Noah Feldman, Columnist

Kavanaugh’s Papers Don’t Help Trump Avoid Indictment

Opponents of the Supreme Court nominee are reading him all wrong.

July 10, 2018 at 2:19 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Kavanaugh has been playing legal chess for a long time. — Kavanaugh has been playing legal chess for a long time.
Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg

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Some Democrats and advocacy groups are saying President Donald Trump picked Judge Brett Kavanaugh as his second nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court because of Kavanaugh’s view that a president shouldn’t be indicted while in office. It’s important that not become the narrative of the Democrats’ opposition, because it can easily be refuted.

Properly understood, Kavanaugh’s expressed views actually support the opposite conclusion: that the president can be investigated and maybe even indicted unless Congress passes a law saying he can’t — which Congress has not done.