Did President Donald Trump say "my crimes" can't be investigated while he is still President? No, that's not true: a tweet erroneously interpreted a Vanity Fair headline that was paraphrasing an argument from Trump's lawyers as a direct quote from Trump himself. Trump never used the phrase "my crimes".
The tweet published by Twitter user @stonecold2050 on September 20, 2019 (archived here) and it read:
"Trump says "my crimes can't be investigated while I'm the president of the United States" "My Crimes" What did he just say? #ImpeachTrump https://t.co/c3iQ86DThG"
This is the original tweet:
Trump says "my crimes can't be investigated while I'm the president of the United States"
-- Stone 🥶 (@stonecold2050) September 20, 2019
"My Crimes" What did he just say?#ImpeachTrump
https://t.co/c3iQ86DThG
The Vanity Fair article (archived here) it linked to did have a title that included the "my crimes" wording but it lacked quotation marks, indicating Vanity Fair did not mean it to be a direct quotation of words spoken by the President:
Trump: My Crimes Can't Be Investigated While I'm President
As you may or may not have heard, Donald Trump refused to release his tax returns while running for president, claiming, falsely, that an audit prevented him from doing so but that the public would see them just as soon as he got the green light.
The Vanity Fair article did not contain any direct quotes from Trump himself at all, it merely repeated some quotes by Trump's lawyers from an earlier Bloomberg article:
Trump Sues Manhattan DA Cy Vance in Tax-Return Fight - Bloomberg
Donald Trump sued Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. after the prosecutor demanded eight years of the president's tax returns in a probe of whether the Trump Organization falsified business records. In the lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Manhattan, Trump said the subpoena issued to his accounting firm, Mazars USA, seeking his tax returns is unconstitutional and asked a judge to declare it invalid.
That story has Trump and Trump's lawyers making following claims:
In the lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Manhattan, Trump said the subpoena issued to his accounting firm, Mazars USA, seeking his tax returns is unconstitutional and asked a judge to declare it invalid. Trump said the subpoena should be blocked until he has left office, because sitting presidents aren't subjected to the criminal process.
"The framers of our Constitution understood that state and local prosecutors would be tempted to criminally investigate the president to advance their own careers and to advance their political agendas," Trump's lawyers said in the lawsuit. "And they likewise understood that having to defend against these actions would distract the president from his constitutional duties."
Note that the story does not have any direct quotes from Trump and the words "crime", "crimes" or "my crimes" are not mentioned. So it is pretty clear the Vanity Fair headline was just paraphrasing how the author thought this lawsuit should be understood and that the headline was not a direct quote.
Anyone seeking to find some kind of admission of guilt on Trump's end in the phrase "my crimes" should be aware that Trump never actually uttered those words.
