The conservative-majority US Supreme Court has referred the question of Donald Trump’s criminal immunity as ex-president to lower courts, further delaying his federal trial in Washington.
The conservative-majority US Supreme Court on Monday, July 1, 2024, further delayed the federal trial of Donald Trump, with a ruling on the limits of a president’s criminal immunity that makes it virtually impossible to hold the trial before the election in four months.
By deciding on February 28 to take up this question, then by scheduling the debates nearly three months later, the highest court in the United States had already considerably postponed the federal trial of the former Republican president for attempting to illegally reverse the results of the 2020 election won by Joe Biden.
Donald Trump welcomes the decision
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.”
The case is therefore sent back to the trial court to determine which acts are potentially immune from criminal prosecution, with the prosecution having to demonstrate that they are not when they were committed in the exercise of its functions. This decision is “a great victory for our democracy and our Constitution,” Donald Trump immediately hailed.
The Republican candidate “thinks he is above the law”, reacted Joe Biden’s campaign team, estimating that the decision “does not change the facts (…): Donald Trump broke down after losing the election of 2020 and encouraged a crowd to overturn the results of an election,” according to a campaign advisor.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent joined by her two progressive colleagues, criticizes the majority of the Court, in its “obsession” that a president can act without fear, “for ignoring the equivalent need for restraint.”
Beyond the case of Donald Trump, this decision has “irrevocably altered the relationship between the president and the people he serves,” she writes, transforming him into “a king above the law in every use of his official power.”
“Manual”
According to Steven Schwinn, professor of constitutional law at the University of Illinois at Chicago (north), “to the extent that Donald Trump was trying to drag out the case until after the election, he was completely successful.”
“The Court’s decision provides an obvious blueprint for a president who would like to immunize himself from prosecution for potentially criminally reprehensible actions, simply by interweaving them with official actions,” he emphasizes.
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 are writing a rule for posterity,” Neil Gorsuch observed, 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.
Targeted by four separate criminal proceedings, Donald Trump is doing everything possible to go to trial as late as possible, at least after the presidential election. He was found guilty on May 30 by a New York court of “aggravated accounting falsification to conceal a conspiracy to pervert the 2016 election.” His sentence will be pronounced on July 11.
But this first criminal conviction, unprecedented for a former American president, in the least politically heavy of the four procedures, now risks also 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 (southeast) 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.
