to pick up and use. the minority, led by justice sotomayor, who warned today that, quote, the man in charge of enforcing laws can now just break them. ironic, isn't it? but for six in the majority, including the chief justice, the already highly controversial decision is meant to protect the presidency, writing that the framers always demanded an energetic, independent executive. we'll dig into the immediate fallout. plus, did today's legal bombshell effectively blow up jack smith's january 6th case against former president trump? what the decision said about the evidence smith can and can't use against the former president if the case gets to trial. it's not just d.c., could the cases in florida and georgia be wiped away, too? as the former president celebrates what he's calling a big win for democracy, a big decision awaits the current president. stay in the race or step aside after thursday's disastrous debate? i'll ask one of biden's top advisers what it's going to take to right the ship and save joe biden's campaign. so much to get to, but we start with the powers of the presidency, being reshaped for decades to come and with immediate benefit for donald trump. the supreme court's 6-3 ruling coming down just hours ago, attempting to draw a line between apt's official actions, which the court says are covered by absolute immunity and unofficial ones which aren't. in a stunningly brutal dissent, justice sotomayor argues this effective live creates a law-free zone around the president. what she wrote was chilling. the final line, with fear for our democracy, i dissent. then reading in aloud in the courtroom she went even further saying, with fear for our democracy i, along with the framers, dissent. i want to bring in nbc's ken dilanian outside the supreme court, jeffrey rosen is president and ceo of the national constitution center and a law professor at george washington law school, tim miller host of the bulwark podcast and msnbc political analyst. with me onset, chuck rosen berpg and former senior adviser to attorney general merrick garland, anthony coley. thank you for being here on this very consequential day. high drama, unlike to what we're used to seeing inside the highest court in the land. give us your thoughts on what prompted such a high-octane dissent? rockefeller i could see chief justice roberts say those dissents struck a note of chilling doom and is holy disproportionate to what this decision actually musters forth. the devil is in the details. what you have a decision that grants absolute immunity to presidential acts. if you listen back, you can see the zone of agreement. lawyer for the special counsel acknowledged there were some official acts under the president under article 2 that are immune for prosecution. president trump's lawyer included acts in the jaj smith indictment that could be prosecuted. the supreme court has carved a large amount of conduct that is immune and another group it says is presumed immune but prosecutors can go into court and try to rebut that premise. that's where this decision really will affect the jack smith indictment. there's only one category of conduct alleged in the indictment that this decision says is out of bounds right away. that's the section about how donald trump allege endly tried to co-op the justice department and get them to conduct bogus investigations of fraud and tell the states that there was fraud. this decision says that is out. that was clearly an official act. it also says that his conversations with mike pence, the vice president, about his role certifying the votes presiding over the senate on january 6th, that that is presumed an official act, but that prosecutors could go and argue before the judge that there's reason to think it wasn't, in part because he was president of the senate. lastly, it says donald trump's public statements, the public statements of a president are presumed to be official acts, but it says there are times when perhaps those statements were not official acts and prosecutors can come and argue about that. the bottom line, all of it gets sent back to the district court which will have to make detailed judgments about which of the conduct is private acts, official acts and that can be appealed. there's no chance this case can go to trial before the election, and it presents a complicated set of circumstances and a lot of litigation left to go and this question of whether donald trump can ever be held accountable based on this jack smith january 6th indictment. >> ken dilanian, thank you. anthony, justice sotomayor also wrote, the court gives former president trump all the immunity he asked for and more. is that what happened here? >> that's right. it's absolutely roadmap. i want to be clear about this case, chris. the right way to challenge elections in our country are through courts of law. >> and that happened. >> 60-plus times and each one of those times the court confirmed joe biden's victory. >> i think 63 out of 64 without even questioning it. >> and that should have been the end of it. what we saw is a president who ignored the facts, work around the law and engaged in the a campaign to overturn the will of the voters. i want to pick up on something that ken dilanian just said about any conversations, any actions that happened within the executive branch being taken out of this -- about this case. to put some meat on the bones, i'm going to give you an example. in december of 2020, donald trump had a conversation with his acting attorney general and his acting deputy attorney general. chris, he told them to just say that the election was corrupt, just say it, and let me and the gop congressmen take care of the rest. this is after bill barr left the department. you remember december 7th of 2000 he told the associated press that there was not enough fraud to change the outcome of the election. fast forward weeks later, trump is trying to put pressure on his own justice department to ignore those facts and to work around the law. that's what's really disturbing to me about this, that those type of conversations can now not be a part of this indictment. >> i have been listening to you all day, chuck. i get the sense that you think this is not the free pass some think it is. >> sorry you've had to listen to me all day, chris. >> my pleasure. >> nobody should be saddled with that. this is not a good decision for the prosecutors, but i don't think it's the end of the world. it makes sense to me that some core constitutional responsibilities of the president are off limits or are immune. it makes sense that purely private conduct of a president is within limits, not immune. that makes sense. the difficulty is that other category, that third bucket, that certain official acts might be immune or not immune, depending on what prosecutor -- >> what about the instance we just heard from anthony? >> i think that's a good point. i think that makes it tough. i would say in response -- and we did talk about this in the hallway. soliciting perjury, counseling someone to lie doesn't strike me as a core constitutional responsibility of a president. and so the devil is in the details, as ken dilanian said. this has to go back to the district court judge, and she has to make detailed findings. if i were the prosecutor on the case right now, i would be amassing my evidence and arguments to present to the district court judge why some of these official acts don't deserve immunity. i think we have to wait and see how that plays out before we can fully assess this opinion. >> jeffrey, we're going to have two hours to go into many of the details like that. i want to read a little more broadly part of sotomayor's dissent. she says under the majority opinion, if a president, quote, orders the navy's sael team 6 o to assassinate a political rival? immune. organizes a military coup to hold on to power? immune. takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? immune, immune, immune. does this ruling change, expand presidential power as we know it? >> it does expand president power as we know it. the core of justice sotomayor's dissent is even if you have an unofficial act, like orderering the murder of your political rival, you can't prove it. say a president says i'm going to do anything possible to stop my opponent from passing a bill and then he orders him murdered, you couldn't introduce the overt evidence that he said he's murdering him because i want to stop him from passing a bill, because that's an official act. that's why the cordis agreement is section 3c of the opinion which has to do with evidence, can you use the official evidence to prove the unofficial evidence. justice barrett came up with a compromise position. she would have just asked does the statute cover the presidential conduct and does that unnecessarily intrude only a core executive function. if the core had held that, there would be far less disagreement between the two sides because justice barrett would allow the official acts to prove the unofficial acts. the majority unnecessarily embraced a sweepingly broadvision of presidential immunity that exacerbated the division between the majority and the dissent and unnecessarily polarized the country. >> so when you have a decision that, as you say, is this broad, how does a court determine what's an official act and what isn't? >> that's the crucial question. what makes this decision so hard to apply, it sends it back to the lower court and trumps all those hard questions. it says you have to sis aggregate the various encounters between president trump and first his vice president, second his attorney general, third the state election officials, fourth, his own tweets. in each case the lower court has to make a determination about whether that's an official or unofficial act, subject to being reversed by the supreme court. frankly, it's just not obvious in all of those categories how a court could hold because it's a mix of official and unofficial acts. take the example of the vice president. he's urging the vice president to commit an act that the vice president himself concluded was unconstitutional. how how is the court to conclude eight head of whether the conversation itself was official as opposed to an unofficial act. that's what makes the test so hard to apply and what creates this large swath of immunity even when the conduct in question is concededly illegal. >> anthony, you're nodding. >> i am nodding. what really bothers me, if i can step back about this case, is it looks like the supreme court is just putting their thumb on the scale for this president. i don't know if you agree with that or not, but if they really wanted this case to go to trial before this election, these pretrial motions could have been happening over the last three or four months. they allowed -- made the district court, put a stay on any type of proceedings. that's what bothers me. i think that's what you're hearing and seeing from some of your twitter mentions and others. folks are just -- they are frustrated because this supreme court doesn't look like they're calling balls and strikes. it looks like they had a predetermined outcome that they wanted to impose to allow this president to escape criminal accountability. that's what it looks like. >> does amy coney barrett's arguments, because she has a partial concurrence, right? does it strike you as a more even-handed, fairer potential outcome of this than the one that actually happened? >> i think so, yes. i think she takes a more thoughtful, more manageable, more workable position. i want to amend one thing -- i agree with ability 93% -- >> that's an a. i'll take it. >> make it 89%. i don't know that the court is putting its thumb on the scales for trump. i think they're putting their thumb on the scales for the executive. this court has always believed in a robust executive. >> look, if you read the opinion -- i'm not going to pretend i've read every word of it. there is a section that the chief justice tries to argue this is broader, this isn't about this specific chief executive. do you think people buy that? >> i can't speak for all people. democrats get to be president, too. so the holding of this case applies to all presidents and until and unless it is overturned, for all time. yeah, does it help mr. trump? absolutely. >> to backtrack, why did this court allow the pre trial proceedings to go on? >> i think that's a really good and important point. let me disaggregate how long it took from the holding of the case. it took too long. completely agree with that. jack smith asked back in december that the case be decided by the supreme court without going through the appellate courts, and i think that could have happened. is anyone really surprised that the supreme court would want to weigh in on the decision about presidential immunity? that's what supreme courts do. >> i'm not surprised by it. but i will note, i worked on the gore campaign. you covered the gore campaign. >> i did. >> and the decision by which the supreme court was -- i mean within days, from briefing to -- >> because they understood the import and why it needed to be decided quickly. >> 1964 nixon case was decided within three weeks. can the court move quickly? absolutely. am i disappointed it did not? absolutely. but i'm not all that surprised. >> tim, let's talk about the political part of this. how does the biden campaign message this to voters? it would seem to dovetail with their warnings about what trump might do if he is elected. >> absolutely. i know the biden campaign is having a conference call today with surrogates. i'd like to see the president himself out today talking about this, because it goes to the central threat of trump. why so many of us never trumpers to democrats to progressives are so panicked about the possibility of a second trump term, because of the nature of the pathooh kind of like the velociraptor in jurassic park learning to work the doors. than tox the plans of project 2025, thanks to the staffing plans they have to put in place, the changes for schedule f, he would go into a second term with a lot more leeway to enact some of his more extra-legal, authoritarian policy items. i think it's a grave concern and americans should be concerned about it. this court decision plays into that. >> i think that grave concern part is something never trumpers believe, most democrats believe, even some republicans believe. having said that, tim, what we keep hearing and what polls suggest is that that kind of thing, the things that donald trump says that he would do, it's baked in. when you talk to voters, a lot of them say, ah, he doesn't really mean it. how does that get messaged, oh, no, he means it. oh, no, there is a real and present danger? >> it's frustrating that that is true. it's a true statement, chris. it is frustrating that some people don't think he really means it. the capitol was stormed on january 6th because of his attempt to overturn the election. so we have the evidence with our eyes and ears. i think there needs to be a robust and vague yous campaign that maybe relates to a topic later in the hour, a robust and vigorous campaign to convince the american people who are convincible about the fact that he does really mean this, he really is planning mass deportations, he is really planning to enact vengeance against his enemies, something he said in the debate. he is really going to be a threat to people that want to speak out against a second trump administration. so i think it's important that that campaign be waged and that folks be reminded of this. i think there's kind of a conventional wisdom, people already know trump, trump is trump. well, they do, but sometimes people have to be reminded about the greatest dangers, and i think this is an opportunity to do that. >> let me in our last minute, jeffrey, ask you about one more thing that was written in the decision accusing the dissension of fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about the future where the president feels empowered to violate federal criminal law. what do you think this decision and that particular statement says about this court and potentially its legacy going forward? >> well, it's a remarkable and significant statement. this is a decision that chief justice roberts would have wanted to be unanimous. the u.s. versus nixon case was unanimous, brown versus board of education -- decisions of this historic significance are not supposed to be divided by a 6-3 vote. the accusation of fearmongering is also one justice barrett issued against the liberal justices in the section three case in the case of whether to kick trump off the ballot. what's going on here, because it's in the face of a decision, is that unanimity failed. the liberals are seriously concerned and view this as a highly unjust find decision, and the majority is trying to dismiss their concerns. it's a sign of how the court is totally fractured. the two sides do not trust each other. it's an unfortunate failure for the leadership of chief justice job john roberts. we'll lay out what the massive decision means for the country. what about the three cases still on the table against the former president? 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[laughs] a home router should never be a home wrecker. oo this is a good book title. the consequences of the supreme court's immunity decision are potentially massive for special counsel jack smith. i means significant delays for smith's prosecution by pushing those questions about what evidence can and can't be used amend lauing further ap peoples. so it may be a long while before a jury can hear evidence over charges that president trump plotted to overturn the 2020 election, and if it is, what evidence will even be admitted? that's just one of three pending cases against donald trump. joining me former fulton county georgia deputy district attorney and msnbc legal analyst alyssa redman. former federal prosecutor and msnbc legal analyst kristy greenberg. msnbc legal correspondent lisa rubin is here. chuck rosenberg is also still with me. lisa, what does this mean for jack smith's ability to move the case forward? >> it's a very interes