The United States Supreme Court will decide on Trump’s immunity in the case of electoral interference | USA Elections

The Supreme Court agreed this Wednesday that it will decide whether former President Donald Trump had presidential immunity when he tried to reverse the electoral result of the 2020 elections, a loss to Joe Biden that he refused, and still refuses, to admit. In practice, the court’s announcement represents a victory for Trump’s legal strategy and entails a new postponement of the start of the trial against the magnate in Washington for the events that led to the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The hearing to hear the oral arguments of both parties has been set for April 22. It is foreseeable that weeks will pass until the nine magistrates issue their resolution, perhaps in June. Only then, and only if they do not agree with Trump and if they deny his immunity, can the start date of the electoral interference trial be set. That could mean that things are delayed to September or October.

Of the four cases that the former president has pending, in which he faces 91 crimes, this is the process being followed against him in Washington. The other three are the one in New York, where he is accused of paying a porn actress in black money to keep her quiet about an alleged extramarital relationship between the two that he denies; that of Florida, for the so-called Mar-a-Lago papers, boxes and boxes of confidential documents that he improperly took from the White House; and that of Atlanta, which also refers to his attempts to reverse the result of the 2020 elections.

Each of these appointments with justice follows its own course, but they all share the same plan of Trump’s defense: to try to delay the processes as much as possible, so that they are delayed as much as for the elections next November to arrive sooner. , in which everything indicates that Trump will face Biden again in his attempt to return to the White House four years later. The Supreme Court’s oxygen tank is a triumph in that sense, but it only affects the case of Washington. The magistrate in charge of this, District Judge Tanya Chutkan, based in the capital, had originally scheduled the first hearing of the trial for this March 4, next Monday. It was then delayed until March 25.

In the brief order of the Supreme Court, the nine justices, six of them conservative, three of whom were appointed during Trump’s time in the White House, can read: “[Decidiremos] Whether, and if so, to what extent, a former president enjoys presidential immunity in criminal proceedings for conduct allegedly involving official acts during his term in office.”

The high court also has yet to rule on whether the third clause of the fourteenth amendment of the US Constitution applies in his case, as the Colorado Supreme Court wants, in which case, his name could not appear on the electoral ballots in that State ( neither in Maine nor in Illinois), considering that he participated in an insurrection on January 6.

A three-judge panel of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled on February 6 against Trump’s claim for immunity. They also gave the magnate’s lawyers time to present an emergency request to the Supreme Court to prevent the decision from coming into force.

Separation of powers

The defense maintains that as president he had total immunity and that this provided coverage for any of his actions. According to that argument, immunity emanates from the fundamental principle of the separation of powers, and is the perfect antidote, says that theory, to ensuring that justice is not used for partisan purposes. The Supreme Court judges will have to decide, among other things, whether these attempts to interfere in the elections can fall into the category of the normal performance of the president’s job.

“For purposes of this criminal case, former President Trump has become Citizen Trump, with all the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as president no longer protects him against this accusation,” the appeals court’s 57-page ruling said in its introduction. “It would be a surprising paradox if the president, who has the ultimate constitutional duty of ensuring faithful compliance with the laws, were the only position capable of defying them with impunity (…),” the ruling continued. “We cannot accept that the office of the presidency places its former occupants above the law forever.”

Trump’s lawyers also claimed immunity in the case of classified papers that the FBI found in a search at Mar-a-Lago, his mansion in Palm Beach (Florida), after the former president improperly retained them. They were full of secrets that affected national security, but lawyers argue that his client had the right to take them from the White House because that decision was made in his last weeks in office. The start of that trial, unless there is a foreseeable delay, is set for the end of May in Florida. The former president’s legal team also regularly airs the complaint that so much trial threatens to interfere with the presidential campaign, which is entering its peak after the summer, and that Trump will surely spend between the bench and the rally stage.

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