Donald Trump Asks the Supreme Court to Sit on His Coup Case
The Supreme Court finally heard from Donald Trump on his presidential immunity claims. What the former president wants right now is more time.
Vincent Alban/Reuters
Donald Trump’s lawyers made their first argument before the Supreme Court on Wednesday about the former president's pending immunity claims, asking the nation’s highest court to delay the D.C. case about Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election—a clear attempt to hold up a much-anticipated election coup trial that could brand him a felon during the 2024 campaign.
Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to consider whether Trump could continue hiding behind the presidential seal by claiming himself to be essentially impervious to criminal charges because he was once the president of the United States. This issue could delay the upcoming criminal trial in Washington, D.C. scheduled to start in March.
This pretrial legal battle would have normally been sorted out in the secondary appellate level, but at the Justice Department’s behest, the Supreme Court accepted the opportunity to address this question immediately.
In their court filing Wednesday, the former president’s attorneys accused Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith of pursuing this historic prosecution with “reckless abandon” by trying to ram this through the courts “at breakneck speed.”
“The question stands among the most complex, intricate, and momentous issues that this Court will be called on to decide,” Trump’s lawyers wrote, deriding the special counsel of harboring “the manifest partisan interest in ensuring that President Trump will be subjected to a months-long criminal trial at the height of a presidential campaign where he is the leading candidate and the only serious opponent of the current Administration.”
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The Trump legal team—made up of Todd Blanche, John F. Lauro, and D. John Sauer—are hoping to delay the case as much as possible. But in Smith, they face a DOJ special counsel who’s determined to put Trump on trial early next year.
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