Go Guy.

Welcome to Law Talk, a production of the Hoover Institution, hosted this week by me, Charles

C.W. Cook, senior editor of National Review, and I'm here with John You and Richard Epstein.

And goodness me, did Troy Seneck choose a week to miss on Monday morning.

We got the bombshell decision in the bombshell case of Trump versus United States.

It was six to three.

Well, sort of six to three.

We'll get into that.

And the court ruled that American presidents enjoy immunity for official acts and no

immunity for unofficial act.

That's the base headline.

Richard, I'll start with you.

Before we get to the various details of the decision and the criticisms that have been

made of it, including in the dissents, what do you make of the basic

reasoning here? Is it correct? Let me put it this way. Nobody knows where this comes from in the

sense that all doctrines with respect to immunity are made by judicial implication from a text

that doesn't even speak of the problem. And when I first looked at this stuff, I thought that

many of the issues would start to talk about not presidential immunities on a separation of powers

basis, but rather would address the thing in concerning with his First Amendment privileges of one

kind or another. And so just to see the swift and emphasis kind of blew me away. And I think basically the intuition is clearly right here. And let me explain why it is. Before we had this recent decision, there were a lot of learned discussions that were clearly incorrect, saying in a sec that the issue of presidential immunity always had to be lodged into sitting president,

and so that once you left office, you were vulnerable. And this, of course, is absolutely crazy

because it means that something can be protected while you're in office, and afterwards,

...