Federal appeals court rejects Trump’s claim of absolute executive immunity
A federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected former President Donald Trump’s claim that he was immune to charges of plotting to subvert the results of the 2020 election, ruling that he must go to trial on a criminal indictment accusing him of seeking to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden.
The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed Trump a significant defeat, but it was unlikely to be the final word on his claims of executive immunity. Trump, who is on a path to locking up the Republican presidential nomination, is expected to continue his appeal to the Supreme Court.
Still, the panel’s 57-page ruling signaled an important moment in U.S. jurisprudence, answering a question that had never been addressed by an appeals court: Can former presidents escape being held accountable by the criminal justice system for things they did while in office?
The question is novel because no former president until Trump had been indicted, so there was never an opportunity for a defendant to make — and courts to consider — the sweeping claim of executive immunity that he put forward.
The panel, composed of two judges appointed by Democrats and one Republican appointee, said in its decision that despite the privileges of the office he once held, Trump was subject to federal criminal law like any other American.
“For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant,” the panel wrote. “But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as president no longer protects him against this prosecution.”
A spokesperson for Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought the case against Trump, declined to comment on the decision.
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, said the former president “respectfully disagrees” with the court’s decision and would appeal it.
“If immunity is not granted to a president, every future president who leaves office will be immediately indicted by the opposing party,” Cheung said, parroting a line used by Trump in social media posts and campaign stops. “Without complete immunity, a president of the United States would not be able to properly function.”
The panel’s ruling came nearly a month after it heard arguments on the immunity issue from Trump’s legal team and from prosecutors working for Smith. While the decision was quick by the standards of a normal appeal, what happens next will be arguably more important in determining when a trial on the election subversion charges will take place and also on the timing of Trump’s three other criminal trials.
In addition to the federal indictment charging him with seeking to overturn his election loss in 2020, he faces similar charges brought by a district attorney in Georgia. Smith, the special counsel appointed to oversee the federal prosecutions, has also brought a case in Florida accusing Trump of mishandling highly sensitive classified documents after leaving office and obstructing efforts to retrieve them. And in New York City, Trump faces trial on charges related to hush-money payments to a porn actor during the 2016 campaign.
The scheduling of the three other trials depends in part on the timing of the federal election case.
In a significant part of their decision about presidential immunity, the three appellate judges circumscribed Trump’s ability to use further appeals to waste more time and delay the election case from going to trial — a strategy the former president has pursued since the indictment against him was filed in August 2023 in U.S. District Court in Washington.
The panel said, for instance, that if Trump appealed its decision to the Supreme Court, the underlying case, which was put on hold by the trial judge in December, would remain suspended until the justices decided to hear the case themselves and issued their own order freezing the proceedings.
But the panel imposed a rule designed to discourage Trump from making an intermediate challenge to the full court of appeals. It said that if Trump took that route, the underlying case would not remain on hold as the full court mulled whether to hear the case and issued its own order pausing it.
If the question does reach the Supreme Court, the justices will first have to decide whether to accept the case or to reject it and allow the appeals court’s ruling against Trump to stand. If they decline to hear the issue, the case will be sent directly back to the trial judge, Tanya Chutkan, who scrapped her initial March 4 date for the trial last week, but has otherwise shown every sign of wanting to move the charges toward trial as quickly as possible.
If, however, the Supreme Court does accept the case, the crucial question will become how quickly the justices act in asking for briefs and in scheduling arguments. Should they move rapidly to hear the case and issue a decision, there remains the chance that a trial on the election charges will occur before the general election in November.
But if the justices take their time, it is possible a trial could be put off until after the election. And were that to happen and Trump were to win, he would be in a position to ask his Justice Department to dismiss the case or even seek to pardon himself.
Even though Trump put three of the justices on the bench, the Supreme Court has not shown much of an appetite for wading into issues related to his efforts to tinker with the mechanics of U.S. democracy.
But the court could end up considering Trump’s immunity challenge and on Thursday is scheduled to hear arguments about another momentous question related to the former president: whether he can be disqualified from the ballot for having engaged in an act of insurrection by encouraging his supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.