Who can charge, investigate, arrest and sentence a sitting president

Is the house of representatives the only body that has this power?

Can cops and prosecutors on the city, county, state or federal level do this?

Does any other organization have this power?

Example: Lets say Trump is at a meet and greet in Baltimore and he sexually assaults a woman by grabbing her butt. Do the Baltimore police or Maryland police have the ability to charge him with a crime if the victim wants to press charges? Or is the president pretty much able to do what he wants unless the house of representatives acts?

What if Trump demands a soldier commit war crimes? Who, if anyone, has the jurisdiction to investigate that?

What if he engages in some kind of behavior to enrich himself (funneling money, accepting bribes, etc)? Who would investigate that?

I’m curious who has the power to charge, investigate, arrest, sentence, etc the president for criminal behavior.

Can a sitting president be charged with a felony but still remain president? Or does being charged with a major crime remove you from office?

Who has the power to arrest the president?

The House as the power to impeach. How is that the power to arrest?

So is the answer nobody knows?

The President is subject to all the same laws and their enforcement as anyone else. Now, for violations of federal laws, there are two complications: The federal police all work for him, and so he could order them not to arrest him, and he could also pardon himself for any federal crime. Congress’s impeachment power gets around both of these problems, the first by virtue of being in a different branch of government, and the second because the Constitution specifically says that impeachment can’t be pardoned.

But the vast bulk of the laws in the US, especially criminal law, is at the state level, not federal. The President is not a state official, and the power to order state police and to issue state pardons both reside at the state level (usually with the governor for both, but as always some states are a little different). So, absent any reason to say otherwise, the President could be arrested, tried, and imprisoned by a state’s legal system.

But I assume police, like soldiers, are not obliged to follow an unlawful order.

Consider the case of Nixon and the Saturday Night Massacre. he ordered the attorney general to fire the special prosecutor investigating him; the AG refused, and resigned. Same process with deputy attorney general, he resigned. the solicitor general agreed.

Funny follow-up story, but several years later Bork was nominated for a supreme court position by Ronald Reagan and oddly enough, was rejected by the senate.

So far as I can tell, that act would not be a sexual offense within the meaning of Maryland law.

However, it would certainly be an unwanted touching, a battery. In Maryland, the term “assault,” applies to a completed act of battery (see, e.g., Lamb v. State, 613 A. 2d 402 (Md Ct Spec App 1992.

During the Clinton administration and questions about the possibility of a Clinton criminal charge, the White House Office of Legal Counsel opined that the President, and only the President, is immune from from criminal process during his term because he embodies the entire executive branch. That is, a city police officer cannot take the President into custody and thus paralyze the entire executive branch. Interestingly, this position echoed a virtually identical one taken by the Nixon White House’s Office of Legal Counsel.

No court has ever considered the specific question; Clinton reached a deal with Robert Ray in which he surrendered his law license for five years in exchange for a promise of non-prosecution, and that was after he left office in any event.

Clinton v Jones settled the issue of whether the President could be compelled to civil litigation. (Short answer: yes).

That’s actually a different question entirely: a President who assaults another in a social setting is acting on his own behalf. A President who orders a soldier to act is presumably acting in his capacity as President. The President has immunity from civil liability for acts committed as President. And in general, there seems to be agreement that while the United States has authority to prosecute federal crimes committed by the President, the necessary first step would be impeachment and removal from office – although again no court has confronted the question, but OLC opinions from both Democratic and Republican administrations have asserted this position.

So while a special prosecutor could investigate this, an indictment seems to require impeachment.

Same answer.

Nothing in the written law limits the reach of a grand jury to indict, but again, legal authorities seem to weigh on the side of the necessity of the President being impeached first.

For what my opinion is worth, this is an invalid argument. The President of the United States might embody the executive branch. But Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon do not. Our system is designed so that the office of the Presidency can be transferred from one individual to another.

If Bill Clinton had been arrested and taken into custody then the 25th Amendment could have been invoked and he could have been declared unable to carry out the duties of being President. Vice President Gore would then become Acting President and the executive branch of the government would continue its functions until Clinton’s arrest was resolved.

In addition to the opinions from White House counsel, that was also the conclusion reached by Leon Jaworski, the second special prosecutor in the Watergate matter. He felt that practically speaking, it just wasn’t possible for a prosecutor to take on the President as if he were an ordinary person facing a criminal charge; it was left to Congress to take action. That was one of the reasons Nixon was named as an “unindicted co-conspirator”.

As I understand it, the immunity from arrest on assorted crimes is specifically to avoid the political infighting on “trumped-up” (sorry) charges that might become some of the back-and-forth of a rough political landscape. Imagine if the DC police or some state police could arrest and hold the president on whatever charge looks convenient to server the other side’s agenda.

IIRC, for the same reason congress members have immunity from arrest on their way to and from and during congressional sessions - so they cannot be silence or removed from the debate or vote. (Although it does not, it appears, exempt them from having to undergo security theatre at the capitol entrance like everyone else.) There’s also the issue of taking a wide stance in a public washroom…

McCain just said if Trump brings back torture he will ‘take you to court’.

Does McCain know something I don’t know? What power does a sitting senator have to take a president to court for a war crime? Who is the ‘we’ that McCain refers to?

Just remember that no state police has any jurisdiction in DC and DC is under control of the federal government, so I doubt that any DC cop could arrest him either. My understanding is that the only way to arrest a sitting president would be for HR to impeach him, the senate vote by a 2/3 majority to convict him (only penalty being removal from office) and then arrest him in the way any of us could be arrested.

No, no. I absolutely disagree. In my view, that way lies coup d’etat.

The 25th Amendment’s section 4 was created when concerns arose that a medical issue could impede the President from his duties.

But I readily concede that since no court has weighed in on the matter, this is merely my view.

However, every single prosecutor actually in the realistic position of contemplating criminal charges against the President (and by “every single” I mean both of them) concluded that impeachment was a necessary prerequisite.

Could be your everyday political bluster, but note that he says “they”, not “him”.

This particular act may be a violation of federal law – I say this to distinguish it from a war crime under international law.

But McCain has no power of arrest or prosecution in this context.

If Trump were arrested, I’m betting he’d be able to slide them tiny hands right outa his handcuffs.

So, can Trump shoot someone on 5th Avenue and get away with it, if congress doesn’t care?

I feel the possibility of a coup d’etat is remote. We’re talking about the Vice President and cabinet - all people who were picked by the President. It seems unlikely they would all join together to overthrow the President unless there was a serious reason that compelled them.

So they’re not going to invoke the 25th because some over-zealous local official filed symbolic criminal charges against the President. But if the President murders the First Lady, then he’ll be immediately removed from office, albeit on a provisional basis, by the cabinet before Congress impeaches him.

As you note, nobody has ever used the 25th amendment this way. But there’s never been a need to. Presidents may arguably have committed crimes but they’ve usually been of a more nebulous nature. We’ve never had a sitting President commit a “smoking gun” crime like murder or rape.

My point is that if the President ever commits a serious crime like that, the legal framework exists to deal with it.

But isn’t that a vulnerability in the 25th no matter what?

It essentially provides a legal means by which the VP, with the cooperation of a majority of the cabinet, can assume the power to control the executive branch against the will of the elected president. It doesn’t even say what qualifies as ‘unable to fulfill the office’. That’s left up to the VP and cabinet. Should the president protest it’s up to Congress to decide. In what way is that not, regardless of the niceties, a legal coup d’état?

VP and Cabinet to congress: “President be whack, bro.”
President: “What? Fuck you; no I’m not!”
VP and Cabinet to congress: “It’s true. Sad, we know.”
Congress: “Damn both of you. Congressmen assemble!”

We can’t really know the answer until a police officer tries to arrest the president and a prosecutor tries to indict him.

I’m not particularly schooled in this area, but I don’t see why a sitting president can’t use his pardon power on himself. There is nothing in the constitution limiting this power. I think some theorists have argued that he can’t pardon himself but no president has tried so we don’t know for certain. If the president can pardon himself, as a practical matter, he is unlikely to stand trial for the most serious federal charges. Perhaps the ability to self-pardon even implies a presidential immunity from federal prosecution during his term. This argues for the “impeachment first” model of prosecution where Congress first removes the president from power before federal law enforcement authorities charge him. If they fail to remove him from office, charges would likely either have to wait until he leaves office or be dropped altogether.

States, though, are separate sovereigns and the president has no pardon power over them. Thus, the presidential pardon shouldn’t limit states’ authority to prosecute the president. Unless the courts adopt an even broader interpretation of presidential immunity, even a sitting president should be subject to state prosecution. Of course, getting the president into state custody is a separate complication.

This would likely only be tested in the most extreme of circumstances. The president’s susceptibility to prosecution shouldn’t depend on the seriousness of the crime but I’ll bet that in the real world, it would. If the president were credibly accused of killing someone or some other heinous crime, I think we would find that he couldn’t escape prosecution even during his term. Any other result could leave us at the mercy of petty tyrants and despots and that is anathema to our founding principles. If he were accused of some debatable ethics foible or filing a trivial misstatement on some required government form, courts are more likely to endorse theories that the president can’t be tried for those crimes so no state could have the power to use these trivialities to exert undue power over the federal government. Federal judges would likely have to determine whether the federal constitution would limit prosecution by the states. I hate to think this would be decided on a partisan basis but partisanship of the federal judiciary seems to be increasing.

Bricker’s coup d’etats theory is interesting but I’m not sure I agree with him. Prosecuting the president could be a means of legitimizing a coup. It could also show that we are a nation of laws and that no person is above them. That’s a strong statement about the values embedded in our constitution. Again, where we come out might just depend on the facts. The 25th amendment does provide a means of determining who gets to be president when the sitting president can no longer act. Maybe this is one of the circumstances that should lead to a transition of power.