The Supreme Court supported Donald Trump’s position, with conservative judges throwing all their weight behind him. Joe Biden’s supporters are outraged.
The conservative-majority US Supreme Court on Monday sent back to lower courts the question of Donald Trump’s criminal immunity as a former president, further delaying his federal trial in Washington, four months before the election.
Trump rejoices in a “big victory”, Democrats denounce
With the voice of the six conservative judges against that of the three progressives, the Court considers that “the president does not enjoy any immunity for his unofficial acts” but that he “is entitled at least to a presumption of immunity for his official acts.”
This decision is “a great victory for our democracy and our Constitution,” Donald Trump immediately reacted, campaigning to return to the White House. Republican ‘thinks he is above the law’accused Joe Biden’s campaign team on Monday, saying the decision “does not change the facts (…): Donald Trump cracked after losing the 2020 election and encouraged a mob to overturn the results of a free and fair election,” according to a campaign adviser.
Conservative judges support Trump
By deciding on February 28 to address this issue, and then scheduling the debates for almost three months later, The highest court in the United States had already significantly postponed the federal trial of the former Republican president for attempting to illegally reverse the results of the 2020 election won by Joe Biden. The entire procedure for this trial, initially scheduled for March 4, and postponed sine die, had already been suspended for four months.
During the debates, if the judges were generally skeptical of the absolute immunity claimed by the Republican candidate, several, particularly among conservatives, insisted on the long-term repercussions of their decision. “We write a rule for posterity», observed Neil Gorsuch, referring to the unprecedented nature of the question. “This affair has enormous implications for the future of the presidency and the country,” added his colleague Brett Kavanaugh.
Trump’s race against time before the election
Targeted by four separate criminal proceedings, Donald Trump is pulling out all the stops to be tried as late as possible, at least after the presidential election.He was found guilty on May 30 by the New York courts of “aggravated false accounting to conceal a conspiracy to pervert the 2016 election.” His sentence will be pronounced on July 11.
But this first criminal convictionunprecedented for a former American president, in the least politically heavy of the four procedures, also risks being the only one before the vote. Because through appeals, Donald Trump’s lawyers managed to postpone other trials until further notice, at the federal level for withholding classified documents after his departure from the White House and before the courts of the key state of Georgia for electoral interference in 2020. If he were elected again, Donald Trump could, once inaugurated in January 2025, order a halt to federal proceedings against him.
