The recent Supreme Court ruling (Trump v United States - wiki, pdf) is being criticized for allowing absolute and presumptive immunity for various acts involving core powers. One of the recurring hypotheticals is (paraphrased) "ordering Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival".
Will a US president order the assassination of any of the above people by 2029?
Resolves YES to any assassinations that have been ordered by the president by the end of 2028 as they are ordered (assassinations that are publicly ordered but not carried out prior to 2028 still count).
Resolves NO to any assassinations that happen, but are not claimed responsibility by the president and are attributed to independent, presidentially-unrelated assassins prior to the end of 2028.
Resolves NO on December 31st of 2028 for any assassinations that have not yet been ordered.
Motivation doesn't matter, but it has to be a deliberate, targeted killing (for instance if something like this happened again, it would resolve "Other US citizen" to "YES"). Accidental or incidental killings don't count here, but explicit assassination orders, whether they're justified as lawful or not, do.
Impeachment in the house or senate, and subsequent removal from office alone does not count as "criminal charges" here. The president has to avoid being criminally charged for the act, whether or not he stays in office.
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For the record, my prior on this is that the chances should be "basically 0%", except for the "Other US citizen" one, which has precedent. I'm happy to be educated about why I'm wrong about this, but I kind of semi-expect that education to come with a commensurate YES bet on the appropriate case.
@JessicaEvans That article says:
> Or, perhaps more troubling, he may be been referring to the law enforcement shooting of Reinoehl as planned in advance. That raises further concerns and questions about the law enforcement response. It’s not clear, however, what the President meant, and the White House offered no clarification when asked.
and
> Official story clashes with eyewitness reports
(followed by a large writeup detailing how officers seemed to try to apprehend the target, and killed him only when it looked like he was drawing his own gun and intending to fire back).
This is not what I'd consider a clear order to kill (I would have considered it such if the White House offered clarification and the clarification was "Yup; the big guy sent officers in specifically to ice this guy")
@inaimathi Things like this are by necessity open to interpretation. The people whose job is to tell you stories have no interest in looking bad in them. Eyewitnesses had no similar motive to lie. I tend to favor them in this case.
@JessicaEvans Sure, but firstly: contrast this with the al-Awlaki case (in terms of ambiguity on what happened and who ordered what).
Secondly: the "eyewitness reports story" here is "officers showed up and looked like they were trying to make an arrest until their target pulled a weapon of his own and then...". If you lend more credence to eyewitnesses, your conclusion on this incident would have to be "suicide by cop, and also, Trump likes looking tough and has no problems with lying in sort of bizarre situations in order to do it".
Ambiguous. He apparently had an active YouTube channel with (what was at the time) lots of views? I guess that might technically cross the line into "political commentary" depending on content. I've never heard of this channel before it was apparently nuked from orbit, so I don't trust my own judgement. If he had an actual (expected to produce writing) ongoing contract with Al Jazeera or something, yes, I'd consider him a journalist. I think this convinces me that I should disambiguate "Political commentator" to "Political commentator who isn't a formal member of the press".