The slow pace of the Trump immunity case makes a trial before the election unlikely

John Kruzel and Andrew Goudsward
| Reuters

WASHINGTON, June 30 (Reuters) – A decision on Donald Trump’s request for immunity from prosecution for trying to reverse his 2020 election defeat is expected to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday. However, regardless of the verdict, the court has already helped the former president in his efforts to avoid trial before the elections scheduled for November 5.

The ruling by the court, whose 6-3 conservative majority includes three justices appointed by Trump, will come 20 weeks after he sought the justices’ dismissal. The timeline for the ruling likely does not leave enough time for Special Counsel Jack Smith to try Trump on a four-count federal indictment obtained last August and for a jury to reach a verdict before voters head to the polls.

“The scale of the delays that occurred made it almost impossible to get the case to trial before the election,” said George Washington University law professor Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor. “The court should have treated her with much more urgency than it did.”

Trump is the Republican nominee challenging Democratic President Joe Biden in a 2020 rematch. He is the first former US president to be charged with a crime and has already been convicted in a New York state court case involving bribes paid to a porn star before the 2016 election r. If he regains the presidency, Trump could try to force an end to the special counsel case or potentially pardon himself for any federal crimes.

The Supreme Court has already delivered important victories for Trump.

On Friday, it raised the legal bar for prosecutors bringing obstruction charges in a federal election diversion case against Trump and defendants involved in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In March, the court rejected a court order that disqualified Trump from running in Colorado’s presidential primary.

The speed with which the court handled the Colorado case — quickly agreeing to proceed and ruling in Trump’s favor within a month of hearing arguments — contrasted with the slow pace of Trump’s immunity claim, which turned out to be beneficial to him.

Trump’s trial was scheduled to begin on March 4 before delays emerged over the immunity issue. No trial date has been set at this time. Trump pleaded not guilty and called the case politically motivated.

“I don’t think there’s any way this case will go to trial before the election,” said Georgetown University law professor Erica Hashimoto. “Even if the Supreme Court were to affirm the lower court rulings and find that Trump lacked immunity, the trial court would have to decide many other legal issues.”

The shifting timeline

Seeking to avoid a delay in the trial, Smith asked the justices in December for an expedited review after U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected Trump’s immunity bid. Trump opposed the offer. Instead of resolving the case quickly, the justices denied Smith’s request and allowed the case to proceed to a lower court, which on Feb. 6 upheld Chutkan’s ruling against Trump.

After Trump asked the Supreme Court for help on February 12, it took more than 10 weeks for the justices to hear the case on April 25, the last day of hearings. And now the ruling will be issued on the last day of the term, nearly nine months after Trump first filed a motion to dismiss the charges based on his immunity claim.

If the Supreme Court rules that former presidents are entitled to some degree of criminal immunity – an approach that some justices appeared to favor during the arguments – it could delay the case even further. In one such scenario, judges could order Chutkan to preside over a potentially time-consuming legal battle over whether certain charges against Trump must be dropped before the case goes to trial.

The judge presiding over the case will also likely have to decide whether the Supreme Court’s decision to toughen the legal standard for prosecutors bringing obstruction of justice charges against a defendant on Jan. 6 will have any impact on Trump, who faces two charges under the same obstruction of justice law.

Chutkan has previously indicated she would give Trump at least three months to prepare for trial when the case returns to the courtroom. That timeline leaves only a narrow path to starting the trial in October, in the final weeks before the election. A trial this close to Election Day would almost certainly draw accusations of election interference from Trump and his legal team.

“The court’s delay in resolving the immunity case has already handed Donald Trump a huge win — a delay that he sought to delay the election interference trial — and any verdict in the trial — until after the election,” University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman said.

(Reporting by John Kruzel and Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Will Dunham and Scott Malone)