On Monday, the Justice Department’s prosecution of Donald Trump for allegedly trying to steal the 2020 election splintered into a multi-level litigation effort with a clear and singular goal: ensuring that Trump stands trial before the presidential election next November. That is the bottom-line takeaway from a remarkable series of events that occurred in rapid succession in the last two weeks, including a surprise petition by prosecutors asking the Supreme Court to intervene.
A quick recap: Trump is slated to go on trial in Washington early next year, and this month, the district judge overseeing the case, Tanya Chutkan, denied two of his motions to dismiss the case: One arguing that Trump is “absolutely immune” from criminal prosecution because he was the president at the time of the relevant conduct, and the second claiming that the prosecution violates “double jeopardy” principles because Republicans in the Senate rallied to acquit Trump after he was impeached by the House following the siege of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
That wasn’t the last word though: The claim that a defendant is immune from a legal proceeding because he was a public official is one of the few issues that can be appealed prior to a verdict in a criminal case. The theory is that public officials properly entitled to immunity should not have to bear the burdens of pretrial and trial proceedings, only to have the trial result later tossed out on appeal. So late last week, Trump’s lawyers very predictably filed his notice of appeal to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
On Monday, Smith and his team went straight to the Supreme Court to short-circuit Trump’s appeal process, which could otherwise take months and clearly jeopardizes the March 4 trial date that Chutkan has set. (The median time in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals under ordinary circumstances to resolve an appeal is about 11 months, though they moved........