Donald Trump‘fisherman Circle doesn’t expect the Supreme Court to side with his extreme arguments about executive power in the judicial immunity case. But what the high court does today is almost irrelevant: Trump has already won.
Three people with direct knowledge of the subject tell rolling stone that many of the former president’s lawyers and political advisers have already accepted that judges will likely rule against him and reject his claims to extended presidential immunity in perpetuity. Bringing the case to court — after a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., ended his arguments about executive power — was a delaying tactic designed to push back Trump’s election subversion criminal trial beyond Election Day this fall. The strategy paid off far more than MAGAworld anticipated.
“We’ve already pulled off the heist,” says a source close to Trump, emphasizing that what the Supreme Court decides now doesn’t matter to them.
Trump’s lawyers and other confidants widely expected — and told the former president — that the legal maneuver would delay the election subversion trial, but perhaps only until around summer. For months, Trump’s lawyers had been actively preparing themselves and their client to face trial over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in the violent Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. right around the time of the Republican Party’s nomination convention. , add the sources.
If the federal trial were to take place during this election year, much of the Trump team predicted it would be far more politically damaging to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee than, say, his ongoing criminal trial in Manhattan.
“We planned for this grueling schedule and split screen,” says one person involved in the planning.
But the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, which Trump built as president, turned out to favor him in a way that many Trump advisers did not believe was likely. When news broke in late February that the court would consider Trump’s claims of broad immunity, Trumpland was so thrilled that a lawyer close to Trump said rolling stone they were “literally popping champagne.”
Special counsel Jack Smith had initially tried to expedite the election subversion case by asking the Supreme Court to rule on Trump’s immunity claims, even as a lower appeals court considered Trump’s arguments. Trump in December 2023. The court denied the special counsel’s request, contributing to delays in the process. the process as the case progressed through the appeals court.
The Supreme Court then agreed to review Trump’s claims, handing him a major victory as it almost certainly pushed his trial beyond Election Day in November. For Trump’s 2024 campaign and its top advocates, the battle ended there and has now lasted two months.
Although Trump’s lawyers do not widely expect the Supreme Court to accept the former president’s views on immunity, there is of course a risk that the ultra-conservative court will bless them to some extent – and his claims are extreme to say the least.
Throughout the process, Trump’s lawyers argued on two fronts. First, they asserted that impeachment is the only constitutional avenue to address criminal acts committed by a president while in office, regardless of when he is prosecuted for those acts. The Senate failed to convict Trump of inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection when it impeached him a second time shortly after he left office. His lawyers say any attempt to prosecute him outside of impeachment represents an unconstitutional form of double jeopardy.
Second, Trump’s lawyers attempted to argue that the principles of civil cases against sitting presidents – where precedent is that the chief executive has absolute civil immunity for all official acts committed in the ” outer perimeter” of his office – also apply to criminal cases. against him and prohibit prosecution.
After Trump’s lawyers appealed a district court’s rejection of their arguments, they appealed to the federal appeals court in Washington.
In oral arguments before the appeals court, the justices expressed disbelief over the implications of Trump’s views on executive power without verification of criminal liability. A stunned judge asked Trump’s lawyers: “Could a president who ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival, and is not indicted, face criminal prosecution?”
The response from Trump’s lawyer, John Sauer, was chilling: “If he were indicted and convicted first… my answer is yes, with reservation, there is a political process that should take place first “, did he declare. In other words, under Trump’s view of immunity, he could not be prosecuted for ordering an assassination – he would have to be impeached and convicted first.
At the Supreme Court, Sauer argued that justices should not worry about “sinister hypotheticals” that “will almost certainly never happen and would almost certainly result in impeachment and conviction in the Senate…if they did.”
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