How have lower courts applied the Supreme Court’s immunity framework to other presidents or presidential‑adjacent conduct?
Executive summary
Lower courts have, so far, approached the Supreme Court’s new immunity framework cautiously and piecemeal, largely because the Court itself remanded fact‑specific questions back to trial judges rather than announcing bright‑line rules [1] [2]. Before and after the Supreme Court’s decision, lower tribunals had already split over immunity claims—most notably rejecting blanket immunity in the D.C. District Court and D.C. Circuit before the Supreme Court’s intervention—and now must perform detailed “official act” inquiries the high court said are for them to resolve [3] [4].
1. Lower courts kept the question alive but refused blanket immunity initially
The immediate lower‑court posture in the Trump prosecutions was refusal to find that a former President enjoyed categorical immunity: both the D.C. District Court and the D.C. Circuit denied dismissal on immunity grounds before the Supreme Court granted review, rejecting the claim that presidential status insulated all acts from criminal process [3] [4]. Those rulings reflect the traditional hesitancy of trial and intermediate courts to broadbrush immunity without a Supreme Court mandate, a posture the high court later complicated by articulating a three‑tier framework rather than a single rule [4] [3].
2. The Supreme Court’s remand forced lower courts into granular “official acts” fact‑finding
Rather than resolving immunity across the board, the Supreme Court held that some “core” constitutional powers receive absolute immunity while other official acts get presumptive immunity and unofficial acts receive none, and it remanded to the lower courts to determine which alleged conduct falls where—a directive that turns trial judges into front‑line adjudicators of constitutional function and motive [1] [2]. The high court emphasized that those determinations are fact‑specific, which means lower courts must examine the context and character of each contested act rather than applying an abstract rule [1] [5].
3. Application so far: cautious, case‑by‑case, and litigious
Scholarly and practice commentary predicts—and early lower‑court work confirms—that courts will parse whether an act was taken pursuant to “conclusive and preclusive” presidential authority, whether it falls within the “outer perimeter” of duties, or whether it was plainly unofficial; that parsing has already begun in filings and motions in the remanded proceedings and in academic fora but has not yet produced a broad body of settled precedent extending immunity to other presidents or adjacent actors [5] [6] [7]. The remand has also produced intense briefing from both government and defense, since a finding of immunity can bar use of certain evidence entirely, as the majority suggested [5].
4. Precedent outside Trump remains limited and rooted in older civil cases
Lower courts’ understanding of presidential immunity still leans heavily on preexisting civil precedents—especially Nixon v. Fitzgerald’s official‑act protection and United States v. Nixon’s limits on absolute privilege—which lower judges have used as analogues even where the Supreme Court’s new criminal framework reshapes the terrain [8] [2]. That legacy means most lower‑court decisions about presidents other than Trump remain either unpublished, tethered to civil contexts, or undecided on the specific criminal‑immunity test that the Supreme Court articulated [8] [9].
5. Competing narratives, hidden stakes, and the unanswered questions for future prosecutions
Advocates for accountability warn that the new framework could immunize serious misconduct where it can be reframed as an “official act,” a concern voiced forcefully by civil‑liberties groups arguing the decision places presidents “substantially above the law” [10], while defense and executive‑branch commentators emphasize separation‑of‑powers imperatives underlying the Court’s tiered approach [3] [7]. Scholars note implicit agendas on both sides—courts protecting institutional prerogatives versus prosecutors preserving criminal accountability—and underline a practical reality: lower courts will be the battleground for those competing aims because the Supreme Court left the fact‑intensive door open [11] [5].
6. What the record does not yet show—and what lower courts must now produce
There is, as of the available reporting, no settled, multi‑case body of lower‑court law applying the new framework beyond the immediate Trump remand; the Supreme Court’s trilogy‑style rules simply redirected the deciding work to trial judges who must now craft detailed findings about which actions were “official” or “unofficial,” and whether prosecuting them “would pose no dangers of intrusion” on executive functions—questions the lower courts have not uniformly answered and that scholars expect will generate new, contested precedents over time [1] [4] [7]. Lower courts’ actual applications will therefore determine whether the framework narrows or widens accountability for future presidents and presidential‑adjacent actors, but reporters and analysts must wait for those concrete rulings to accumulate before declaring a trend.