Is it possible for a sitting President to be arrested for anything?
Let’s say the President did something like stab his wife to death. What could the authorities do? Couldn’t he just order the FBI not to arrest him and the Justice Department not to prosecute him, then issue a full pardon to himself? :dubious:
He can’t be arrested, but he can be impeached and removed from office. And once he is no longer president, then he can be arrested.
First, he cannot stop himself from being impeached – following which he can be arrested, tried, and convicted for any crimes committed before or while President. I believe that rather than set a precedent of arresting an incumbent President, the consensus would be to go that route.
Second, the 25th Amendment provides for means of removing authority from an incumbent President. The specifics have to do with certifying his inability to carry out the job (e.g., comatose from a stroke), but my hunch is that if he carried out a violent crime while serving as President, it would be considered grounds to consider him putatively insane, and could properly be invoked.
Cite please.
Who says the president can’t be arrested? If he commits murder as the OP suggests he can and must be immediately arrested for murder. Police or secret service officers who fail to arrest him would be derelict in their duty.
Found this online:
CAN the president pardon himself? I can hear the Founding Fathers spinning in their graves. I don’t think that they ever thought to ask the question. Over the centuries, the president’s power to pardon has been interpreted extremely broadly by the courts. I can’t think of any instance when the courts rejected a presidential pardon. However, self-pardon? I don’t know.
Further, if the president were to use the pardon to cover up his own crimes, be it through the pardon of someone else, or of himself, he would be open to charges of obstruction of justice or something or other. You might have to remove him from office before you could practically follow through on the criminal prosecution.
But, then again, look at the Constitution. It clearly states that the president may be criminally prosecuted for the same crimes for which he is removed from office. If he could pardon himself before the final vote in the Senate, that would seem to negate the ability to prosecute him criminally after removal. And don’t argue that he couldn’t pardon himself because he hadn’t been indicted. Ford pardoned Nixon of any crimes that he MAY have committed, without Nixon being indicted. Perhaps inherent in the clause to remove him from office, and remain liable to criminal prosecution is an inability to pardon himself.
Hope that helps!
D.
President Grant was once arrested for speeding in Washington (there were speed limits even back in the pre-automobile era). The police officer pulled over his carriage and was prepared to let him go when he realized who the driver was but Grant told him to do his duty. The officer wrote him a ticket which Grant paid without contesting.
But isn’t the secret service’s duty to protect the President no matter what? Including, I presume, to protect him from arrest.
Emphatically not. Secret Service agents are to protect the president from physical harm and not from due process of law. Secret Service agents are law enforcement personnel sworn to uphold the Constitution and the laws, not to protect the president from the legal consequences of his own actions. Taking a bullet for him is one thing; shielding him from an arrest warrant is quite another.
Regarding pardon, as I understand it the President can grant pardon only for federal crimes. Even if he issued a blanket pardon for himself, that probably wouldn’t prevent a state or local prosecution for murder, assault, etc. And it’s hard to believe that a president who was suspected of committing a serious crime personally–as opposed to making bad policy judgments–wouldn’t be out of office pretty quickly. Not only could he be impeached, but under the 25th amendment the Vice President and the cabinet, by majority vote, could determine that the President was unable to perform the duties of his office and put the VP in charge. (Then the President gets to appeal to Congress, etc., but what are the chances he’d be successful?)
Realistically, the President is rarely alone. I suspect that the Secret Service would stop him from doing something really stupid, even if he momentarily wanted to.
On a related note, at what point can a pardon be issued. Can the President issue a pre-emptive pardon before an indictment? (In Tom Clancy’s recent novel, he has the President issuing pardons for crimes that haven’t even been committed, but that’s fiction.)
No, no, no, no, NO!
The first part is true, but then the cop asked him for his ID…
…so Grant pulled out a Fifty.
The cop arrested him for attempted bribery. 
FWIW, the Constitution allows members of Congress to be “privileged from arrrest” during their attendence of sessions of Congress, going and coming back from those sessions, and for their speech and debate during those sessions; EXCEPT in cases of “treason, felony, and breach of the peace.”
I fail to see how a president can claim immunity to arrest when (a) when the Constitution doesn’t give it to him (b) even members of Congress who enjoy such protection have it limited to basically crimes that are not treason or violence.