Subject: Re: On July 1 We Lost the Republic
But what if the President merely ordered the arrest of X? What if in the course of the arrest, a SWAT team was dispatched to the home of X? Instead of quietly completing the arrest without incident, what if a SWAT team member got trigger happy and began shooting and wound up killing X? Well, that's not assassination, that's just an arrest gone bad. Happens every day in 'Murica. Damn citizens should respect the police when they show up to your door.

Sounds eerily similar to the conspiracy theory that right-wingers were cooking up when they found out about the boilerplate "use of force" terms for the Mar-a-Lago search, TBH.

But in the above scenario, how on earth would the President be subject to any criminal charges in the first place? If the President did in fact simply order the arrest of X, then he would have done nothing criminal.

If the President gave specific instructions to murder X, then that information wouldn't be protected from any investigators. Trivially, it's both relevant to and admissible in the murder and conspiracy to commit murder charges for everyone else involved in this scheme, since none of them are protected by immunity. More importantly, all of that evidence regarding what the President did and why he did it is still admissible for the determination of whether his actions are entitled to immunity in the first place. Only once the actions are adjudged to be immune is all that stuff off the table. And this evidence would demonstrate that not only were the actions of the President outside of the constitutional authority of the office, but actually prohibited by the Constitution.

So no - a President who did this would be just as likely to be arrested for murder after the ruling as they are today, because it's not an official act of the President to order an assassination of a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil.