Presidential Immunity Protects Obama from Prosecution

“Turns out I’m really good at killing people.”

When the Supreme Court released its 6-3 opinion in Trump v. United States no person benefited more than Barack Obama.

Writing for the majority was Chief Justice John Roberts. He wrote:

“Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity for criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecutions for all his official acts. There is not immunity for unofficial acts.”

Obama benefits because without that immunity even today he can be charged for the federal crime of murder (18 USC §§ 1111). This is because there is no statute of limitations for murder. 

Let’s explore what happened.

Samir Khan was not anybody’s idea of an All-American boy. Born in Saudi Arabia, he immigrated to the US with his parents when he was a child. He became a naturalized US citizen and did typical high school boy activities in his hometown of Queens, New York. He played high school football and wrote for the school newspaper.

In 2004 after he finished high school his parents moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. They thought the change of scenery would do Samir some good. They were troubled by some of the views he was adopting and they believed Samir was caught up with inappropriate influences. Instead of fixating on going to college or getting that first grown-up job, he was becoming antagonistic toward the US and its foreign policy.

The change of venue didn’t help. Kahn left the US for Yemen in 2009. There he began editing an online jihadist magazine known as Inspire that served al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). There were no claims Khan personally engaged in any violent activity. He edited a magazine with that encouraged violent behavior. Thomas Hegghammer, a political scientist who studies Islamic violence, described Inspire as having dubious influence.

Advocating violence is not unheard of. Consider US Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) who was censured by Congress in 2023. One of Tlaib’s transgressions was promoting the slogan “from the river to the sea,” which is a call to commit genocide against Jews and eradicate Israel. Tlaib is unlikely to ever land on a US drone kill list.

Khan’s days as a magazine editor came to an abrupt end on September 30, 2011. A drone strike that was personally approved by Obama killed Samir Khan and a New Mexico-born US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki.

Obama often bragged he retained final approval authority for drone strikes. Years later, he claimed he was “very cautious” in approving drone strikes when women and children were present. Some on the political left praised Obama’s use of drones.

The other US citizen killed in the strike with Khan, Al-Awlaki, had become a Muslim cleric, also emigrated to Yemen and was also associated with AQAP. Like Khan, al-Awlaki was not accused of personally engaging in violence. He preached hateful, jihadist rhetoric. In 2010, Obama approved adding al-Awlaki to his administration’s “kill list.”

This detail alone is chilling. A president maintained a kill list that included a known US citizen. There is nothing in the US Constitution that permits the president to skip due process and act as judge, jury and executioner for any American citizen let alone one that was accused of preaching hateful rhetoric. Whether he be located in the US or abroad.

The White House justified the action by relying on a white paper its administration drafted that alleged the president had the authority to take fatal action against any US citizen it deemed a threat. Fortunately for Obama, he was “entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecutions for all his official acts,” as Roberts wrote 16 years after those American deaths in Trump v. United States.

In a speech before Northwestern University School of Law the following year, US Attorney General Eric Holder elaborated on the Obama administration’s opinion that there existed presidential authority to order drone strikes targeting Americans. Holder emphasized the relevance of “the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which says that the government may not deprive a citizen of his or her life without due process of law.” However, this due process is met, Holder argued, not by any judicial approval, but merely by the president making a decision that an American posed a potential threat and therefore was deemed a legitimate target.

In another time and with another president the media uproar would have been deafening over such a presidential policy. Waterboarding of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad is a crime against humanity, but drone strikes targeting Americans not charged with a single US crime is perfectly acceptable, they reason. But this was Obama who was adored by the left-wing press. So, they remained silent on Obama’s unilateral action to target and kill an American citizen. Or outlets like the New York Times, NPR and CNN offered Obama political cover by describing Samir Khan as a domestic terrorist, implying killing him was the right thing to do.

During the 2008 presidential election, Obama campaigned in opposition to George Bush policies in Iraq. But upon taking office in 2009, Obama escalated the use of drones to attack targets, including people.  Obama ordered more drone strikes in his first year in office than George Bush ordered during his entire presidency.^[i]

During his eight-year presidency, Obama is known to have ordered nearly 550 drone strikes that killed nearly 3,800, including 324 civilians. In 2011, he quipped to his aides, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”

On October 14^th, two weeks after the drone strike that killed Samir Khan and Anwar al-Awlaki, another drone strike approved by Obama killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Like Samir and Anwar, Abdulrahman was also an American citizen. He was born in Denver, Colorado. However, unlike the other two, Abdulrahman was not accused of editing a jihadist magazine or preaching hateful rhetoric. In fact, he was just a school boy. Abdulrahman was the 16-year-old son of the American cleric.

The Obama administration blundered. It targeted Abdulrahman claiming he was an al-Qaeda militant in his twenties. He wasn’t. On the evening he was killed Abdulrahman was with several other teenagers enjoying an outdoor barbecue.^[ii] The teen’s family produced a birth certificate showing the boy was born in Denver in 1995. The Obama administration never offered any intelligence data or other information justifying why it targeted the boy. It made a tragic mistake.

Presidential immunity protects Obama from prosecution for their deaths.

Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, and Parler at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.

His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).

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^[i] Mark Hyman, Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation, (New York: Post Hill Press, 2019), 339.

^[ii] Peter Finn and Greg Miller, “Family Condemns Death of Awlaki’s Son,” Washington Post, October 18, 2011.