Prosecution of the President of the United States

"Lowell Brown has written a compendious, even-handed, exhaustively-researched exploration of the arguments for and against the proposition that an American President can be criminally prosecuted while in office. No scholar, advocate, or citizen concerned with the scope of presidential power or the real danger of an emergent culture of executive branch impunity should be without this book.” —Frank O. Bowman, Professor of Law at the University of Missouri, USA, and author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump (2019)

This book provides an in depth look at the constitutional, historical, and political arguments concerning presidential immunity from prosecution, as well as the opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel that provided the justification for the decision not to prosecute President Trump. Focusing on those opinions, the book examines the constitutional basis of presidential immunity, both textual and historical, as reflected in the deliberations of the 1787 Convention and the ratification debates. The opinions are viewed in the context of the criminal investigations of Presidents Nixon and Clinton that gave rise to those opinions, as well as the pronouncements of the Supreme Court concerning their claims, and those of President Trump to immunity from judicial inquiry. Lastly, the book analyses presidential immunity in light of the separation of powers, the availability of impeachment, and the discordance between presidential immunity and the rule of law.