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      US supreme court urged to make ‘immediate, definitive decision’ on Trump’s immunity

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      Jack Smith has urged speed for the supreme court to take up the issue of whether Donald Trump is, as the former president claims, immune from criminal prosecution on federal charges over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.On Thursday the US special counsel submitted a new file to the supreme court in Washington DC, reiterating his argument for urgency in their consideration of such a key element of the federal election interference case, in response to Trump’s latest move the day before.On Wednesday, Trump’s team asked the highest court in the US to stay out of the argument about whether he has immunity from federal criminal prosecution, after Smith asked the court last week to take up review of the matter.On Thursday, Smith submitted to the supreme court that in the public interest it should make an “immediate, definitive decision” on the “important constitutional question” of Trump’s immunity or lack of it in the federal election interference case.“The charges here are of the utmost gravity. This case involves – for the first time in our nation’s history – criminal charges against a former president based on his actions while in office,” the latest submission said.Smith’s filing added: “Enforcing federal criminal laws that prohibit such conduct is vital to protecting our constitutional processes and democracy itself.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSmith is the veteran prosecutor appointed as special counsel by the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, in November 2022, to lead two federal investigations of Trump, the election interference case and the alleged mishandling of classified documents that were discovered at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after he left office. More

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      Is barring Trump from office undemocratic? Let’s assess point by point | Jan-Werner Müller

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      The decision by the Colorado supreme court to ban Donald Trump from the Republican primary has received pushback from some predictable and some not-so-predictable quarters.The former president’s supporters of course consider him the great Maga martyr, temporarily hindered by nefarious elites from his rightful return and revenge; in this morality play, the US supreme court, besieged with accusations of being undemocratic, can now play the savior by putting him back on the ballot and making the people Trump’s ultimate judge.Some liberals also fuss about the political fallout of the decision, worried that barring Trump from running will provoke chaos and violence. And the left, suspecting a “liberal plot against democracy”, is not happy either: they reproach the liberals who welcome Trump’s disqualification for wanting to short-circuit the political process – thereby revealing deep distrust of democracy or at least defeatism about confronting Trump in an open contest. All these concerns are mistaken.The Colorado supreme court comprehensively refuted Trump’s claims, especially the ones bordering on the absurd. The justices patiently argued that parties cannot make autonomous, let alone idiosyncratic, decisions about who to put on the ballot – by that logic, they could nominate a 10-year-old for the presidency. They also painstakingly took apart the idea that the now famous section three of the 14th amendment covers every imaginable official expectation of the president. In terms clearly tailored to appeal to justices on the US supreme court, they explain that plain language and the intent of the drafters of the amendment suggest that insurrectionists – including ones at the very top – were not supposed to hold office again, unless Congress voted an amnesty with a two-thirds majority.The court’s majority also made the case that the House of Representatives’ January 6 report is not some partisan attack on poor Trump and hence could be admitted as evidence; they then drew on that evidence to show that Trump had clearly engaged in insurrection; they did not have to prove that Trump himself had led it (of course, he didn’t valiantly enter the Capitol to “save democracy” – his words – but tweeted the revolution from the safety of the White House).We know that few Maga supporters will be swayed by the evidence – in fact, the entry ticket to Trump’s personality cult is precisely to deny that very evidence. But it is more disturbing that liberals still think that prudence dictates that Trump should run and just be defeated at the polls.For one thing, the same liberals usually profess their commitment to the constitution – and the Colorado court has given an entirely plausible reading of that very document. Should it simply be set aside because supporters of a self-declared wannabe dictator threaten violence?Some liberals also appear to assume that, were Trump to lose in November 2024, their political nightmare would stop. But someone who has not accepted defeat before, doubled down on the “big lie”, and ramped up authoritarian rhetoric is not likely to just concede. Would the logic then still be that, even if the law says differently, Maga supporters must somehow be appeased?The more leftwing critique is the most interesting. Liberals are charged with having a Mueller moment again. By trusting courts to save democracy, they reveal how little faith they have in the people; they appear to hope that, magically, wise old men (it’s usually men) like Robert Mueller, acting for more or less technocratic “institutions”, will solve a challenge through law when it should be solved politically.The only question is: by that logic, are any measures meant to protect democracy but not somehow involving the people as a whole as such illegitimate? Had Trump been impeached after January 6, would anyone have made the argument that this was the wrong process and that he just should keep running in elections no matter what?Countries other than the US are more comfortable with the notion that politicians or parties expected to destroy democracy should be taken out of the democratic game. The threshold for such a decision has to be very high – clearly, there’s a problem if attempts to save democracy are themselves undemocratic. Here the Colorado decision is more vulnerable: as one of the dissenting judges pointed out, Trump might not have been given due process; even prosecutor Jack Smith, a master legal chess player, is not going after Trump for insurrection.Three factors can mitigate anxieties about undemocratic measures to save democracy, though: one is that, before a drastic decision like disqualification is taken, an individual has to exhibit a very consistent pattern of wanting to undermine democracy. Check, for Trump.Second, there has to be some room for political judgment and prudence: disqualification is not automatic and not for life; in theory, Congress could pass an amnesty for Trump in the name of democratic competition.Third, banning a whole party can rightly make citizens with particular political preferences feel that their voices are silenced; in this case, though, no one is removing the Republican party. And, of course, two Trump epigones remain on the ballot.
      Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University. He is also a Guardian US columnist More

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      Colorado supreme court justices face death threats after Trump ruling

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      Justices on the Colorado supreme court are receiving a barrage of death threats after it ruled to exclude Donald Trump from the state’s presidential ballot next year because of his attempts to cause insurrection.A report compiled by Advance Democracy, a non-partisan non-profit organization, said there was “significant violent rhetoric” against the justices and Democrats on social media, according to NBC News.Some of the worst of it was posted on fringe websites, including one post that said “behead judges” and “slam dunk a judge’s baby into the trash can”.Another post on The Donald, a pro-Trump forum where a Trump supporter once publicly bragged about his involvement with the January 6 insurrection and was arrested as a result, said “this ends when we kill these fuckers”.“The normalization of this type of violent rhetoric – and lack of remedial action by social media entities – is cause for significant concern,” Daniel J Jones, president of Advance Democracy, told NBC News.“Political leaders on both sides of the political aisle need to speak out against these calls for violence, and social media platforms need to reassess their role in hosting and promoting this rhetoric.”Advance Democracy noted that some violent posts are in direct response to Trump’s own furious posts about the ruling on Truth Social. Trump has called it “election interference” and implied it proves the 2020 election was stolen, the lie that eventually led to the January 6 insurrection.It isn’t the first time Trump’s posts and comments have incited threats against a court. A New York court reported last month that the office of the judge overseeing Trump’s fraud trial had been bombarded with death threats and antisemitic abuse, including some levied against the judge’s law clerk. The office received multiple threatening voicemails, including one that told the judge “you should be assassinated … you should be executed”. Another said: “We are coming to remove you permanently.”Trump’s lawyers in his fraud trial argued that the former president, who faces 91 criminal charges and is an adjudicated rapist, has no control over those who levy violent threats.Meanwhile, the court’s ruling has shaken Washington, with Republicans railing against the decision, Democrats defending the court’s ruling and legal scholars presenting a variety of views.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn an unusual move, Dean Phillips, a Democratic representative from Minnesota who is running a long-shot campaign against Joe Biden, criticized the ruling on social media, making him one of the few Democrats disagreeing with the Colorado court.“Do I believe Trump is guilty of inspiring an insurrection and doing nothing to stop it? I was there. Absolutely. Do I believe it’s wrong to ban him from the ballot in Colorado without a conviction? Absolutely,” Phillips wrote on X. “Do I believe the SCOTUS must opine immediately? Absolutely.”Other Democrats have praised the ruling. Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a close ally of Biden, called it “striking” and said it is “undeniable in my view that [Trump] participated in an insurrection and as such should be disqualified from holding federal office.” More

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      A Republican commitment to inequality underscores Trump’s impunity | Rebecca Solnit

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      No one is above the law. That’s a familiar axiom of American life, and it’s often been bent by the power of wealth and those possessing a wealth of power, but it has never been tested as it is being tested now. If it breaks, then something fundamental to the country’s meaning and function breaks, and repair will not be easy.But as far as the Republican party and its leading candidate for the presidency, conservative members of the supreme court, and much of the Republican delegation in Congress – that is, parts of all three branches of the federal government – are concerned, someone should be above the law and all of the rest of us should be unequal under the law. It’s part of their larger commitment to inequality as law and culture.If the person above the law is also the most powerful person in the nation, then this nation becomes exactly what the American Revolution and the constitution were intended to escape and prevent: a monarchy. This week the Colorado supreme court found that the 14th amendment’s provision that anyone who, while under oath to defend the constitution, “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it can’t hold office again applies to Donald Trump. That is a challenge to the US supreme court to apply the law to the man who, in the case of three of those conservatives, appointed them, while a fourth member, Clarence Thomas, is married to a leader of the insurrection in question who has yet to be held accountable for her role.Legal expert Elie Mystal said in the Nation that he expects the supreme court to overturn this decision designed to “make the Supreme Court look very ugly and partisan when it bends over backward to save Trump and preserve his ability to threaten the country”.In 2019, in Trump v Vance, the chief justice, John Roberts, delivered the opinion that Trump was not immune from a state court’s demand to see his tax records, citing an 1807 case in which the then president, Thomas Jefferson, claimed to be immune to a subpoena for records. Roberts cited that case when he wrote that no one can “stand exempt from the general provisions of the constitution”, and added that “this Court rejected Nixon’s claim of an absolute privilege”.Trump himself has routinely claimed that his power as president was absolute and that it granted an immunity from prosecution and accountability that has never ended. He has made it clear that if returned to office he would institute an autocracy in open conflict with the checks and balances of the political system of the United States. In the spring of 2020, when he sought to overrule pandemic restrictions imposed by state governments, he declared in a press conference: “When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total.” It’s not, said legal scholars and governors. But he keeps trying.A surprising number of pundits said, placidly, that he was running for election in 2020 to avoid accountability for the crimes committed during his first term. That someone should want to sit atop the system of laws in order to flout the law and keep crime-ing should be shocking – and situations that are both shocking and unsurprising have been a constant of the last several years.The mainstream media have too often normalized or downplayed outrageous, alarming and criminal conduct in order to deliver news that sounds objective and calm, apparently because they believe an accurate description of a country in which one party largely remains what it once was while the other has gone berserk and lawless in unprecedented ways would seem partisan. Rightwing media have created a parallel universe in which these crimes didn’t happen or weren’t crimes or both at once.As a result, we are in a slow-moving insurrection attempt that continues even after many of the participants in the 2021 coup attempt face criminal and civil charges for their acts. If Trump is re-elected, that insurrection will have succeeded after all.The most equivalent event in US history is the civil war, in which a number of states and political leaders broke away from the Republic and waged war on it, in defense of the radical inequality that was slavery. That war, when the Union side eventually defeated the Confederacy, led to the 14th amendment. And that amendment, this week, led to Colorado’s state supreme court ruling that Trump should not appear on the ballot in that state.The US supreme court, in addition to reviewing the Colorado decision, is deciding another case about Trump – whether he has presidential immunity from prosecution in the trial charging him with, as prosecutor Jack Smith put it, “conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding”.All these facts are well known. But what underlies this unprecedented situation is something essential to the contemporary Republican party: a passionate devotion to inequality. Republicans have sought to disenfranchise voters who are likely to vote against them and to undermine the systems set up to protect elections from corruption. They’ve sought to give corporations, including the fossil fuel industry and the gun industry, immunity from accountability as both climate change and gun deaths devastate the nation, as well as to liberate dark money to dominate politics.The legislation and legal cases they have pursued makes women unequal to men by overturning the bodily autonomy necessary to make women free and equal participants in society. Having overturned abortion rights in their pliant supreme court, and launched a new era of persecution of both pregnant people and medical providers in the states they dominate, Republicans are now threatening to overturn marriage equality.Marriage equality threatens conservatives not only by making queer couples equal to straight couples, but by establishing that marriage is a freely negotiated relationship between equals, a blow to patriarchal marriage’s demand that wives submit to husbands. Some Republicans, including the new house speaker, also aspire to eliminate no-fault divorce, which would trap unhappy couples in general and abused women in particular.With their support for Muslim bans and their attacks on immigrants, affirmative action and legislation protecting minority rights, and on first amendment rights to free speech and protest, conservatives have sought to return this country to the inequality that has been increasingly overcome in recent decades. It is in fact exactly this equality that they have fought against, with fury, in recent decades. Additionally, in 2022, five Republican congressmen, including then speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, ignored congressional subpoenas from the January 6 committee, demonstrating that they considered themselves, too, to be above the law.At the end of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the pigs who have risen to dominate and subjugate the other creatures eliminate six of the seven commandments they agreed upon in founding their little republic. And they modify the seventh, which declares “all animals are equal”, by adding to it “but some animals are more equal than others”.Donald Trump has lived his life as though he was more equal than others, and he is backed by a party seeking to make inequality prevail as the law of the land and make that law unable to hold some animals accountable. Whether or not the animals who believe they are more equal than others are rendered equal under the law is in part in the supreme court’s hands now. The rest of it is up to, as it usually is, citizens and their elected representatives.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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      Americans are hoping the courts will spare them an electoral reckoning with Trump | Lawrence Douglas

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      “This is how dictatorships are born.” Such was Donald Trump’s response to news that the Colorado supreme court had ruled that the former president is disqualified from holding office and so should be removed from the state’s Republican primary ballot.Anytime Trump speaks of “dictatorships” these days we should pay attention. He has all but declared his intention to engage in dictatorial rule should he win in 2024. It isn’t clear, then, whether his statement, in a fund-raising missive fired off minutes after the news broke, was meant as a condemnation of the ruling or a prediction of how he would handle such legal setbacks should he be returned to the White House.The specter of a dictatorial Trump using the presidency to deform the rule of law into a tool of political punishment explains why millions of Americans continue to cling to the hope that our court system will spare us an electoral reckoning with Trump. Biden continues to suffer from inexplicably weak polling numbers while Trump has managed to turn criminal counts into a fund-raising juggernaut. None of this translates into Trump’s defeating Biden in the national popular vote in 2024. But, as we all know, he doesn’t have to. Our grossly defective Electoral College could once again hand Trump the presidency.And so the hope that our court system will insulate us from the infirmities of our electoral system and our own failings as democratic citizens. Yet, however understandable, the hope will find no answer in yesterday’s ruling. This is not because the Colorado supreme court reached the wrong decision.Indeed, the ruling, which turned on the court’s interpretation of the insurrection clause of the 14th amendment, was brave and correct. A lower Colorado court had already concluded that Trump had engaged in insurrection on 6 January 2021, but had concluded that the 14th amendment’s bar against insurrectionists from holding office did not apply to the presidency.The Colorado supreme court had little trouble rejecting this latter conclusion. To argue, the court observed, that the 14th amendment, ratified in the wake of the civil war, “disqualifies every oath-breaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land” would be utterly nonsensical (italics in original).And so the court concluded that Trump is “disqualified from holding the office of the President” and instructed the Colorado secretary of state to remove his name from the presidential primary ballot.Admittedly, the seven-member court was divided, with three dissenters questioning whether Trump can be disqualified without having first been convicted of engaging in insurrection. The court itself stayed its own ruling until early 2024, anticipating Trump’s already announced appeal. And so this explosive issue will all but inevitably land in the lap of the US supreme court.How will the court act? In an ideal world, it would uphold the Colorado ruling and would do so unanimously. Only a unanimous decision, handed down by a court composed of three Trump appointees – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – and one, the ethically-challenged and ideologically-rigid Clarence Thomas, whose spouse was a committed ‘stop the steal” activist, could possibly weather the storm of protest and civil unrest that such a historic ruling would trigger.Alas, no such ruling will issue from this supreme court. This court will predictably toss out the Colorado decision, insisting that Trump’s name be placed back on the ballot. I say this not because the court is necessarily beholden to Trump, but because, already suffering from historically low and largely self-inflicted approval ratings (see its ruling in Dobbs, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion; and Bruen, elevating gun ownership to a fundamental right), it will hide behind judicial modesty, insisting that voters and not unelected judges, should have the final say about Trump’s fitness for office.Still, in refusing to intervene, the court will be unable to escape the damaging appearance of extreme partisanship. The court has already been asked to review Trump’s claim that he enjoys “absolute immunity” from prosecution, an argument, which, if accepted, would derail his Washington DC federal trial, tentatively scheduled to begin on 4 March 2024, for conspiring to defraud the United States by seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. And it has already agreed to review the scope of the charge that January 6 insurrectionists obstructed an official proceeding, a matter also central to the federal case against Trump.While it’s hard to imagine the court accepting Trump’s unsustainably broad immunity argument, it’s easier to imagine it ruling in a manner that might work to the benefit of Trump’s tried and true legal strategy of delay, delay, delay. So while the supreme court might dodge a reckoning with Trump, there will be no escape for the American people.
      Lawrence Douglas is the author, most recently, of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020. He is a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian US and teaches at Amherst College More

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      Colorado’s ruling to disqualify Trump sets up a showdown at supreme court

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      The Colorado ruling disqualifying Donald Trump from the ballot because he incited an insurrection on January 6 sets up another high-stakes, highly controversial political intervention by the US supreme court – a conservative-dominated panel to which Trump appointed three stringent rightwingers.Compromised in progressive eyes by those appointments and rulings including the removal of the federal right to abortion, the court was already due to decide whether Trump has immunity from prosecution regarding acts committed as president.Arising from one of four criminal indictments that have generated 91 charges, that case – concerning elected subversion if not incitement of insurrection – has produced intense scrutiny of Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving justice and a hardline conservative also at the centre of an ethics scandal.Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, is a hard-right activist who was deeply involved in attempts to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, a defeat which according to Trump’s lie was the result of electoral fraud.With the Colorado ruling, calls for Clarence Thomas to recuse from cases involving Trump will no doubt increase – and no doubt continue to be ignored.On Tuesday, the progressive strategist Rachel Bitecofer said: “Justice Thomas will get to weigh in on whether Trump engaged in insurrection for the same plot his own wife helped organise. Extraordinary.”Earlier, in a scene of extraordinary Washington pageantry, Biden addressed Thomas and the other justices at a memorial service for Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to sit on the court.Speaking at the National Cathedral, the president delivered a passage that would within hours assume greater significance.To O’Connor, Biden said, the court was “the bedrock of America. It was a vital line of defence for the values and the vision of our republic, devoted not to the pursuit of power for power’s sake but to make real the promise of America – the American promise that holds that we’re all created equal and deserve to be treated equally throughout our lives.”Citing that need for equality before the law, some prominent observers said the supreme court should uphold the Colorado ruling.J Michael Luttig, a conservative former judge who testified before the House January 6 committee and has written with the Harvard professor Laurence Tribe on the 14th amendment, called the Colorado ruling “historic”, “masterful” and “brilliant”.“It will be a test of America’s commitment to its democracy, to its constitution and to the rule of law,” Luttig told MSNBC, adding: “Arguably, when it is decided by the supreme court, it will be the single most important constitutional decision in all of our history.“… It is an unassailable … decision that the former president is disqualified from the presidency because he conducted, engaged in or aided or supported an insurrection or rebellion against the United States constitution.”But others were not so supportive.Jonathan Turley, a conservative law professor from George Washington University who has appeared as a witness for House Republicans seeking to impeach Biden on grounds of supposed corruption, told Fox News: “This court has handed partisans on both sides the ultimate tool to try to shortcut elections. And it’s very, very dangerous.“This country is a powder keg, and this court is throwing matches at it. And I think it’s a real mistake. I think they’re wrong on the law. You know, January 6 was many things, most of it not good. In my view it was not an insurrection, it was a riot.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“That doesn’t mean the people responsible for that day shouldn’t be held accountable. But to call this an insurrection for the purposes of disqualification would create a slippery slope for every state in the union.“This is a time where we actually need democracy. We need to allow the voters to vote to hear their decision. And the court just said, ‘You’re not going to get that in Colorado, we’re not going to let you vote for Donald Trump.’ You can dislike Trump, you can believe he’s responsible for January 6, but this isn’t the way to do it.”Adopted in 1868, section three of the 14th amendment barred former Confederates from office after the civil war. But it has rarely been used. In Trump’s case, much legal argument has centered on whether the presidency counts as an office, as defined in the text. In Colorado, a lower court found that it did not. The state supreme court found that it did. That argument now goes to the highest court in the land.After the Colorado ruling, many observers also pointed out that Trump has not been convicted of inciting an insurrection, or charged with doing so. He was impeached for inciting an insurrection on January 6 but acquitted at trial in the Senate, where enough Republicans stayed loyal.What is clear is that thanks to Colorado, a US supreme court already racked by politics and with historically low approval ratings will once again pitch into the partisan fight. On Tuesday, Trump seized on the Colorado ruling as he has his criminal indictments: as battle cry and fundraising tool. His Republican opponents also slammed the ruling.Last month, the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Eric Foner, an expert on the civil war and Reconstruction, spoke to the Guardian about 14th amendment challenges to Trump, including in Colorado. A successful case, Foner said, would be likely to act on Trump like “a red flag in front of a bull”.So, it seems clear, will anything the US supreme court now does regarding the Colorado ruling.On Wednesday a Trump attorney, Jay Sekulow, said on his own internet show he expected the court to act quickly, with “the next 10 days … critical in this case” and oral arguments likely by mid-January. His son and co-host, Jordan Sekulow, countered that a slow-moving case could not be counted out. More

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      Trump lawyers urge supreme court to reject fast-tracking immunity decision

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      Lawyers for Donald Trump on Wednesday urged the US supreme court to reject a request from the special counsel to expeditiously decide whether he was immune from prosecution over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, contending prosecutors lacked standing to bring the petition.The argument from the ex-president was that prosecutors had no basis to appeal a lower court ruling that was favorable to them, and should instead defer intervening in the case until a federal appeals court issued its own judgment first.“This Court’s ordinary review procedures will allow the DC Circuit to address this appeal in the first instance, thus granting this Court the benefit of an appellate court’s prior consideration,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in the 35-page filing.“The Special Counsel urges this Court to bypass those ordinary procedures, including the longstanding preference for prior consideration by at least one court of appeals, and rush to decide the issues with reckless abandon. The Court should decline that invitation at this time.”The papers filed by Trump’s lawyers in essence amounted to an attempt to refreeze the case – and indefinitely delay the March 2024 trial date – after prosecutors sought to bypass the potentially lengthy appeals process by directly asking the nation’s highest court to resolve the matter.Trump’s main argument asking the supreme court to defer the petition was procedural, arguing the narrow cases where prosecutors could appeal a favorable lower court ruling were limited to when the government had suffered some harm, which did not apply to the special counsel Jack Smith.The filing added that the court’s preference should be to allow the DC circuit to issue a judgment first, consistent with ordinary practice and especially when the DC circuit had already agreed to consider the question on an expedited basis.Whether Trump’s line of arguments will prevail remains uncertain, insofar as Trump repeatedly cited the case of Camreta v Greene (2011), in which the court expressly ruled that the fact that the victor filed the appeal did not deprive it of jurisdiction to hear the case.Trump also accused the special counsel’s office of conflating the “public interest” in a speedy trial with “partisan interest”, alleging prosecutors of wanting to go to trial before the 2024 election in order to tie him up in court during the height of his presidential campaign for political reasons.The supreme court is likely to decide whether to grant the special counsel’s appeal in short order. If it does take the case, it could schedule oral arguments in January and issue a decision within weeks. If it declines, it would return to the DC circuit’s jurisdiction.Earlier this month, Trump asked the US court of appeals for the DC circuit to reverse a decision by the trial judge rejecting his motion to dismiss the indictment on grounds that he enjoyed absolute immunity for any actions related to his official duties while president.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Trump legal team suspected the motion would fail, according to people familiar with the matter, but filed it in the knowledge that it could be appealed before trial and, crucially, that it would cause the case to be paused pending the outcome of the appeals process.Trump’s lawyers appeared to expect the DC circuit to take months to schedule oral arguments and issue a ruling. They only intended to take the matter to the supreme court after a possible loss, which could again take months to decide whether Trump could be prosecuted in the case.But prosecutors pre-empted Trump and forced him to contend with the supreme court plank of his delay strategy earlier than he expected, requesting a grant of what is known as certiorari before the DC circuit issued a judgment. Prosecutors also separately asked the DC circuit to expedite its consideration.The federal 2020 election interference trial is currently set for 4 March, the day before Super Tuesday, when 15 states are scheduled to hold Republican primaries or caucuses. Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP nomination, has been adamant that he does not want to be stuck in a courtroom.Trump has also made no secret that his overarching legal strategy, for all of his criminal cases, is to pursue procedural delays. If the cases do not go to trial before next year’s election and he wins a second term, then he could direct his handpicked attorney general to drop all of the charges.And even if the case did go to trial before November, the people said, Trump’s preference would have been for the trial to take place as close as possible to the election because it would have given his 2024 campaign ammunition to miscast the criminal case against him as political in nature. More

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      Biden says it’s ‘self-evident’ that Trump is an insurrectionist

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      Joe Biden has said it is “self-evident” that Donald Trump is an insurrectionist in his first public comments since Colorado’s supreme court removed the former president from the state’s 2024 ballot.The president was speaking before boarding Air Force One to an afternoon engagement in Milwaukee, and said he would not comment on the legal premise cited by the Colorado panel for its majority decision, or the likely intervention of the US supreme court.“Whether the 14th amendment applies or not, we’ll let the court make that decision,” the president said.But he was more forthright when asked directly if he thought Trump was an insurrectionist.“I think it’s self-evident … he certainly supported an insurrection. There’s no question about it. None. Zero. And he seems to be doubling down on it, about everything,” he said.Biden has mostly remained silent about the legal troubles that Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination, is facing.The president has long been critical of Trump’s conduct surrounding the events of 6 January 2021, when the outgoing president incited a mob of his supporters to overrun the US Capitol in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s election victory.Trump was, Biden said at the time, “singularly responsible” for the violence of the deadly riot, in which several people lost their lives, including law enforcement officers and protestors.Among Trump’s legal cases is one in Washington DC, in which he has pleaded not guilty to four criminal counts, including conspiracy to defraud the US and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. The supreme court is poised to soon hear an appeal that could affect the trial.Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, backed Biden’s comments during a lunchtime appearance on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The big picture, no matter if Donald Trump ends up being on the ballot or off the ballot, is the extent of how dangerous he is to American democracy,” she said.“He tried to steal the presidency from the American people. He incited an insurrection with folks ramming into the US Capitol, some of whom had plans to hang the vice-president, and then he did not stop there. He spent months trying to undermine the peaceful process, the peaceful transfer of the presidency.” More