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      New Trump Cases Shadowed by Rocky Relationship With Supreme Court

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      Though he appointed three justices, his administration had the worst track record before the justices since at least the 1930s.“I’m not happy with the Supreme Court,” President Donald J. Trump said on Jan. 6, 2021. “They love to rule against me.”His assessment of the court, in a speech delivered outside the White House urging his supporters to march on the Capitol, had a substantial element of truth in it.Other parts of the speech were laced with fury and lies, and the Colorado Supreme Court cited some of those passages on Tuesday as evidence that Mr. Trump has engaged in insurrection and was ineligible to hold office again.But Mr. Trump’s reflections on the U.S. Supreme Court in the speech, freighted with grievance and accusations of disloyalty, captured not only his perspective but also an inescapable reality. A fundamentally conservative court, with a six-justice majority of Republican appointees that includes three named by Mr. Trump himself, has not been particularly receptive to his arguments.Indeed, the Trump administration had the worst Supreme Court record of any since at least the Roosevelt administration, according to data developed by Lee Epstein and Rebecca L. Brown, law professors at the University of Southern California, for an article in Presidential Studies Quarterly.“Whether Trump’s poor performance speaks to the court’s view of him and his administration or to the justices’ increasing willingness to check executive authority, we can’t say,” the two professors wrote in an email. “Either way, though, the data suggest a bumpy road for Trump in cases implicating presidential power.”Now another series of Trump cases are at the court or on its threshold: one on whether he enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution, another on the viability of a central charge in the federal election-interference case and the third, from Colorado, on whether he was barred from another term under the 14th Amendment.The cases pose distinct legal questions, but earlier decisions suggest they could divide the court’s conservative wing along a surprising fault line: Mr. Trump’s appointees have been less likely to vote for him in some politically charged cases than Justice Clarence Thomas, who was appointed by the first President Bush, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who was appointed by the second one.In his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, Mr. Trump spoke ruefully about his three appointees: Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, suggesting that they had betrayed him to establish their independence.“I picked three people,” he said. “I fought like hell for them.”In a speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump spoke ruefully about his three appointees and suggested that they had betrayed him to establish their independence.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesMr. Trump said his nominees had abandoned him, blaming his losses on the justices’ eagerness to participate in Washington social life and to assert their independence from the charge that “they’re my puppets.”He added: “And now the only way they can get out of that because they hate that it’s not good in the social circuit. And the only way they get out is to rule against Trump. So let’s rule against Trump. And they do that.”Mr. Trump has criticized Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on similar grounds. When the chief justice cast the decisive vote to save the Affordable Care Act in 2012, Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter that “I guess @JusticeRoberts wanted to be a part of Georgetown society more than anyone knew,” citing a fake handle. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump called the chief justice “an absolute disaster.”When he spoke on Jan. 6, Mr. Trump was probably thinking of the stinging loss the Supreme Court had just handed him weeks before, rejecting a lawsuit by Texas that had asked the court to throw out the election results in four battleground states.Before the ruling, Mr. Trump said he expected to prevail in the Supreme Court, after rushing Justice Barrett onto the court in October 2020 in part in the hope that she would vote in Mr. Trump’s favor in election disputes.“I think this will end up in the Supreme Court,” Mr. Trump said of the election a few days after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death that September. “And I think it’s very important that we have nine justices.”After the ruling, Mr. Trump weighed in on Twitter. “The Supreme Court really let us down,” he said. “No Wisdom, No Courage!”The ruling in the Texas case was not quite unanimous. Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, issued a brief statement on a technical point.Those same two justices were the only dissenters in a pair of cases in 2020 on access to Mr. Trump’s tax and business records, which had been sought by a New York prosecutor and a House committee.The general trend continued after Mr. Trump left office. In 2022, the court refused to block the release of White House records concerning the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, effectively rejecting Mr. Trump’s claim of executive privilege. The court’s order let stand an appeals court ruling that Mr. Trump’s desire to maintain the confidentiality of internal White House communications was outweighed by the need for a full accounting of the attack and the disruption of the certification of the 2020 electoral count.Only Justice Thomas noted a dissent. His participation in the case, despite his wife Virginia Thomas’s own efforts to overturn the election, drew harsh criticism.Mr. Trump’s rocky record at the court offers only hints about how the justices will approach the cases already before them and on the horizon. His claim of absolute immunity appears vulnerable, based on other decisions from the court on the scope of presidential power.The case examining one of the federal statutes relied on by the special counsel in the federal election-interference case, which makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct an official proceeding, does not directly involve Mr. Trump, though the court’s ruling could undermine two of the charges against him.Mr. Trump’s rocky record at the court offers only hints about how the justices will approach the cases already before them and on the horizon.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe justices have been skeptical of broad interpretations of federal criminal laws, and the arguments in the case will doubtless involve close parsing of the statute’s text.The case that is hardest to assess is the one from Colorado, involving as it does a host of novel questions about the meaning of an almost entirely untested clause of the 14th Amendment, one that could bar Mr. Trump from the presidency. The case is not yet at the Supreme Court, but it is almost certain to arrive in the coming days.Guy-Uriel E. Charles, a law professor at Harvard, said the justices would have to act.“The Supreme Court is a contested entity, but it is the only institution that can weigh in and try to address this problem, which needs a national resolution,” he said. “There has been some loss of faith in the court, but even people who are deeply antagonistic to it believe it needs to step in.” More

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      Biden Says It’s ‘Self-Evident’ That Trump Supported an Insurrection

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      But President Biden said the courts must decide if former President Donald J. Trump should be on the ballot in 2024.President Biden said on Wednesday that it was “self-evident” that former President Donald J. Trump had supported an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, but that the courts would decide whether he should be on the ballot in 2024.The president was responding to a reporter’s question about the Colorado Supreme Court decision on Tuesday that said that Mr. Trump was disqualified from being on the 2024 ballot in the state’s Republican primary because he was part of an insurrection.“Not going to comment on it,” Mr. Biden said after landing in Milwaukee for a speech to the Wisconsin Black Chamber of Commerce.And then he did.“It’s self-evident. You saw it all,” Mr. Biden said, adding that it would be up to the court to decide whether Mr. Trump was in violation of the 14th Amendment, which says that acts of insurrection can disqualify someone from office.“But he certainly supported an insurrection,” Mr. Biden said. “No question about it. None. Zero.”Mr. Biden typically steers clear of talking about Mr. Trump’s legal culpability or any of the federal charges pending against him.Mr. Trump has denied that he incited the Jan. 6 riot. His campaign said it would appeal Tuesday’s decision, which applies only to Colorado, to the U.S. Supreme Court. But the court could end up answering the question for all 50 states.Mr. Trump has been the Republican front-runner for the nomination for months, despite the long list of criminal charges he faces in multiple investigations.On Wednesday, Mr. Trump called the indictments against him “political” and “fake.”The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear a case that could complicate and delay the election interference case against him in Washington. More

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      Colorado Supreme Court Was Narrowly Split on Barring Trump From Ballot

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      The 4-3 decision was harshly criticized by Trump supporters, who called it undemocratic. But some observers say the court is notably nonpartisan. The Colorado Supreme Court, which barred former President Donald J. Trump from the state’s primary ballot, is composed of seven justices who were all appointed by Democratic governors.Justices on the court serve 10-year terms, and Democrats have held the governor’s office for the last 16 years, so all of the current justices were appointed by that party, with five appointed by one man: John Hickenlooper, who was governor from 2011 to 2019 and is now one of the state’s U.S. senators.Still, the chief justice, Brian Boatright, is a Republican, while three justices are Democrats and three are listed in voter registration records as “unaffiliated” with a party. And the court was not of one mind on whether Mr. Trump should appear on the ballot. The decision was 4-3, with the court ruling that the 14th Amendment forbade Mr. Trump from holding office because he had “engaged in insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters overran the Capitol. (Of the four who voted with the majority, two are registered Democrats and two are not registered with a party.)The decision was harshly criticized by supporters of Mr. Trump, who said that keeping him off the ballot was undemocratic. The head of Colorado’s Republican Party, Dave Williams, said “out-of-control radicals” in Colorado “would rather spit on our Constitution than let the people decide which candidates should represent them in a free and fair election.”But some observers of the court say that it is notably nonpartisan, in part because of how the justices are named. The governor must choose from a pool of nominees recommended by a bipartisan commission. The majority of the members on that commission are not lawyers. Still, most are chosen by the governor.The decision was harshly criticized by supporters of Mr. Trump, who said that keeping him off the ballot was undemocratic.Max Whittaker for The New York Times“It’s perceived to be way less political than the U.S. Supreme Court, and I think it’s true that it’s way less political,” said Chris Jackson, a lawyer in Denver whose practice includes election law. “There aren’t really conservative and liberal justices in the way that we describe the U.S. Supreme Court justices.”The decision on Trump on Tuesday was not the first time the court has removed a political candidate from the ballot. In 2020, it ruled that a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, Michelle Ferrigno Warren, could not appear on the primary ballot because she had not collected enough signatures from voters. A lower court had been more lenient, citing the Covid-19 pandemic, but the state’s highest court disagreed.Two years earlier, in 2018, the court removed a Republican candidate from a ballot. It found that Representative Doug Lamborn, a longtime congressman from Colorado Springs, had not collected enough valid voter signatures to be on the ballot. In that case, however, a federal court disagreed and eventually reinstated Mr. Lamborn, who won the election.Mr. Lamborn said in a statement that he hoped Mr. Trump would have similar success in the U.S. Supreme Court.Brian Boatright, the chief justice, in December. Pool photo by David Zalubowski“This wrongful decision was made by the same court that unconstitutionally removed my name from the ballot years ago & had to be corrected by a federal court,” Mr. Lamborn wrote on the social media platform X. Like the U.S. Supreme Court, the Colorado Supreme Court can choose whether to hear cases that are appealed to it, and, in some of the state’s biggest recent cases, the Colorado high court has declined. That was true in two cases in which the U.S. Supreme Court eventually weighed in: Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which that court sided in 2018 with a baker who had refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, and a case this year, Counterman v. Colorado, in which the high court said that the First Amendment put limits on laws banning online threats.Doug Spencer, a law professor at the University of Colorado, said the state’s high court appeared, in its Trump decision, to try to walk a tight line. It had ruled to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot but put a pause on its own ruling. If the case is appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, as is expected, then Mr. Trump’s name would, under the state court’s order, remain on the ballot until the Supreme Court decides the case. But the Colorado secretary of state said on Tuesday that she would follow whatever court order is in place on Jan. 5, when the state must certify ballots for the primary election.In staying its own decision until the Supreme Court weighs in, Professor Spencer said, the state court had “teed it up in just the right way” to be decided by the nation’s top court.He added: “They’re very thorough in terms of explaining themselves, whether or not you agree with them.”Susan C. Beachy More

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      Trump Cases Crashing Into Supreme Court Could Reshape 2024 Election

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      The ruling that Donald Trump is not eligible for the ballot in Colorado is the latest election-related issue likely to land before the justices. The implications for 2024 could be profound.It has been obvious for months that politics and the law were going to bump into one another in the 2024 campaign, given the double role that former President Donald J. Trump has been playing as a criminal defendant and leading Republican candidate.But in a way that few expected, that awkward bump has turned into a head-on collision. It now seems clear that the courts — especially the Supreme Court — could dramatically shape the contours of the election.The nine justices have already agreed to review the scope of an obstruction statute central to the federal indictment accusing Mr. Trump of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. And they could soon become entangled in both his efforts to dismiss those charges with sweeping claims of executive immunity and in a bid to rid himself of a gag order restricting his attacks on Jack Smith, the special counsel in charge of the case.The court could also be called upon to weigh in on a series of civil lawsuits seeking to hold Mr. Trump accountable for the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.And in the latest turn of events, the justices now seem poised to decide a novel and momentous legal question: whether Mr. Trump should be disqualified from state ballots for engaging in an insurrection on Jan. 6 in violation of a Reconstruction-era constitutional amendment.Taking up just one of these cases would place the Supreme Court — with a conservative majority bolstered by three Trump appointees — in a particular political spotlight that it has not felt in the 23 years since it decided Bush v. Gore and cemented the winner of the 2000 presidential race.But a number of the issues the court is now confronting could drastically affect the timing of the proceedings against Mr. Trump, the scope of the charges he should face or his status as a candidate, with potentially profound effects on his chances of winning the election. And the justices could easily become ensnared in several of the questions simultaneously.“In this cycle, the Supreme Court is likely to play an even larger role than in Bush v. Gore,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group dedicated to improving election administration.“It’s not just the issue of whether or not Donald Trump engaged in insurrection, which would disqualify him from holding the presidency under the 14th Amendment,” Mr. Becker said, “but also issues related to presidential immunity and criminal proceedings in general.”All of this arrives at a particularly vulnerable moment for the court. In the wake of its decisions on contentious issues like abortion rights and affirmative action, critics have assailed it for being guided by an overt political ideology.At the same time, some of the justices have come under withering personal scrutiny for their finances and links to wealthy backers. And given that Mr. Trump has at times expressed surprise that the justices he put on the bench have not been more attuned to his interests, any decisions by the court that favor him are sure to draw intense criticism.“Most of the justices would surely prefer the court to keep a low profile in the 2024 presidential election,” said Richard H. Pildes, a law professor at New York University.“In a highly polarized, social media-fueled political culture,” he said, “the justices know that nearly half the country is likely to view the court as having acted illegitimately if the court rules against their preferred candidate.”But while the court’s current majority has certainly favored any number of staunchly conservative policies, it has shown less of an appetite for supporting Mr. Trump’s attempts to bend the powers of the presidency to his benefit or to interfere with the mechanics of the democratic process.The justices largely ignored the slew of lawsuits that he and his allies filed in lower courts across the country three years ago seeking to overturn the last election. They also rejected out of hand a last-minute petition from the state of Texas to toss out the election results in four key battleground states that Mr. Trump had lost.None of this, of course, is a guarantee of how the court might act on the issues it is facing this time.Even a decision by the Supreme Court to move slowly in considering the issues heading its way could have major ramifications, especially the question of whether Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution for actions he took as president. If that issue gets tied up in the courts for months, it could make it harder to schedule his trial on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election before the general election season starting in the summer — and could even delay it until after Election Day.In fact, there are so many moving parts in the overlapping cases that Mr. Trump is facing that it is all but impossible to predict which issues might get taken up, how the justices will rule on the questions they consider and what effects their decisions might have as they flow downstream to the lower courts that are handling the former president’s four criminal cases and his many civil proceedings.It is important to remember something else: Mr. Trump is interested in more than winning arguments in court. From the start, he and his lawyers have pursued a parallel strategy of trying to delay his cases for as long as possible — ideally until after the election is decided.If he can succeed in such a delay and win the race, he would have the power to simply order the federal charges he is facing to be dropped. Regaining the White House would also complicate the efforts of local prosecutors to hold him accountable for crimes.The courts have shown that they, too, are aware that timing is an issue in Mr. Trump’s cases. Judges are normally loath to set the pace of proceedings based on outside pressures, but in the cases involving Mr. Trump the courts have found themselves in an unusual bind.Setting too aggressive a schedule could impinge on the rights of the defendant to have sufficient time to prepare for a complex trial. But to move too slowly would be to risk depriving voters of the knowledge they would glean from a trial before Election Day and give Mr. Trump, were he to win the election, the chance to kill the prosecutions or put them on hold for years.“It’s all extremely awkward,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department official who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School.Having the courts so enmeshed in Mr. Trump’s legal and political future has opened up the question of just how much ordinary people, not judges, will get to decide what happens at the polls next year. It has also left unresolved the degree to which judicial decisions will affect whether voters are able to hear the evidence that prosecutors have painstakingly collected about Mr. Trump’s alleged crimes before they render a decision about whether to re-elect him.Some election law specialists said the courts should generally defer to voters and not interfere in the choices they can make.“My view is that Trump is a political problem, and the appropriate response is politics,” said Tabatha Abu El-Haj, a law professor at Drexel University.But Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University, said that elections must be governed by legal principles.“It’s commonplace to think that voters, not courts, should determine who’s elected president,” he said. “But it’s also essential to remember that the law, including court rulings, structures the electoral choices voters face when they cast their ballot.”Adam Liptak More

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      The Supreme Court Can Stop Trump’s Delay Game

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      This is a good week to remember that, in the hours after Senate Republicans refused to convict Donald Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, offered a hint of future comeuppance for the former president. Mr. Trump, he said, was still liable for everything he did as president.“He didn’t get away with anything yet — yet,” Mr. McConnell said on the Senate floor on Feb. 13, 2021. “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.”Almost three years later, we are approaching the moment of truth. Mr. Trump, under federal indictment for his role in the insurrection, is attempting to evade legal accountability as he always has, by delay and misdirection.On Monday night, the case reached the Supreme Court, where litigation is normally measured in months, if not years. That’s understandable, especially when legal issues are complex or involve matters of great public significance. The course of justice is slow and steady, as the tortoise sculptures scattered around the court’s building at One First Street symbolize.But sometimes time is of the essence. That’s the case now, as the court weighs whether to expedite the case against Mr. Trump, who is trying to get his criminal charges thrown out a few weeks before the Republican primaries begin, and less than a year before the 2024 election.Last week after the federal trial judge, Tanya Chutkan, rejected Mr. Trump’s legal arguments that he is immune from prosecution, he appealed to the federal appeals court in Washington, a process that he clearly hoped would add weeks of delay. The special counsel Jack Smith countered by going directly to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to take the case away from the appeals court and rule quickly.It was, he acknowledged, “an extraordinary request” for “an extraordinary case.” The justices took the hint, ordering Mr. Trump to file his response by next week — lightning speed compared to the court’s usual pace.The prosecution was further complicated on Wednesday, when the justices agreed to hear a case challenging the government’s reliance on a particular obstruction charge against hundreds of Jan. 6 attackers, and against Mr. Trump himself.Prosecuting a presidential candidate during a campaign is not an ideal situation. Still, the justices were right not to sit on Mr. Smith’s appeal. The American people deserve to know, well before they head to the polls, whether one of the two probable major-party candidates for president is a convicted criminal — whether he is guilty, no less, of conspiring to subvert the outcome of a free and fair election to keep himself in power. The Jan. 6 trial — one of four Mr. Trump is expected to face over the coming months, and arguably the most consequential of all — is scheduled to start in early March, and it cannot move forward until the court decides whether he as a former president is immune from prosecution for his actions in office.The good news is there’s nothing stopping them. The justices are fully capable of acting fast when the circumstances demand. Consider the 2000 presidential election: the dispute over Florida’s vote count rocketed up to the court not once but twice in a matter of days in early December. The court issued its final opinion in Bush v. Gore, which was 61 pages in all, including dissents, barely 24 hours after hearing oral arguments.In 1974, the court managed to decide another hugely consequential case involving the presidency — Richard Nixon’s refusal to turn over his secret Oval Office tapes — over the course of a few weeks in June and July. The court’s ruling, which came out during its summer recess, went against Mr. Nixon and led to his resignation shortly after.The stakes in both cases were extraordinary, effectively deciding who would (or would not) be president. In both cases, the justices knew the country was waiting on them, and they showed they have no trouble resolving a legal dispute rapidly. The Jan. 6 charges against Mr. Trump are similarly consequential. Never in American history has a sitting president interfered with the peaceful transfer of power. No matter their positions on Mr. Trump and his eligibility to run again, all Americans have a compelling interest in getting a verdict in this case before the election.For that to happen, the Supreme Court needs to rule on Mr. Trump’s claim of executive immunity, one of a narrow category of appeals that can stop a trial in its tracks rather than having to wait until after conviction to be filed. The former president’s argument is that his actions to overturn the election were taken in the course of his official duties, and thus that he is absolutely immune from prosecution for them. It’s an absurd claim, as Judge Chutkan explained in denying it on Dec. 1.“Whatever immunities a sitting president may enjoy, the United States has only one chief executive at a time, and that position does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass,” she wrote. “Defendant’s four-year service as commander in chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens.”Mr. Trump made two additional arguments, involving double jeopardy and the First Amendment, that were even weaker than the immunity claim, and Judge Chutkan denied those as well. She was probably tempted to toss out all of them as frivolous, as so many of Mr. Trump’s delaying tactics, dressed up as legal arguments, turn out to be. Instead she erred on the side of caution because no one has ever made such arguments, so there is no legal precedent for assessing their validity.Of course, the reason no one has made these arguments is that no former president has been criminally charged before. This is classic Trump, freeloading on everyone else’s respect for the law. You can drive 100 m.p.h. down the highway only if you are confident the other cars will stay in their lanes.The irony is that, even as he seeks to delay and obstruct the justice system, Mr. Trump is bolstering the case for a speedy trial thanks to his repeated threatening outbursts on social media. He has attacked the judge, the prosecutor and others, including those who are likely to testify against him. Statements like those endanger the safety of witnesses and the basic fairness of the trial, and have resulted in a gag order against the former president, but they are routine for a man who has spent a lifetime acting out and daring decent Americans everywhere to do something, anything, to stop him.“He keeps challenging the system to hold him accountable,” Kristy Parker of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan advocacy group, told me. Most any other defendant who behaved in this way would risk being thrown in jail for violating the conditions of their bail, she said, but “no one wants to see him locked up prior to trial. It’s not going to be good for American society.”She was referring to the propensity for threats and violence that Mr. Trump’s supporters, egged on by their overlord, have shown in the face of any attempt to hold him to account. At this point, however, many Americans have accepted that risk as part of the price of cleansing the nation of a uniquely malicious political figure. We know the violence is coming, just as we know Mr. Trump will claim that any election he doesn’t win is rigged against him.“The best way to do anything about this is to have the trial soon,” Ms. Parker said. Right now, there are nine people in America who can help guarantee that is what happens.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Trump on Trial: The Looming Legal and Political Collision

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      The former president’s trial in one of his four criminal cases is scheduled for early March, putting his legal drama and the race for the White House on an unprecedented trajectory.In the next few months, as the weather warms in Washington, something remarkable could happen in the city’s federal courthouse: Donald J. Trump could become the first former president in U.S. history to sit through a trial as a criminal defendant.The trial, based on charges that Mr. Trump conspired to overturn the 2020 election, is scheduled to start in early March. And while the date could change, it is likely that a jury will sit in judgment of Mr. Trump before the 2024 election — perhaps even before the Republican Party meets in Milwaukee in July for its nominating convention.Mr. Trump is the front-runner for the Republican nomination and is facing 91 felony charges in four separate cases. Putting him on trial either before the convention or during the general election would potentially lead to a series of events that have never been seen before in the annals of American law and politics.It would almost certainly fuse Mr. Trump’s role as a criminal defendant with his role as a presidential candidate. It would transform the steps of the federal courthouse into a site for daily impromptu campaign rallies. And it would place the legal case and the race for the White House on a direct collision course, each one increasingly capable of shaping the other.Throughout it all, Mr. Trump would almost certainly seek to turn the ordinarily sober courtroom proceedings into fodder he could use to influence public opinion and gain any advantage he can in a presidential race unlike any other.“There is no useful precedent for this — legally, politically — in any dimension that you want to analyze it,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former United States attorney and F.B.I. official. “The turbulence is particularly dangerous because if Mr. Trump is convicted, he has set the stage for a large portion of the population to reject the jury’s verdict. As part of that, it is also his call to arms, and so there are other dangers that attend to his rhetoric.”The expectations of how a Trump trial would unfold before the election are based on interviews with people close to the former president. Already, Mr. Trump has sought to capitalize on the New York attorney general’s fraud case against him and his company. In that case, now underway in a Manhattan courtroom, Mr. Trump has shown up when he didn’t have to and has addressed reporters repeatedly. At the Washington trial, there will surely be enormous security, not only because of Mr. Trump’s status as a former president, but also because the event could become a flashpoint for conflict. There has been no violence during Mr. Trump’s various arraignments, when law enforcement officials had feared the worst.Still, there are some variables at play that could push the trial in Washington until after the election.Mr. Trump’s lawyers are planning to appeal a decision last week by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is presiding over the election case, to deny his sweeping claims that he enjoys absolute immunity from the indictment because it covers actions he took while he was president. That appeal, on a question that has never been fully tested, could end up in front of the Supreme Court, further delaying the case even if prosecutors ultimately win the argument on the merits.But despite such time-buying tactics, Mr. Trump’s legal team is cautiously preparing for a trial in the late spring or early summer. While the other three cases in which Mr. Trump is facing charges are much likelier to be pushed off until after Election Day, the former president’s team believes Judge Chutkan is intent on keeping the proceeding she is overseeing moving ahead.Mr. Trump has already turned his legal travails into a campaign message that doubles as a lucrative online fund-raising tool. But his attempts to reap political benefit from his prosecutions and to use his legal proceedings as a platform for his talking points about victimhood and grievance are likely to only intensify if he is actually on trial, in the nation’s capital, in the middle of the 2024 presidential cycle.Merchandise alluding to Mr. Trump’s criminal cases at a campaign event in Waterloo, Iowa, in October.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThere is no evidence that President Biden has meddled in any of the Trump prosecutions. Still, people close to Mr. Trump are planning to exploit the situation by falsely claiming to voters that Mr. Biden is a “socialist” leader directly seeking to imprison his political rival. One of those people, who was not authorized to speak publicly, suggested that this message could resonate especially powerfully with Hispanic voters, some of whom have family members who have suffered under dictatorial regimes in Latin America.When he is in Judge Chutkan’s courtroom, Mr. Trump is likely to be fairly well-behaved, constrained by his lawyers and by the federal rules of criminal procedure. He is unlikely to say much at all under Judge Chutkan’s supervision. And his silence inside the courtroom may feel all the quieter given the noise he is likely to make outside it in front of the television cameras that will surely await him every day.Even now, Mr. Trump has been engaging in a fusillade of daily attacks not only against the election case in Washington but also against his three other criminal cases — as well as his civil fraud trial in Manhattan.He has tried to blur all four cases together in the public’s mind as one giant “witch hunt,” yoking them to previous investigations into him. He has assailed the judges, prosecutors and witnesses involved in the cases, leveraging moments when gag orders against him have been temporarily lifted. He has also mounted a sustained publicity blitz, comparing himself to Nelson Mandela while portraying the indictments against him as retaliatory strikes by his political opponents, including Mr. Biden.This sort of spin and vitriol is only likely to increase when crowds of reporters await Mr. Trump’s exit from Judge Chutkan’s court each day.Mr. Trump’s allies expect he will hold news conferences outside the courthouse, seeking to maximize media coverage and hoping to have cameras capture his daily motorcade departures, likely to the airport to fly back to New York so he can sleep in his own bed.The trial and the enormous publicity that surrounds it could also offer Mr. Trump an unmatched opportunity to communicate to the American public without anyone providing an effective rebuttal.The gag order in Washington does not preclude Mr. Trump from attacking the trial in general, and federal prosecutors are barred by their code of ethics from speaking about a case that is in process. That means the former president, who has no compunction about lying, is likely to be the only person directly involved in the proceeding talking about it daily on television and social media.“The reality of the ethical laws as they pertain to prosecutors is that Trump is going to continue to have a pathway to rail against the indictment and trial for all the reasons that he’s done in the past and will do in the future, essentially unfiltered and unlimited — the prosecutors won’t,” said Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the former Manhattan district attorney whose office spent years investigating Mr. Trump’s finances and business dealings.“There’s a significant imbalance in the ability of prosecutors to comment in real time about the evidence and the case.”A coalition of news organizations has asked Judge Chutkan to televise the proceedings and Mr. Trump has joined in the request. But that is unlikely to happen given that federal rules prohibit news cameras from broadcasting from the courtroom. Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, have opposed the request, saying that the former president would turn the proceeding into a “media event” with a “carnival atmosphere.”Mr. Smith’s team is unlikely to react at all to Mr. Trump’s provocations — at least in public — instead focusing its energies on winning the case inside the courtroom, said Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor and law professor at Duke University.“There have always been circuslike cases and this could be the most circuslike case of them all,” Mr. Buell said. “But the strategy of the prosecutors in these cases is to not get distracted.”Mr. Buell suggested that the special counsel’s office might request special protections for members of the jury who will be under scrutiny in a way rarely seen in other criminal matters. He said prosecutors might ask for the jurors to be anonymous or to have federal marshals drive them to and from the courthouse every day.The selection of the jurors will be of paramount importance, with Mr. Trump’s best hopes of avoiding a conviction likely resting on a hung jury, according to former prosecutors and defense lawyers. Given the demographics of Washington, D.C., the jury pool is likely to be racially diverse, but it is unclear how politically diverse it will be.Should he be convicted, it is unclear how quickly Mr. Trump would be sentenced. He will most likely file appeals. And the details of any sentence — when he would be punished and whether he would be sent to prison or ordered to serve home confinement — would all carry enormous significance and are likely to be litigated intensely.Even though Mr. Trump will try to shape public narratives about the trial, wall-to-wall coverage about it may not be entirely to his benefit.The trial is expected to feature a parade of witnesses, including many of his own lawyers and advisers who will testify under oath that he had been told in no uncertain terms that he lost the 2020 election. It is also likely to focus heavily on the role he played in stirring up the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.But even if Mr. Trump dominates the discussion about the trial on the airwaves, the slow and steady accumulation of evidence presented in the courtroom could serve as a counterbalance.“At trial, the prosecutors will present witnesses,” Mr. Vance said. “It becomes more balanced, and more powerful, when the trial is ongoing.” More

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      Colorado Supreme Court Takes Up Trump’s Eligibility to Be President

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      A district court judge ruled last month that the 14th Amendment barred insurrectionists from every office except the nation’s highest. “How is that not absurd?” one justice asked of that notion.The Colorado Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday on the question of whether former President Donald J. Trump is barred from holding office again under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which disqualifies people who engaged in insurrection against the Constitution after taking an oath to support it.Several of the seven justices appeared skeptical of arguments made by a lawyer for Mr. Trump, including the core one that a district court judge relied on in a ruling last month ordering Mr. Trump to be included on the Colorado primary ballot: that Section 3 did not apply to the presidency. The Colorado Supreme Court is hearing an appeal of that ruling as part of a lawsuit brought by Republican and independent voters in the state who, in seeking to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot, have contended the opposite.“How is that not absurd?” Justice Richard L. Gabriel asked of the notion that the lawmakers who wrote Section 3 in the wake of the Civil War had intended to disqualify insurrectionists from every office except the nation’s highest.Section 3 lists a number of positions an insurrectionist is disqualified from holding but not explicitly the presidency, so challenges to Mr. Trump’s eligibility rely on the argument that the presidency is included in the phrases “officer of the United States” and “any office, civil or military, under the United States.” It also does not specify who gets to decide whether someone is an insurrectionist: election officials and courts, as the petitioners argue, or Congress itself, as Mr. Trump’s team argues.Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Scott Gessler, suggested on Wednesday that the lawmakers had trusted the Electoral College to prevent an insurrectionist from becoming president, and that they had known the Northern states held enough electoral power after the Civil War to prevent a Confederate leader from winning a national election anyway.Justice Gabriel did not seem satisfied, and neither did colleagues who jumped in with follow-up questions. Justice Monica M. Márquez asked why lawmakers would have chosen the “indirect” route of blocking someone only through the Electoral College. And Justice Melissa Hart asked whether Mr. Gessler’s interpretation of Section 3 would have allowed Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy, to become president.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      O’Connor’s Most Vital Work Was After She Stepped Down

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      You can tell a lot about a person by what he or she regrets. This holds especially for Supreme Court justices, whose decisions can, with a single vote, upend individual lives and alter the course of history. Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. said he probably made a mistake in upholding a law criminalizing gay sex; Justice Harry Blackmun was sorry he ever voted to impose the death penalty.Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who died on Friday at the age of 93, expressed regret publicly over one vote she cast: in the case of Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, a 2002 ruling that judicial candidates could not be prohibited from expressing their views on disputed legal and political issues. Minnesota, like many states that elect judges, had imposed such a ban in order to preserve the appearance of judicial impartiality. The court rejected the ban for violating the First Amendment. The decision was 5 to 4, with Justice O’Connor joining the majority.The court’s ruling led to an explosion of partisan spending on judicial elections around the country and judicial candidates freely spouting their predetermined views on the very issues they would be entrusted to decide if elected.There are many ways to remember Justice O’Connor — as the first woman on the Supreme Court, as one of the justices who saved Roe v. Wade 30 years ago, as the author of the landmark decision protecting affirmative action in 2003. As impressive as those achievements were, they have mostly been surpassed or reversed. What stands out for me is what she said and did after leaving the court.Her response to the 2002 ruling would define most of her last years and underline her commitment to American democracy not just in the halls of justice but also on the ground. It was as if she could see what was coming as the judiciary grew ever more politicized, and she devoted much of her postcourt public life to combating that trend.In March 2006, only weeks after she stepped down, she gave a speech calling out Republican lawmakers for attacking the judiciary. She highlighted the comment by Senator John Cornyn of Texas that deadly violence against judges might be related to their rulings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More