A federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s claim that he was immune from charges of conspiring to undermine the 2020 election results and ruled that he must stand trial on a criminal indictment accusing him of: he tried to reverse his loss to President Biden.
The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed Mr. Trump a resounding defeat but is unlikely to be the final word on his claims of executive immunity. Trump, who is on track to block the Republican presidential nomination, is expected to continue his appeal to the Supreme Court.
Still, the panel’s 57-page ruling marked an important moment in American jurisprudence and answered a question that had never before been answered by an appeals court: Can former presidents face prosecution through the criminal justice system for things they did while in office? escape?
The question is new because no former president had been impeached until Mr. Trump, and so there was never an opportunity for a defendant to assert — and for the courts to consider — the blanket claim of executive immunity he has made.
The panel, made up of two Democratic-appointed judges and one Republican-appointed judge, said in its decision that Mr. Trump was subject to federal criminal law like any other American, despite the privileges of the office he once held.
“For purposes of this criminal proceeding, former President Trump has become a citizen Trump, with all the defenses of another criminal,” the panel wrote. “But the executive immunity that may have protected him during his term as president no longer protects him from this prosecution.”
A spokesman for Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought the case against Mr. Trump, declined to comment on the decision.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said the former president “respectfully disagrees” with the court’s decision and will appeal it.
“If a president is not granted immunity, any future president who leaves office will be immediately impeached by the opposing party,” Mr Cheung said. “Without complete immunity, a President of the United States would be unable to function properly.”
The panel’s decision came nearly a month after it heard arguments on the immunity issue from Mr. Trump’s legal team and prosecutors who worked for Mr. Smith. While the decision came quickly by the standards of a normal appeals process, what happens next will arguably be more important in determining not just when a trial will take place on the election subversion allegations, but also the timing of the three other criminal cases against Mr. Trump.
In addition to the federal indictment accusing him of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat, he faces similar charges brought by a district attorney in Georgia. Mr. Smith, the special counsel appointed to oversee federal prosecutions, has also filed a lawsuit in Florida accusing Mr. Trump of mishandling highly sensitive classified documents after he left office and obstructing efforts to recover them have. And in Manhattan, Mr. Trump is on trial for hush money payments to a porn star during the 2016 election campaign.
The schedule for the three other trials depends in part on the timing of the federal election case.
In a key part of their decision on presidential immunity, the three appeals judges limited Mr. Trump’s ability to use further appeals to waste more time and delay the trial of the election case – a strategy the former president has used since he was impeached was filed in August in federal district court in Washington.
The panel said, for example, that if Mr. Trump appealed its decision to the Supreme Court, the underlying case, which was put on hold by the trial judge in December, would remain on hold until the justices decided to hear the case itself to hear him and decide on their own order to freeze the proceedings.
But the panel issued a rule intended to bar Mr. Trump from filing an interim challenge before the full appeals court. It said if Mr. Trump took that route, the underlying case would not remain on hold, as the full court considered whether to hear the case and issued its own order staying the proceedings.
If the issue actually reaches the Supreme Court, the justices will first have to decide whether to accept or reject the case and uphold the appeals court’s decision against Mr. Trump. If they refuse to hear the matter, the case will be sent straight back to trial judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who last week scrapped her original March 4 trial date but has otherwise shown clear signs of favoring the prosecution change wants to bring to trial as quickly as possible.
But if the Supreme Court takes the case, the key question will be how quickly the justices act in obtaining briefs and scheduling arguments. If they hear the case quickly and make a decision, there is still the possibility that a trial on the election allegations will take place before the general election in November.
However, if the judges take their time, it is possible that the trial will be postponed until after the election. And should that happen and Mr. Trump wins, he would be able to ask his Justice Department to dismiss the case or even try to pardon himself.
Even as Mr. Trump installed three of the justices on the bench, the Supreme Court has shown little desire to address issues related to its efforts to tinker with the mechanisms of American democracy.
But the court could end up dealing with the challenge to Mr. Trump’s immunity, and on Thursday it is scheduled to hear another key question related to the former president: whether he can be barred from voting for taking part in an insurrection by encouraging his supporters to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
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2024-02-06 17:48:21
www.nytimes.com
