Supreme Court immunity ruling poses major hurdle for Trump case in Georgia

The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on presidential immunity on Monday will change the prosecution of Donald J. Trump in Georgia.

But that will take some time.

The election interference case against Mr. Trump and 14 of his allies has been largely frozen while the Georgia Court of Appeals considers whether to disqualify Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney leading the prosecution. Earlier this year, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee allowed Ms. Willis to continue the case after revelations that she was romantically involved with the attorney she hired to manage it.

But the appeal of that ruling is likely to take at least several months, and efforts by Mr. Trump and other defendants to remove Ms. Willis from the case may not be finally decided until early next year.

Once that is resolved, the Supreme Court’s finding that presidents are immune from prosecution for official actions will be felt sharply in the Georgia case, where it will influence Judge McAfee’s own final ruling on a Trump motion seeking immunity from state prosecution. Trump’s Georgia legal team filed the immunity motion in January, but all sides were waiting for the Supreme Court’s ruling for guidance.

Judge McAfee will now have to sort out which of the alleged actions for which Mr. Trump is being prosecuted count as official conduct and which count as unofficial under new guidelines set by the Supreme Court. A federal judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, will have to do the same sorting in a parallel case alleging federal election interference.

The Georgia indictment, filed last August, accuses Trump and his allies of conspiring to overturn his narrow 2020 election defeat in the state. It lists eight ways in which the defendants were accused of interfering with the election, including lying to the Georgia legislature about claims of voter fraud and creating fake pro-Trump voters.

It is considered unlikely that a phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in early January 2021, in which he pressed Raffensperger to find enough votes to overturn his loss, will be considered an official act.

But Mr. Trump’s call for Vice President Mike Pence to intervene in the counting of electoral votes in Congress on Jan. 6 is another story. So are Mr. Trump’s conversations about challenging the election results with two of his co-defendants in Georgia: Jeffrey Clark, who was a Justice Department official, and Mark Meadows, who was the White House chief of staff.

In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that Mr. Trump was “absolutely immune from prosecution” for “alleged conduct involving his conversations with Justice Department officials.” The chief justice also created guidelines for determining whether other types of presidential conduct should also be considered immune from prosecution.

Judge McAfee’s analysis of what counts as an official act and what not, and any appeals of the judge’s findings, could delay the case in Georgia for many more months, potentially pushing back a potential trial until 2026. In any case, if Trump is elected in November, it is considered highly unlikely that he will stand trial during his presidency, though that too would have to be fought out in court.

If Ms Willis were to be dismissed by the Court of Appeal, the entire case would remain in limbo.

Monday’s ruling could also mean that Mr. Trump would have to be tried separately from Mr. Clark and Mr. Meadows. Evidence used against the two former Trump aides could be considered inappropriate for use in a trial against the former president if it involved what were considered official presidential actions.

Any evidence against Mr. Clark “would likely include internal executive branch conversations and official presidential actions,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University. While Judge Roberts dismissed Justice Department contacts as immune, Mr. Kreis said “the Meadows case is more complicated” and potentially involves “a category of criminal conduct.”

In their January motion, Trump’s lawyers in Georgia argued that he was charged for “acts that are at the core of his official responsibilities as President” and that because of immunity, such charges “must be dismissed with prejudice.”

The Supreme Court ruling now provides more leverage for such claims.

“Some of the charges should survive today’s decision,” Melissa Redmon, a law professor at the University of Georgia, said Tuesday. She pointed out that the Trump team’s January motion acknowledged that two of the charges against him related to “post-presidential conduct,” as the motion called it. (One of those charges was thrown out by Judge McAfee earlier this year, a decision Ms. Willis is appealing.)

Other aspects of the original Georgia indictment are perhaps harder to categorize as official or unofficial. They include the charges relating to the Trump campaign’s use of fake voters in swing states he lost, which are at the heart of election prosecutions in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, as well as Georgia.

For Trump and his allies, the Supreme Court ruling was confirmation.

“MANY OF THESE FALSE THINGS WILL NOW DISAPPEAR, OR FADE INTO OBLIVION,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Rachel Cauley, a spokeswoman for the Center for Renewing America, a Trump-affiliated policy organization where Clark is director of the litigation division, said the ruling “affirms immunity in resounding and unmistakable terms.”

Efforts by Mr. Clark and Mr. Meadows to transfer their Georgia prosecutions to federal court have so far failed. The courts have rejected their arguments that they were acting in their official capacity.

To some critics of Mr. Trump and his conduct, the ruling and its likely consequences underscore that federal and state prosecutors moved too slowly to hold him accountable. Ms. Willis formally began her investigation in February 2021 but took her time as she built a complex racketeering case. The Justice Department charged Mr. Trump with election interference last August, around the same time the Georgia charges were filed.

None of the four other states that filed criminal election lawsuits in the past year have charged Trump.

“In retrospect, we should have moved much more quickly at the federal and state levels in 2021 to resolve these matters,” said Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment trial.

“Depending on how this all plays out, Donald Trump could be tried in 2025 or 2026. Or he may never be tried,” Eisen said, adding: “Future historians will say that the failure of a relatively small number of people to take legal action in response to a clearly unlawful attempted coup dramatically changed the course of American history, and not for the better.”