Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday complained that special counsel Jack Smith turned to the Supreme Court to decide whether presidential immunity shields Trump from prosecution.
Trump’s attorneys earlier this month argued in an appeal that he is immune from prosecution because his alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election were part of his official duties. Smith in response leapfrogged the appellate court and filed an emergency petition to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to rule on the matter in an apparent effort to speed up the process.
“Now they’re saying, ‘Let’s rush it to the Supreme– we gotta rush it, rush it, rush it,” Trump complained at a rally in Iowa on Wednesday. “They could have started three years ago. Everything– nothing changed. They could have started three years ago, but they didn’t. They started just recently with this crap.”
Trump claimed that “they’re fighting like hell because they want to try and get a guilty plea from the Supreme Court,” which is not a thing since the Supreme Court is not the one under indictment and cannot rule on Trump's guilt.
“But they want to get that because that’s the only way they’re going to win the election. It’s a very sick thing,” Trump claimed.
Trump: Now they’re saying let’s rush it to the Supreme Court… They want to try to get a guilty plea from the Supreme Court which I can’t imagine because you have presidential immunity pic.twitter.com/hgiGpTXvtf
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 14, 2023
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance explained on MSNBC that the former president’s recent moves show that his filings in the D.C. case are a “delay game.”
“And here’s how we know that and there can no longer be any questions, not that there was,” she said. “Trump has filed a motion to dismiss the charges against him on immunity grounds and now today we see him in front of the court of appeals saying ‘but wait a second, don’t rule on my motion too fast. No need to expedite it. Let’s take our time here.’ And, of course, any criminal defendant who’s under indictment, who has a serious motion to dismiss the charges wants to see that motion ruled on as quickly as possible. Yes, this is a delay game. Even Trump understands that his immunity motion is a loser.”
"Yes, this is a delay game. Even Trump understands that his immunity motion is a loser"@JoyceWhiteVance gives her take on Trump's motion to dismiss his case based on presidential immunity. pic.twitter.com/uBXStyvMtp
— 11th Hour (@11thHour) December 14, 2023
Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman called Smith’s decision to go around the appeals court and straight to the Supreme Court a “masterly move” that is “likely to upend Trump’s chief strategy of delaying” the trial.
“The standard playbook would suggest sitting tight while forcing Trump to press the issue in the higher courts. But Smith realized that Trump could string out the review process by plodding through every possible step, preventing the Supreme Court from taking up the issue soon enough to allow a trial before the November election,” Litman wrote in a Los Angeles Times column. “So the special counsel wisely decided to jump ahead,” he said, crediting former deputy solicitor general Michael Dreeben, a former member of special counsel Bob Mueller’s team who filed the Supreme Court petition on behalf of Smith’s team.
The Supreme Court in response to Smith’s filing ordered Trump’s team to submit a response by next Wednesday, which Litman called “warp speed by the court’s standards.”
“It’s a promising sign for Smith that the Supreme Court jumped on the question with the urgency the special counsel advocated,” he wrote, adding: “Indeed, the court might welcome Smith’s motion. If the immunity issue were to come to them much later, they would be taking it up in the shadow of the election.”
Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who also served on Mueller’s team, noted that an appeals court ruled earlier this month that Trump is not immune from lawsuits from victims of the Jan. 6 attack even though he was president at the time.
“So, if you are committing crimes as part of your campaign to stay in office, that is not something within the function of the office of the White House,” Weissmann told MSNBC, arguing that the ruling "bodes very well for Jack Smith, and not so good, obviously, for Donald Trump."
“You know, it really cannot be the case that just because you're president of the United States, that you can kill somebody or you can just decide to — could you imagine what this would mean?” he added. “Can you really have a second term where the president who was told, by the way, you have absolute immunity to commit crimes in office. Just cannot be the case."
