Donald Trump got a big helping hand from the conservative Supreme Court Wednesday. The highest court not only agreed to hear his absurd claim that presidents enjoy “total immunity” in his federal election subversion case but also scheduled the arguments for late April, allowing the former president to stall the proceedings well into the spring.
Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting the case, had called for a “speedy trial” as he announced charges of conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding against the former president last August. “Delaying the January 6 trial suppresses critical evidence that Americans deserve to hear,” former Representative Liz Cheney, the top Republican on the January 6 committee, wrote Wednesday. “Donald Trump attempted to overturn an election and seize power. Our justice system must be able to bring him to trial before the next election.” But Trump, who baselessly insists all charges against him in his four criminal cases are politically motivated, has sought to gum up the process, seemingly in hopes that he can avoid accountability by winning back the White House.
Included among Trump’s delay tactics is the claim that, as president, he is essentially above the law. John Sauer, one of his attorneys, even argued during a hearing last month that this supposed “presidential immunity” would cover political assassinations. “There is a political process that would have to occur under our Constitution,” Sauer said in federal court. “If there’s no impeachment ever and no conviction, then the official acts are immune—period.”
A three-judge panel rejected that argument earlier this month, but Trump quickly appealed to the Supreme Court, where three of his appointees as president help make up the 6-3 conservative supermajority. (Another member of that majority, Clarence Thomas, has ignored calls to recuse himself from the case over his wife’s involvement in the failed attempt to overturn Trump’s reelection loss.) Trump cheered the court’s decision to take up the case, writing Wednesday that presidents “will not be able to properly function, or make decisions,” without immunity.
It’s unclear if the Supreme Court will agree with him and effectively end the prosecution against him—or if and for how long the trial, initially set for March, will be delayed. But that the justices are even entertaining such an outrageous claim is itself outrageous, as conservative former federal justice J. Michael Luttig told MSNBC Wednesday. “There was no reason in this world for the Supreme Court to take this case,” said Luttig, who pressed then-Vice President Mike Pence not to go along with Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election results. “Under the constitution… there’s never been an argument that a former president is immune from prosecution for crimes that he committed while in office,” Luttig said. “On a more practical level, of course, the Supreme Court is capable of deciding this very quickly, in time that the former president could be tried before the election. But today’s decision makes that that much more unlikely.”
Indeed, the decision by the court to hear this claim casts even more uncertainty over the cases against Trump. The hush-money case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is seeking to impose a gag order on the former president, is set to go to trial in late March—but that is seen as the least severe of the four. Another election case led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia has been sidetracked by a hearing over her relationship with one of her top prosecutors. And the classified documents case, which is also being prosecuted by Smith, sits before Aileen Cannon—a Trump appointee whose earlier rulings sympathetic to the former president have raised concerns that the anticipated May trial date might not hold.
Trump has faced trial in civil sexual assault and defamation cases by E. Jean Carroll and a criminal case against his company, both of which have resulted in massive financial penalties against him. And it’s still possible he’ll face more than one of his felony trials before the election this fall. But the Supreme Court’s decision Wednesday, which should further concern about its own integrity and independence, means voters may not only be deciding on the presidency this November but on whether or not Trump actually ends up facing full accountability.
