There are two elements to the immunity decision that are particularly extreme in a way that many will miss: (1) motive is irrelevant and (2) immune acts are not just excluded from prosecution, they’re excluded from evidence.
/1
/2 Motive being irrelevant means that the President can do a thing for expressly lawless reasons so long as the thing is within the extremely broad range of official acts. So question isn’t “can the President conspire to defraud,” it’s “can the President call a state official about an election.”
/3 The problem is that almost anything can be shoehorned into an official act depending on how you characterize it or the level of generality you use. The Court’s “well of course a President has to use due care that election laws are enforced” hints at this.
A new test is coming into focus:
1) When the act is bad for the Justices personally (e.g., one of them who was appointed by a Republican President is bundled into a Border Patrol van and is never seen again), it's not an official act.
2) Otherwise it's bold and decisive action and therefore A-OK.
