malice if you can happen. The long history of

experiences told us that it turns out when you're dealing with deliberate acts of a President,

the no-malice defense never works, so you have to either an absolute immunity, you give nothing

at all. Now, when you do give an absolute immunity under these cases, it's typically from a

torched suit by somebody else, very rarely does somebody get absolute immunity from criminal

prosecution for things that he does within his reigns. The whole theory is that, for example,

you have a judge, the losing litigation cannot sue even though somebody had bribed him,

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