This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church, and the Libertarian with me is Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution.

He's also the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU and he serves as a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Now today is Tuesday, August 9th and we're doing an early podcast this week because of news that broke late yesterday

when President Trump's Marilago estate was rated by the FBI on some sort of search warrant that we believe is related to the

unlawful possession of classified documents held by Trump, although we're

still not exactly sure. Richard, I have so many questions here and I actually want

to start with a bigger picture one which is

there's a precedent being set here about rating an ex president's home.

Should a former president of the United States be exempt from this?

I mean, are there parallels to Nixon?

Take me through this.

Well, it's very, very tricky.

I mean, if you're trying to talk about the legal situation,

it's pretty clear that ex-presidents are just like anybody else. A nice way to kind of get to that is to see what happens in the impeachment cases. After the impeachment, the punishment that you could give extends no further than the removal from office.

But once he's removed from office, then the ordinary criminal processes can take over

so that there is no special immunity for an ex-president from criminal prosecution.

From that I think it probably follows that there's no special legal immunity of a president from a search warrant which is a preliminary to a criminal trial.

There are protections that are given to ordinary citizens.

They would be given to him.

The question as to whether they observe from here our bracket for the moment.

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