By considering Trump’s immunity claim, the Supreme Court strengthened its delay strategy

The Supreme Court, which helped shape former President Donald J. Trump, threw him a legal lifeline Wednesday night, making a decision that significantly helped him delay his federal trial on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election.

By deciding to adopt Trump’s claim that presidents enjoy near-total immunity from prosecution for any official action while in office — a legal theory rejected by two lower courts and one that few experts say has any basis in the Constitution — the judges the former president at least several months before a trial on election interference charges can begin.

It is not out of the question that Mr. Trump could still appear before a jury in the case in the Federal District Court in Washington before Election Day. At this point, the legal calendar suggests that if the justices rule before the end of the Supreme Court’s term in June and determine that Mr. Trump is not immune from prosecution, the trial could still begin in late September or October.

But each delay increases the likelihood that voters won’t get a chance to hear evidence that Trump tried to undermine the last election before deciding whether to support him in the current election.

If Mr. Trump succeeds in delaying the trial until after Election Day and wins, he could use the powers of his office to try to dismiss the election interference charge altogether. Additionally, Justice Department policy precludes prosecution of a sitting president, meaning that once he is sworn in, the federal trial he faces could likely be delayed until after he leaves office.

On the face of it, Wednesday night’s Supreme Court ruling was a purely logistical decision. The judges decided to suspend trial preparations while they reviewed a lower court’s rejection of the immunity defense. They organized a hearing on the issue at the end of April.

In practical terms, however, the court’s decision delayed the process of resolving the immunity debate, confirming what appeared to be a last-ditch move by Mr. Trump’s legal team to find a way to keep pushing back a trial date. until the date of the trial. campaign was over.

A spokesman for Jack Smith, the special counsel handling the Washington election case, declined to comment on the court’s ruling. Within Mr. Trump’s camp, the court’s ruling was seen as a major victory, but not a decisive one.

A year ago, when Mr. Trump was first criminally charged in Manhattan and then, over the next five months, charged three more times — in Florida, Washington and Georgia — it seemed he would doing. spending much of 2024 before a jury. But if events get in his way, he could only appear in court once before the November elections.

In that case, a state judge in Manhattan set a March 25 start date for the former president’s trial on charges of arranging hush money payments to a porn star in an effort to prevent a scandal on the eve of the 2016 election.

And on Friday, a federal judge in Florida will hold a hearing to turn back the clock on Trump’s other federal trial — the one in which he is accused of mishandling dozens of classified documents after leaving office. That process was supposed to begin in May, but now may or may not happen before Election Day.

The Georgia case is also embroiled in pretrial clashes that are casting doubt on when, or even if, the case will proceed.

The election interference case in Washington should have been the first of Mr. Trump’s four criminal cases to go before a jury. Months ago, the judge overseeing the case, Tanya S. Chutkan, set March 4 as the trial date.

But then Trump filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that he enjoyed full immunity from the charges because they stemmed from actions he committed as president. Although the claim had no precedent and violated basic legal and constitutional principles, it had strong appeal to Mr. Trump’s lawyers: Once the claim was filed, Judge Chutkan had to stay the underlying case until the issue of immunity was resolved dissolved.

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court in Washington weighed in on the issue, rejecting the immunity defense in a unanimous and scathing ruling that found that Mr. Trump was subject to federal criminal law like every other American.

He then asked the Supreme Court to stay the trial while the justices decided whether to take up the issue, perhaps hoping less that the justices would agree with him on the merits of his claims than that they would review the case. would take over. ask questions and take the time to make a decision.

And that’s exactly what the court did on Wednesday.

The question of when the trial will ultimately take place is complicated by Judge Chutkan’s insistence that Trump waste no time preparing for the proceedings as long as the pause in the case remains in effect. She has suggested in court papers that the former president, in the spirit of fairness, should have an extra day to prepare for anyone lost to the stay.

Judge Chutkan froze the election case on December 13. That means that if she sticks to her decision, she will owe Mr Trump another 82 days of preparation time – equivalent to the period between December 13 and the originally scheduled trial date in March. 4. If the Supreme Court rules on the immunity decision in June and trial preparations resume immediately, the additional 82 days could push a trial date back to September.

At that point, the general election campaign would be in full swing — and there would be no guarantee that the process could be completed before Election Day.