Supreme Court to weigh Donald Trump’s immunity claim in Washington DC 2020 election trial

The Supreme Court will review Donald Trump’s unprecedented claim that he is shielded from prosecution for actions taken while in office, further delaying the former president’s federal trial in the nation’s capital on charges of conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss to remain in power.

The justices set arguments for the week of April 22 to consider a unanimous ruling from a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, which early this month rejected Trump’s sweeping assertion of immunity from prosecution.

Mr Trump’s pretrial proceedings in DC will remain on hold until a ruling is issued, putting the Supreme Court in the politically fraught position of influencing the timing of an election obstruction trial for the leading Republican presidential candidate. The high court could rule at any time after argument and almost certainly will do so before its term ends in late June or early July, potentially pushing any DC trial well into the presidential election season.

Some legal experts had predicted that at least the required four justices would want to weigh in on the unprecedented question of whether presidential acts can be criminally prosecuted - a question Mr Trump has also raised in his separate Florida and Georgia trials. But simply by taking up the matter now, the high court has effectively helped Mr Trump achieve his goal of pushing back at least the DC trial, which originally was scheduled to start next week. The former president has repeatedly pressed to postpone all his trials until after the November election, raising the possibility that if he is elected he could try to have the federal cases dismissed.

Wednesday’s announcement means there are now three cases before the Supreme Court that could directly impact Trump’s legal and political future: The justices are also considering whether he can be barred from the ballot because of his conduct around the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, and they will hear a challenge in April to the use of an obstruction charge against participants in that riot - the outcome of which could affect the charges Mr Trump faces in DC as well.

The appeal to the High Court on Mr Trump’s ban from the primary ballot came down to a ruling by Colorado’s state court. But there is likely to be a further appeal on that front given the fact that on Wednesday an Illinois judge also decided to remove Mr Trump from its state primary ballot over the 2021 Capitol riots as well.

Wednesday’s Illinois ruling from Cook County Circuit Judge Tracie Porter relied on previous findings by the Colorado Supreme Court, making it the third state to eject Mr Trump from the ballot. The Colorado case is the subject of Mr Trump’s US Supreme Court appeal.

The Illinois decision has been paused, in a bid to give Mr Trump a short period to appeal.

The brief unsigned order issued in the US Supreme Court’s immunity case Wednesday said the justices were not “expressing a view on the merits” of the case and would consider only the question of “whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

Mr Trump, who has pleaded not guilty in all his criminal cases, praised the court in a statement for agreeing to review the DC.appeal, saying that without presidential immunity: “Presidents will always be concerned, and even paralysed, by the prospect of wrongful prosecution and retaliation after they leave office. This could actually lead to the extortion and blackmail of a President.”

A spokesman for special counsel Jack Smith, whose office is prosecuting the case, declined to comment.

In the DC trial, Trump faces four felony counts in connection with what prosecutors allege was a plan to overturn Biden’s 2020 presidential victory: conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to obstruct the formal certification in Congress of President Biden’s victory, obstructing a congressional proceeding and conspiracy against rights - in this case, the right to vote.

He challenged the indictment, saying former presidents are immune from prosecution, at least for actions related to their official duties, unless first impeached and convicted by Congress. On February 6, the DC Circuit delivered a forceful rebuke of that idea.

“We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a president has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralise the most fundamental check on executive power - the recognition and implementation of election results,” wrote the three judges, two nominated by President Joe Biden and the third by President George H.W. Bush.

Mr Trump asked the Supreme Court to put the appeals court ruling on pause and give him time to seek a rehearing by a full complement of DC Circuit judges. His lawyers argued that he should not be sidelined from the campaign trail by a months-long criminal trial and said voters have the right to hear from Mr Trump on the stump.

In response, Mr Smith’s office urged the Supreme Court to quickly allow the DC. trial to proceed and pushed back on Mr Trump’s claim that the rights of American voters require a delay. “To the contrary, the charges here involve applicant’s alleged efforts to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters,” prosecutors wrote.

While the Supreme Court refused Mr Smith’s earlier request in December to skip review by the appeals court and fast-track consideration of Mr Trump’s immunity claim, the high court also rejected on Wednesday Mr Trump’s request for additional time to seek review by the full appeals court. Instead, the justices added the case to their last week of argument during this term.

In assessing whether at least four of the nine justices would agree to take up any case, analysts cited the high stakes and unprecedented legal questions at issue; Mr Trump is the first former US president to be charged with a crime, and many thought the justices would want to have the last word on such a significant issue as whether he is shielded from prosecution.

Mr Trump has also raised immunity issues in his federal case in Florida, where he is charged with illegally retaining classified materials after he left the White House and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them. He argued in a filing last week that most of those charges should be dismissed - noting he was still president when he packed up the classified documents and saying that he designated them at that time as personal materials.

Mr Trump was no longer president when federal officials tried to retrieve the materials, however, and his lawyers did not argue that the obstruction-related charges in Florida should be dismissed on the grounds of presidential immunity.

The Florida trial is scheduled for May 20 but could be pushed back at a hearing scheduled for Friday.

Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is overseeing the Florida case, must now determine whether she sees enough similarities between the presidential immunity arguments in her case and the DC case to hold up her pre-trial proceedings until the Supreme Court makes its decision.

Mr Trump has also brought up the issue of presidential immunity in Georgia, where he faces state charges for allegedly participating in a massive conspiracy to undo the 2020 election results in that state.

The former president is separately facing a state trial in New York, scheduled to start March 25, on charges of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment during the 2016 election.

His request that the Supreme Court hear his DC immunity appeal was the second time this year that Mr Trump turned to the nation’s highest court to intervene in an unprecedented legal question that could greatly affect his political future.

At oral argument on February 8, the justices seemed inclined to reverse a ruling from Colorado’s top court that Trump should be barred from the ballot because of his conduct around the Jan.uary 6, 2021, attack on the U. Capitol.

A ruling in that case could come at any time.

Perry Stein, Marianne Lavine and Devlin Barrett contributed to this report.

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