US Court to hear immunity claim
Ex-president may be exempt from charges
WASHINGTON: The Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to decide whether former President Donald Trump is immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, further delaying his criminal trial as it considers the matter.
The justices scheduled arguments for the week of April 22 and said proceedings in the trial court would remain frozen, handing at least an interim victory to Mr Trump. His litigation strategy in all of the criminal prosecutions against him has consisted, in large part, of trying to slow things down.
The Supreme Court’s response to Mr Trump put the justices in the unusual position of deciding another aspect of the former president’s fate: whether and how quickly Mr Trump could go to trial. That, in turn, could affect his election prospects and, should he be reelected, his ability to scuttle the prosecution.
The timing of the argument was a sort of compromise. Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the federal prosecutions of Mr Trump, had asked the court to move more quickly, requesting that the justices hear the case in March.
Mr Trump, by contrast, had asked the court to proceed at its usual deliberate pace and to consider the case only after he asked the full US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the decision of a unanimous three-judge panel, which had rejected his claim of absolute immunity.
In settling on the week of April 22, the court picked the last three scheduled argument sessions of its current term and seemed to indicate that its decision would follow before the end of its current term, in late June.
That does not mean the trial would start right away if Mr Trump lost. Pretrial proceedings, currently paused, must first be completed. By some rough calculations, the trial could be delayed until late September or October, plunging the proceedings into the heart of the election.
Mr Trump’s emergency application asking the Supreme Court to intervene had been fully briefed since Feb 15, and the court’s delay in addressing it suggested that the justices differed about how to proceed. It takes four votes to add a case to the court’s docket but five to grant a stay.
A separate case, on Mr Trump’s eligibility to hold office, may also have played a part. The court heard arguments in that case, from Colorado, on Feb 8 and is expected to rule soon. If the court rules for Trump in the Colorado case, it might be attracted to the optics of ruling against him on his claim of immunity, which legal experts say is an ambitious argument with potentially frightening implications.