That’s the big question, and one the Supreme Court may eventually need to answer.
Trump has argued he was merely taking steps to ensure the election results were accurate, and this was an “official act.”
The special counsel says a jury should decide whether Trump was lying about fraud and scheming to subvert the election.
Some courts have raised the legal theory that Trump was acting as a losing candidate between November 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021, not as a president acting in the nation’s public interest.
Last month, a panel of D.C. appellate judges adopted such a view in a suit against Trump brought by Capitol police officers. They said that while a president may be entitled to immunity for his official actions, this does not extend to his conduct as a candidate. The judges allowed the civil suit to move forward on those grounds.
The bounds of immunity were also tested recently in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, where a three-judge panel rejected an attempt by Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to move the conspiracy case brought against him by Fulton County Dist. Atty. Fani Willis from state to federal court.
The opinion stressed that actions Meadows is accused of taking in Georgia were not official duties of federal officials because states run elections.
That indictment accuses Trump, Meadows and 17 others of a campaign to intimidate Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to flip 11,780 votes, lying about election fraud and recruiting fake electors to attempt to replace real votes cast at the electoral college.