Last Friday, Judge Tanya Chutkan granted Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request for an extension in the Jan. 6 election subversion case against former President Donald Trump in light of the Supreme Court’s decision manufacturing criminal immunity for former presidents.

Smith, who now has until Aug. 30 to lay out his recommendations for how to proceed, told Chutkan that more time is needed for “consultation with other Department of Justice components.”

It’s possible that Smith is merely checking the boxes of DOJ bureaucracy. What is absolutely certain, however, is that it is a daunting project to pick through the high court’s immunity ruling to divine a strategy for salvaging the prosecution.

Writing for a 6-3 majority in Trump v. U.S., Chief Justice John Roberts explained that “the indictment alleged that after losing [the 2020] election, Trump conspired to overturn it by spreading knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the collecting, counting, and certifying of the election results.” The indictment contains four counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights (i.e., the right to vote).

The charges are relatively modest and prominently exclude claims that Trump incited an insurrection under federal law. Smith’s prosecutorial choices likely indicated a strategy to proceed to trial swiftly. That plan failed pretty spectacularly, thanks to the Supreme Court.

Not only did the court indefinitely delay the case by taking up Trump’s breathtaking claim of absolute immunity in the first place, but........

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