PARTIAL IMMUNITY: The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that Donald Trump has immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts taken while in office, but not for unofficial acts. The decision was 6-3 along the court’s ideological lines.

  Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito voted with the majority despite calls for their recusal for conflict of interest because of political activities of their wives.

  Trump told Fox News it’s a “big win for our Constitution and for democracy.” 

  President Biden said, “The power of the office will no longer be constrained by the law.”

  It’s a decision with mixed results for Trump. A critical element is that they ruled that acts for which the President is immune cannot be used against him in a criminal prosecution. For instance, calling the attorney general or the vice president regarding the election would be immune even if those calls were an attempt to illegally overturn the election.

 Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson said in their dissent that the majority decision “makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.”

  The minority said, “The main takeaway of today’s decision is that all of a President’s official acts, defined without regard to motive or intent, are entitled to immunity that is ‘at least . . . presumptive,’ and quite possibly ‘absolute.’ “

  Sotomayor wrote, “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in ex- change for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.” 

  The decision will likely delay but does not end the case against Trump for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It will be returned to the lower court to decide what actions Trump took regarding the election were in an official or private capacity. Trump has claimed he was acting as president trying to enforce federal election law because the election was rigged against him.

  The court dismissed Trump’s claim that he would have to have been removed from office by impeachment before he could be criminally prosecuted.

  The former president faces three charges of conspiracy and one count of obstructing an official proceeding. What Trump has described in his defense is using official powers to achieve a personal result and that’s what the trial court will have to sort out. Yesterday’s decision makes it unlikely that he will go to trial before the November election.

  Trial Judge Tanya Chutkan had previously rules that “former Presidents do not possess absolute federal criminal immunity for any acts committed while in office.”  Now, the Supreme Court’s decision makes it possible that the case will be back before them for a definition of what were and were not officials acts listed in Trump’s indictment.

OPENING MOVE: Hours after that Supreme Court decision, lawyers for Donald Trump asked to throw out his Manhattan criminal conviction and delay his sentencing, claiming that he is covered by presidential immunity. Trump makes this claim even though he committed the crimes before he was president and was convicted nearly three and a half years after he left office. The post-trial motions period has expired.

REVENGE PORN: Presidential son Hunter Biden has sued Fox News under New York’s “Revenge Porn” law, claiming they used naked images and videos of him taken from his abandoned laptop without his permission.

  The Fox mini-series, “The Trial of Hunter Biden,” which first appeared in 2022 on the network’s streaming service, presented a dramatized version of a fictional criminal trial of Biden. They used images of him nude and engaged in sex taken from the laptop he left at a Delaware computer repair shop.

  The lawsuit says, “Fox published and disseminated these intimate images to its vast audience of millions as part of an entertainment program in order to humiliate, harass, annoy and alarm Mr. Biden and to tarnish his reputation.” 

CATEGORY 5: Hurricane Beryl has already killed one person in the windward islands of Caribbean and is headed toward Jamaica as the earliest Category 5 storm on record. Beryl has already ripped through homes and grounded boats in Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Many people have been left without power or water. 

  The power of the storm is blamed on higher than normal sea temperatures, causing concern for what will happen later in the summer when the full hurricane season kicks in. Scientists have also found that in recent years hurricanes are developing more quickly, allowing people less time to prepare or evacuate.

TABLOID NEWS: Jurors in the Karen Read murder trial that has held the focus of the Boston area told the judge they are hopelessly deadlocked and he declared a mistrial. The jury note said, “The deep division is not due to a lack of effort or diligence, but rather a sincere adherence to our individual principles and moral convictions.”

  Read was accused of backing over her police officer boyfriend and leaving him to die in a snowstorm on the lawn of a friend’s home. Despite testimony from first responders that they heard Read declare repeatedly, “I hit him,” the defense offered an alternate explanation that John O’Keefe was beaten for unknown reasons by other people in the basement of the home then left outside to die.

THE SPIN RACK: Israel’s generals say they want a cease-fire in Gaza even if it keeps Hamas in power, because they are short of ammunition and fear a second-front war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. — At least 30 people were injured yesterday after an Air Europa Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner flight hit clear air turbulence over the Atlantic. Passengers flew out of their seats and one man appeared to have gotten stuck in the overhead bins.

BELOW THE FOLD:  The Rubik’s Cube is 50 years old and we can’t even solve Wordle.

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