So Renato, can President Biden order Seal Team 6 to assassinate Trump now?

Well, it is complicated.

I'm Renate Mariati. I'm a former federal prosecutor, a practicing lawyer, and a legal analyst.

And I'm Asha Rangapa. I'm a former FBI agent. I teach national security law at Yale University,

and I'm a legal contributor for ABC News.

And we're here to help you understand topics that can't be boiled down into a soundbite or a tweet.

Ahhah, I gotta say if any topic cannot be boiled down into sound bite it is this decision which is just

unbelievable this is a trumpet horrific yeah it's really something I have to I was not

expecting this were you no you know what I was expecting. So I'll just say if you read the decision and I will have to walk through this in more detail, there was a separate concurrence by Justice Barrett.

Yeah.

And that was more along the lines of where I thought things might look.

It turns out she was not the fifth follow,

she was the sixth vote. And so accordingly, her opinions on this didn't matter, but they were more measured than the majority opinion.

Yeah. So let's talk about what's in that majority opinion.

Oh boy, yeah.

So I think the best way to summarize this opinion is that the majority purports to be engaging in a separation of powers analysis.

In other words, they are looking at how the balance of power among the different branches play out if you allow for prosecutions of the president for kind of ordinarily applicable laws.

And where they go with, you know, framing the problem in this way is they say Article 2 of the Constitution

confers certain powers exclusively to the executive branch.

And, you know, they specify the things that if you go to Article II, you can, you know, you see like making trees and pointing ambassadors and all of these things.

And they say that in having that exclusive and preclusive authority,

that means that the other branches cannot under any circumstances encroach on those

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