Donald Trump might be praising the Supreme Court’s refusal of special counsel Jack Smith’s plea for an expedited hearing on the former president’s immunity claim, but he might be celebrating too soon.
Watergate prosecutor Nick Ackerman warned Wednesday that what Trump considers good news is going to blow up in his face.
“Not so fast!” he wrote in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “My New Year’s prediction: The Supreme Court will refuse to hear Mr. Trump’s inevitable appeal from the D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals finding that presidential immunity does not apply to Mr. Trump’s alleged criminal acts arising out of the Jan. 6th insurrection. The criminal prosecution against Mr. Trump will proceed to trial in March.”
Trump is claiming that he’s immune from criminal prosecution for actions he took on January 6 because he was acting in his official capacity as president. In an effort to brush the claim aside and get quickly to trial, Smith asked that he be able to sidestep the lower Court of Appeals hearing of his case and go straight to the Supreme Court.
The court refused — meaning the immunity argument will now be heard by the appeals court and then likely end up at the Supreme Court, which experts have said will likely delay Smith’s trial that’s currently set for March — a slowdown that feeds into Trump’s tactic of delay.
But Ackerman, who was an assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate case, suggests that will not be the case.
“Ultimately, Mr. Trump’s efforts to manipulate the legal system and postpone his criminal trial are doomed to fail,” he wrote.
Trump has already tested the immunity claim before an appeals court. On Dec. 1, the D.C. Circuit heard arguments that he should be immune from civil litigation brought against him by Capitol police officers and members of Congress.
It was roundly rejected, with the court finding the actions arose from campaigning, and were “not an official act of the office.”
In Atlanta, another court of appeals unanimously rejected a similar claim by Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, who said he should be immune from charges involving attempts to overturn the 2020 election brought by District Attorney Fani Willis.
“Whatever the precise contours of Meadows’s official authority, that authority did not extend to an alleged conspiracy to overturn valid election results,” the court found.
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“The Supreme Court justices were undoubtedly aware of [the Atlanta] decision when they denied Mr. Smith’s motion to hear the appeal,” wrote Ackerman. “[It] clearly stands for the proposition that participating in a conspiracy to overturn the peaceful transfer of power is not within the scope of executive authority. As such, the crimes Mr. Trump is alleged to have committed in the criminal case are not excused by presidential immunity.”
Ackerman concluded, “The Supreme Court will be fully justified in not accepting an appeal from Mr. Trump on his all but certain loss in the D.C. Circuit expected shortly after next week’s scheduled Jan. 9th oral argument. Presidential immunity is simply not a controversy the Supreme Court needs or in which it should want to partake, thereby permitting the criminal trial of Mr. Trump to proceed as scheduled without the indeterminable delay he hopes to achieve.”