Supreme court’s decision to hear Trump’s immunity claim sanctions his delay strategy
The US supreme court’s Wednesday decision to hear Donald Trump’s claims that he cannot be prosecuted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election marked the court’s direct entry into the 2024 presidential election. The decision to hear the case and delay his criminal trial in Washington DC was unquestionably one of Trump’s biggest legal victories to date.
Fending off the 91 criminal charges against him, the cornerstone of Trump’s legal strategy has been to try to delay each of the four criminal trials against him until after the election. If he wins the presidency, he would have the power to install an attorney general who would dismiss the federal cases against him. His claim of immunity in the federal election interference case brought by Jack Smith, the justice department’s special counsel, is seen as novel and a long shot, but it nonetheless has succeeded in slowing down the case against him.
The court has now essentially sanctioned Trump’s delaying strategy.
Even though it set a relatively quick argument for the week of 22 April, the court put the case on hold while it was being considered. Even if the court moves quickly to reach a decision in
May – something it is not known to do recently – a trial in the case would not start until the summer. If the court were to wait until the end of its term in late June or early July, the trial would be pushed back until late September, the heart of the election season, as the Guardian has previously reported.
“If the Court does not issue an opinion until late June, are we really going to see the trial court put Trump on trial during the general election season (or even during the RNC convention)? I find this very hard to believe,” Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California Los Angeles wrote in a blogpost. “This could well be game over.”
The delay is of the court’s own making. Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecutor handling the election interference case, first came to the supreme court in December and asked the justices to quickly take up the issue so that the trial would not be delayed. The court declined to do so.
After the US court of appeals for the DC circuit ruled Trump was not immune in February, Smith again urged the court to act quickly in a brief