Now that the Senate has voted to clear President Trump of impeachment charges, any judgment of his conduct will be left up to the voters, as fellow Republicans argued it should be.

That is, until Trump leaves office, and loses the immunity from criminal prosecution that presidents are granted by Justice Department policy.

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“It wasn’t a criminal trial,” Stanford law Professor Robert Weisberg said. “There is no double jeopardy.”

The Constitution also specifies that a president who has been impeached, and even one who is later convicted and removed by the Senate, “shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial judgment and punishment, according to law.”

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“The evidence of corrupt intent here is vastly stronger than you would see in the vast run of political corruption cases,” said David Sklansky, a Stanford criminal law professor and former federal prosecutor. “I think most federal prosecutors would view it as a very strong case against someone else.”

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Weisberg, co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, said he wasn’t sure that the aid Trump was seeking from Ukraine would fit the bribery or extortion laws. “It takes a bit of creative reasoning to say a benefit to Trump’s election, harming Biden, is a thing of value,” he said.

But Sklansky, his Stanford colleague, said courts have ruled that a “thing of value” can be something intangible, like political aid. And in comparison to the information the Russian lawyer allegedly offered about Hillary Clinton, he said, Trump was reportedly seeking a criminal investigation of the Bidens in Ukraine, which would give prosecutors “a stronger argument.”

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