The inside story of John Roberts and Trump’s immunity win at the Supreme

CNN
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The Supreme Court’s toughest cases during Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure have often generated internal suspense, with shifting votes, last-minute switches and the chief’s own push toward compromises that would lessen the appearance of politics.

Not so this spring, when the six Republican-appointed conservatives established a far-reaching immunity from prosecution for former President Donald Trump.

Sources familiar with the negotiations told CNN there was an immediate and clear 6-3 split, as the justices met in private in the oak-paneled conference room that adjoins the chief justice’s chambers.

Roberts made no serious effort to entice the three liberal justices for even a modicum of the cross-ideological agreement that distinguished such presidential-powers cases in the past. He believed he could persuade people to look beyond Trump.

In past decades, when the justices took up major tests of presidential power, they achieved unanimity. Certainly, today’s bench and all of Washington is far more polarized, but as recently as 2020, Roberts was able to broker compromises in two Trump document cases.

It was understandable for outsiders, and even some justices inside, to believe that middle ground might be found on some issues in the immunity dispute and that Roberts would work against any resounding victory for Trump.

The chief justice’s institutionalist tendency had been cemented over the past two decades. He often talked it up, famously admonishing Trump in 2018 that jurists shed their political affiliation once they take the robe, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have it an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

The chief justice, now 69 and about to begin his 20th term, appears to have abandoned his usual institutional concerns.

He upended constitutional norms, enlarged the institution of the presidency and gave Trump a victory that bolstered his litigating position even beyond the case at hand, for example, in his attempt to reverse the conviction in his Manhattan “hush money” trial. A jury in May found Trump guilty of falsifying business records.

Roberts may also have sensed that the liberals were simply not going to accept any version of his sweeping presidential immunity.  Roberts’ boldness was perhaps belied by some defensiveness, however, as he devoted five pages (of his 43) in rejoinder to the dissenting justices’ condemnation of his majority opinion. He deemed it “fear mongering” and derided “the tone of chilling doom.”

Roberts declined to respond to CNN’s…