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      Appeals court rejects Mark Meadows’s bid to move Georgia elections case

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      A US appeals court has ruled that the election interference case against the former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows must stay in state court in Georgia and not move to federal court as he requested.Meadows had attempted to transfer his 2020 election interference case in the state to federal court, but the court had expressed doubt in his argument that he was acting as a federal official in trying to reverse Donald Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden.Meadows has been charged with violating the Georgia racketeering statute, alongside Trump and other co-defendants by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, over their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.More details soon … More

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      Trump seeks to dismiss Georgia election case by claiming political speech

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      Donald Trump’s lawyer asked a judge on Monday to throw out the Georgia criminal case over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state, contending the indictment violated the former president’s first amendment rights by charging him for so-called core political speech.The motion to dismiss the election interference case brought by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, was similar in scope and theory to Trump’s request to throw out the federal indictment in Washington DC that was rejected this month.Trump’s filing, submitted after a court hearing on the issue, directly attacked the charges that he and his allies violated Georgia’s racketeering statute in trying to reverse his 2020 election defeat, including his 2 January 2021 call pressuring the Georgia secretary of state to “find” 11,780 votes.The 19-page motion sought to reframe the indictment as an attempt to criminalize Trump’s political speech, arguing that the former president’s repeated lies that widespread fraud corrupted the vote count were supposedly aimed at prompting investigations by state legislatures.“It was directed at the bodies responsible for conducting government business, the bodies with the information in their possession, the bodies undertaking the investigations, and the bodies vested with the authority of adjudicating such complaints,” Trump’s lawyer Steve Sadow wrote.The motion also argued that Trump’s claims of election fraud were protected by the constitution’s first amendment because the US supreme court had previously decided the government could not criminalize speech on disputed political issues just because it determined the views to be false.“The first amendment prohibits the state from weaponizing its powers to silence disfavored viewpoints or prevent people from advocating such viewpoints to government officials,” Sadow wrote.Trump probably faces a steep uphill battle to have the case dismissed, especially after the US district judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington DC earlier denied Trump’s near-identical motion to dismiss with a detailed 48-page opinion that cut down the same first amendment claims.Chutkan wrote in her decision even if Trump was right that his statements disputing the outcome of the 2020 election were true, “core political speech” did not immunize him from prosecution if it was used in furtherance of criminal activity.The decision also found that it was misguided for Trump to rely on the supreme court precedent in United States v Alvarez – that the Stolen Valor Act, which prohibits an individual from falsely claiming they received a medal for serving in the military, violated the first amendment.The stolen valor case was not helpful to Trump, Chutkan suggested, because the supreme court did not undermine settled precedent allowing prosecutors to charge cases where speech was used to advance a crime.Trump and the original 18 co-defendants in August pleaded not guilty to the racketeering charges. In the weeks that followed, the former Trump lawyers Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro, as well as the local GOP operative Scott Hall, took plea deals and became witnesses cooperating with the prosecution.The Fulton county district attorney’s office does not intend to offer plea deals to Trump and at least two of his top allies, including his ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and his former lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the Guardian reported last month. More

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      Clarence Thomas’s salary complaints sparked rightwing fears he would resign

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      Clarence Thomas told a Republican congressman that US supreme court justices should get a pay raise or “one or more” would quit, prompting “a flurry of activity” among rightwingers because his “importance as a conservative was paramount”, ProPublica said in its latest hard-hitting report on questionable ethics at the high court.Cliff Stearns, the Florida Republican Thomas spoke to in 2000, told the non-profit newsroom: “We wanted to make sure he felt comfortable in his job and he was being paid properly.”At the time, a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, would have nominated a replacement if any justice had resigned. Republicans held the Senate, which would have conducted the confirmation.ProPublica said Thomas spoke to Stearns on a flight after giving a speech at Awakening, a “‘conservative thought weekend’ featuring golf, shooting lessons and aromatherapy along with panel discussions with businessmen and elected officials”, held in Sea Island, Georgia, in January 2000.Thomas’s trip was paid for by event organisers, ProPublica said, adding that the justice’s reported 11 free trips on his annual disclosure form that year but not the trip to Awakening, “an apparent violation of federal disclosure law”.Thomas’s finances have come under the spotlight this year, with ProPublica publishing a series of in-depth reports, stirring an ethics scandal.He took and largely failed to declare gifts from Republican donors including luxury travel and resort stays, school fees and a property purchase.An arch-conservative on a panel dominated 6-3 by the right, Thomas has been in place since a 1991 confirmation dominated by allegations of sexual harassment.Responding to reports by ProPublica and other outlets, he has denied wrongdoing and pledged to conform to disclosure rules. Progressives have called for him to resign or be impeached and removed – vanishingly unlikely outcomes with the court in conservative hands and Republicans holding the House and contesting the Senate.ProPublica said the justice was struggling financially at the time of his conversation with Stearns. The site published a letter dated 11 January 2000 in which the congressman told the justice: “Just a note to let you know how much I enjoyed visiting with you on the flight back from Jacksonville to Dulles.“I intend to look into a bill to raise the salaries of members of the supreme court. As we agreed, it is worth a lot to Americans to have the constitution properly interpreted. We must have the proper incentives here, too.”Stearns quoted the philosopher Immanuel Kant, telling Thomas to “have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived”.On Monday, responses to the ProPublica story included the former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann calling Thomas a “loyal judicial prostitute”.Stearns sought help from a lobbying firm and spoke in the House. Thomas’s suggestion that resignations might be imminent reached judicial administrators. The then chief justice, William Rehnquist, said in his annual report: “The most pressing issue facing the judiciary: the need to increase judicial salaries”.Mitch McConnell, a Republican senator from Kentucky (now minority leader), proposed removing a ban on paid speeches by justices. That effort failed, and supreme court salaries have not changed, bar keeping up with inflation.But ProPublica also reported that “during his second decade on the court, Thomas’ financial situation appears to have markedly improved.” The justice received a $1.5m advance for his memoir and gifts from rich individuals.In a public appearance in June 2019, Thomas was asked about court salaries.“Oh goodness, I think it’s plenty,” Thomas said. “My wife [the rightwing activist Ginni Thomas] and I are doing fine. We don’t live extravagantly, but we are fine.”ProPublica said: “A few weeks later, Thomas boarded [the mega-donor Harlan] Crow’s private jet to head to Indonesia. He and his wife were off on vacation, an island cruise on Crow’s 162ft yacht.”In a statement, Caroline Ciccone, president of the watchdog Accountable.US, said the ProPublica report showed again how Thomas “has long seen his position on our nation’s highest court as a way to upgrade his own lifestyle”.Ciccone said: “When the court itself wasn’t providing him with the luxury perks he wanted, his billionaire benefactor social circle stepped in to make it happen.“Justice Thomas, Harlan Crow, Leonard Leo [of the Federalist Society, a key figure in rightwing activism around the US judiciary] and other key players in this corruption crisis may believe they exist above the law – but they don’t. With public trust at record lows, it’s far past time to restore credibility and integrity to our high court.” More

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      Appeals court skeptical of Meadows’ bid to move Georgia election case

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      A federal appeals court on Friday appeared skeptical of former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ attempt to transfer his 2020 election interference case in Georgia to federal court, expressing doubt that he was acting as a federal official in trying to reverse Donald Trump’s defeat.The court also questioned, in a particularly ominous development for Meadows, whether he was even entitled to remove his case from state to federal court given he was no longer a federal official.Meadows was charged with violating the state racketeering statute alongside Trump and other co-defendants by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, over their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.The indictment also included a charge against Meadows for his role in setting up Trump’s infamous recorded phone call on 2 January 2021 asking the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” 11,780 votes so he could win the battleground state.Meadows filed to transfer his case to federal court – a move that would allow him to seek dismissal of the charges on federal immunity grounds – but had the motion rejected by the US district judge Steve Jones. Meadows then appealed to the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit.The issue for Meadows has long been whether his involvement in the call or his involvement in the so-called fake electors scheme were within the scope of his official duties as a White House chief of staff, as he argued, or whether he was engaged in campaign activity, as prosecutors have argued.At a roughly 50-minute hearing before circuit judges William Pryor, Robin Rosenbaum and Nancy Abudu – George W Bush, Obama and Biden appointees, respectively – the court expressed deep skepticism that Meadows could declare all of his actions as White House chief of staff were related to his official duties.“That just cannot be right,” Rosenbaum said at one stage, saying “electioneering on behalf of a specific political candidate” or becoming involved in “an alleged effort to unlawfully change the outcome of the election” might be examples of actions not covered by a federal official’s job.The skepticism of Meadows’ sweeping position that there were no limits to the scope of his duties was joined by Abudu, who noted that other federal laws like the Hatch Act prohibits government officials from engaging in political activity as part of their federal duties.Meadows’ lawyer George Terwilliger responded that Meadows only needed, under the federal officer removal statute, to “establish a nexus” to the duties of his federal job. It would make “no sense”, Terwilliger said, to have a state judge decide at trial matters relating to federal laws.The hearing took a negative turn for Meadows when Pryor, the chief judge known to be a staunch conservative, suggested he did not think Meadows was entitled to have his case moved to federal court at all because Meadows was no longer a federal official.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPryor suggested it might be reasonable to infer that Congress intended the removal statute to apply only to current federal officials to make sure that state charges did not interfere with “ongoing operations of the federal government”.Still, the three-judge panel also expressed concern to Donald Wakeford, a prosecutor in the Fulton county district attorney’s office, about the “chilling effect” on federal officials to enact policy if they felt they could be indicted by state authorities once they left the government.That opening was seized upon by Terwilliger, who claimed he would have done his job differently when he was deputy attorney general in the George HW Bush administration.Wakeford responded that it might be a good thing if some federal officials felt chilled from engaging in certain conduct – a reference to an opinion in a recent ruling by the US district judge Tanya Chutkan rejecting Trump’s attempt to dismiss his federal election interference case in Washington. More

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      Trump’s election-interference case may get boost from US supreme court

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      A decision by the US supreme court to take a case linked to the January 6 attack on the Capitol could have consequences altering the trajectory of the criminal case against Donald Trump over his effort to overturn the 2020 election as well as for hundreds of other people prosecuted for the riot.The nation’s highest court has agreed to consider whether federal prosecutors can charge January 6 riot defendants with a statute that makes it a crime to obstruct an official proceeding of Congress – a charge also filed against Trump in his 2020 election-interference case.The decision by the conservative-dominated court to take up the matter complicates and could delay Trump’s trial in federal district court in Washington, which is currently scheduled for next March.The supreme court’s eventual ruling in Fischer v United States will indicate whether the obstruction charge under section 1512 of title 18 of the US criminal code can be used against Trump, and could undercut the other general conspiracy charges brought against the former president by the special counsel, Jack Smith.The court could also end up by extension invalidating many convictions against rioters involved in the January 6 Capitol attack. The obstruction statute has been the justice department’s primary weapon to hold accountable those involved in the violence of that day.The case involves Joseph Fischer, who was indicted in Washington on seven counts of obstructing the congressional certification of the 2020 election results when he assaulted police officers during the riot.Fischer sought to dismiss part of his indictment, arguing that the obstruction statute passed under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 in response to the Enron scandal, had to do with document or evidence tampering for white-collar financial crime.The US district judge Carl Nichols, who presided in the case, interpreted the statute as requiring prosecutors to show that the defendant took some action with respect to a document or record and did not apply to Fischer as he assaulted police officers at the Capitol.But a split three-judge panel at the US court of appeals for the DC circuit reversed the decision, deciding that obstruction applied more broadly and encompassed impeding any official proceeding. Fischer, and two other January 6 defendants, appealed to the supreme court to resolve the issue.The supreme court may not decide whether the obstruction statute can be applied to the Capitol attack until June, when the next term ends. In the meantime, the viability of that charge – and potentially that of other general conspiracy charges – against Trump remains uncertain.It could also give Trump an opening to seek to pause ongoing pre-trial proceedings in his 2020 election interference case pending the supreme court’s consideration of the issue, although he is unlikely to succeed and it may not be appealable should such an effort be denied.Similar criminal cases involving members of Congress or congressional aides, for instance, typically go to trial and are then tried again if a higher court finds that some of the charges were inapplicable.At issue for Trump is the definition of “corruptly” in the obstruction statute. The DC circuit has been unable to agree, with judge Justin Walker interpreting it as “unlawful benefit”, while judge Greg Katsas interpreted it as “an unlawful financial, professional, or exculpatory advantage”.The obstruction statute was never a natural fit for January 6 cases, and defense lawyers have repeatedly argued in trial and appeals courts in Washington that the justice department was using it in an overly broad fashion to target rioters because of the 20-year maximum sentence it carries.The problem for the justice department now is that the supreme court has previously chafed at the use of broad conspiracy arguments by federal prosecutors.In the case of Jeffrey Skilling in the Enron scandal, the court held in a unanimous decision that Skilling had been improperly charged with the “honest services” provision of the statute about a scheme to defraud, because it applied only to accepting bribes and kickbacks.“The court’s been very clear that over-aggressive theories under general criminal statutes don’t fly,” said the former House general counsel Stanley Brand, whose firm Brand Woodward has also represented January 6 defendants. “That’s the lesson of Skilling and all these other cases.”If the supreme court were to rule in favor of Fischer next year on the basis that the justice department was using charges that were too broad, Brand added, it could undercut the other general conspiracy statutes used in the indictment against Trump, as well. More

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      Judge puts Trump’s 2020 election interference case on hold

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      Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case in Washington will be put on hold while the former president further pursues his claims that he is immune from prosecution, the judge overseeing the case ruled Wednesday.US district judge Tanya Chutkan agreed to pause any “further proceedings that would move this case towards trial or impose additional burdens of litigation on defendant”. But the judge said that if the case returns to her court, she will “consider at that time whether to retain or continue the dates of any still-future deadlines and proceedings, including the trial scheduled for March 4, 2024”.At issue is an appeal last week by Trump’s lawyers of an order from Chutkan denying their claims that the case must be dismissed on immunity grounds. Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has also asked the supreme court to take up the legally untested question.“The prosecution has one goal in this case: to unlawfully attempt to try, convict, and sentence President Trump before an election in which he is likely to defeat President Biden,” defense lawyers wrote Wednesday. “This represents a blatant attempt to interfere with the 2024 presidential election and to disenfranchise the tens of millions of voters who support President Trump’s candidacy.”The issue is of paramount significance to both sides given that a ruling in Trump’s favor would presumably derail the case and because a protracted appeal could delay a trial well beyond its currently scheduled start date of 4 March. Trump faces charges he plotted to overturn the 2020 election after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, and he has denied doing anything wrong.Special counsel Jack Smith, whose team has brought two federal cases against Trump in Washington and in Florida, has sought to keep both on track while Trump has attempted to delay the proceedings – at one point even asking for the Washington prosecution to be pushed back until 2026.A separate potential hiccup for the prosecution developed Wednesday when the Supreme Court said that it would review a charge of obstruction of an official proceeding that the Justice Department has brought against more than 300 participants in the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol. That’s among four counts brought against Trump by Smith, meaning that a high court ruling that benefits the defendants in the riotA postponement until after the election would clearly benefit Trump, especially since, if elected president, he would have the authority to try and order the justice department to dismiss the federal cases.In telling the Washington-based federal appeals court that there was no reason for it to fast-track the immunity question, Trump’s lawyers wrote that the “date of March 4, 2024, has no talismanic significance.“Aside from the prosecution’s unlawful partisan motives, there is no compelling reason that date must be maintained, especially at the expense of President Trump and the public’s overriding interest in ensuring these matters of extraordinary constitutional significance are decided appropriately, with full and thoughtful consideration to all relevant authorities and arguments,” they wrote.At issue is an appeal by the Trump team, filed last week, of a trial judge’s rejection of arguments that he was protected from prosecution for actions he took as president. Smith sought to short-circuit that process by asking the supreme court on Monday to take up the issue during its current term, a request he acknowledged was “extraordinary” but one he said he was essential to keep the case moving forward.Smith’s team simultaneously asked the US court of appeals for the DC circuit to expedite its consideration of Trump’s appeal, writing: “The public has a strong interest in this case proceeding to trial in a timely manner. The trial cannot proceed, however, before resolution of the defendant’s interlocutory appeal.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Trump team made clear its opposition to that request, saying the case presents “novel, complex, and sensitive questions of profound importance.“Whether a president of the United States may be criminally prosecuted for his official acts as president goes to the core of our system of separated powers and will stand among the most consequential questions ever decided by this court,” they wrote. “The manifest public interest lies in the court’s careful and deliberate consideration of these momentous issues with the utmost care and diligence.”The supreme court has indicated that it would decide quickly whether to hear the case, ordering Trump’s lawyers to respond by 20 December. The court’s brief order did not signal what it ultimately would do.A supreme court case usually lasts several months, from the time the justices agree to hear it until a final decision. Smith is asking the court to move with unusual, but not unprecedented, speed.If the justices decline to step in at this point, Trump’s appeal would continue at the US court of appeals for the DC circuit. Smith said even a rapid appellate decision might not get to the supreme court in time for review and final word before the court’s traditional summer break. More

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      US supreme court agrees to consider abortion pill access

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      The US supreme court on Wednesday agreed to hear oral arguments in a case that could determine the future of a pill used in most abortions in the US, in the first major abortion rights case to land at the country’s highest court since the justices overturned Roe v Wade and abolished the national right to the procedure in 2022.A decision in the case will probably arrive in summer 2024, just months before the presidential election. The outcome of the case could affect not just access to the pill, which has been repeatedly deemed safe and effective, but the Federal Drug Administration’s authority to regulate all manner of medications.The drug at the heart of the case is mifepristone, one of the two drugs typically used in medication abortions, which make up the majority of US abortions. Last year, an association of anti-abortion organizations and doctors, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the FDA had overstepped its authority when it approved mifepristone in 2000.In April, a Texas federal judge appointed by former president Donald Trump issued a preliminary ruling to suspend the FDA’s approval of mifepristone and pull the medication off the market. The US court of appeals for the fifth circuit – one of the most conservative federal appeals courts in the US – ruled in August that, while it was too late to suspend the FDA’s approval, the agency should significantly restrict access to mifepristone. The Biden administration and Danco Laboratories, which manufactures mifepristone, then asked the supreme court to weigh in on the case.The supreme court paused lower-court rulings while the case plays out, so mifepristone remains widely available in states that permit abortion. If the court allows the fifth circuit ruling to stand, it would roll back recent FDA efforts that refined the drug’s dosage and expanded access by allowing it to be prescribed later on in pregnancy and through telehealth.On Wednesday, the supreme court agreed to hear the consolidated petitions from the Biden administration and Danco Laboratories, which asked the justices to focus on the legal attempts to roll back those later FDA efforts. Those petitions also asked the justices to consider whether the challengers have the legal right, or standing, to bring the case in the first place.“You can’t just bring random lawsuits in court. You actually have to have been harmed by something,” said Greer Donley, an associate law professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. “That’s really what standing analysis is all about, to try to figure out if if the people who bring the lawsuit actually have a stake in the case.” Numerous legal experts have questioned whether the challengers in this case have properly demonstrated that they have been harmed by mifepristone’s continued legality.The supreme court also denied a petition from the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine that asked the justices to explicitly consider the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone. That move suggests that the supreme court is unlikely to pull mifepristone off the market entirely.In Donley’s view, the outcome of this case will probably signal whether the supreme court, which is controlled 6-3 by conservatives, wants to be involved in the post-Roe war over abortion rights. If the justices decide to focus on the standing issues in the case, they could sidestep having to rule on the substance of the case entirely.“I could see the more moderates on the supreme court thinking: ‘we don’t want to touch this,’” Donley said. “It might make the supreme court look like less of an activist court if it were to dismiss this case on the basis of really legitimate standing problems.”Any ruling by the court would affect all 50 states, including those that have protected abortion rights. (In recent months, officials in states such as Washington and California have announced that they have begun to stockpile mifepristone.)A ruling could also imperil the FDA’s regulatory power writ large and pose an existential threat to pharmaceutical companies. If courts can rewrite the FDA’s approval of abortion pills, any kind of drug – including, for example, drugs used to protect against HIV or to provide gender-affirming care – could end up in conservative jurists’ crosshairs.The ruling from the federal appeals court, Danco Laboratories warned in its briefs to the supreme court, “destabilizes the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries by questioning when scientific studies – accepted by FDA – are sufficient”. More than 100 studies, conducted across 26 countries, have concluded that mifepristone is safe, a New York Times review found.If deprived of access to mifepristone, several abortion clinics have said that they would keep providing medication abortions using only misoprostol, the other drug typically used in medication abortions. Although misoprostol-only abortions are still overwhelmingly safe, they can have more side-effects and are slightly less effective than the two-drug protocol.Ultimately, regardless of how the supreme court rules, its decision will not curtail the thriving underground networks that routinely supply mifepristone to women looking to end their pregnancies, including in the 16 states with near-total abortion bans. In fact, a move to ban mifepristone is likely to cause a sharp rise in demand for the drug through those networks.In the wake of Roe’s fall, a vast web of abortion rights supporters and opportunistic merchants have sprung up to ship abortion pills to Americans. Inducing your own abortion is not illegal in most US states, even in states that have banned in-clinic abortions, and medical experts widely agree that it can be safe to use pills to “self-manage” an abortion early in pregnancy. More

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      Jack Smith just made a gutsy, momentous decision in his prosecution of Trump | Margaret Sullivan

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      Timing isn’t everything. But it certainly matters, and seldom more so than in special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Donald Trump.The former US president intends to use timing – delay, delay, delay – to avoid punishment for trying to overturn the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, and for fomenting a violent coup.Nope, said Smith this week. A tough guy who has prosecuted war crimes in the Hague, Smith clearly recognizes that putting off the case until after next fall’s presidential election could let Trump off the hook.So the prosecutor made a bold legal maneuver. Smith moved to bypass the court of appeals, whose involvement could slow things down considerably, and to go directly to the US supreme court for a decision on a foundational issue.He wants the US’s highest court to rule – immediately – on whether Trump, as he claims, is immune from criminal prosecution.“Jack Smith wants to cut straight to the chase,” writes former US attorney Joyce Vance, noting that the supreme court has never decided this issue before.Should the court rule in Trump’s favor on immunity, the case goes away. That looks like a gamble, but the case is headed to the supreme court anyway.The key question is rather simple.Is Trump above the law? Or, like every other US citizen, must he abide by it?Smith’s maneuver was heralded by several prominent legal experts.“A huge and possibly brilliant move, a game changer one way or the other,” Harry Litman, a former justice department official who teaches constitutional law, wrote on Twitter/X.So far, the signs are encouraging. The court granted Smith’s request to speed up the question of whether to hear the case, asking for a quick response from Team Trump.In other words, the court quickly agreed to decide whether to decide the case, an important first step.Of course, this supreme court doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, given its terrible rulings on voting rights and abortion rights and the appalling ethical malfeasance of some of its members.But even this tainted court probably doesn’t want to be associated for all time with the notion that a US president is above the law.Watching Jack Smith’s aggressive efforts throughout this prosecution, I can’t help but think of two earlier high-level legal situations involving presidents.One was decades ago, during the Watergate scandal, when the supreme court ruled that President Nixon’s tape recordings were fair game; Nixon had appointed some of those justices but the ruling was unanimous nonetheless.That ruling was among the many contributing factors in holding Nixon accountable, to some extent, for the crimes he encouraged while in office. Ultimately, of course, he resigned and was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.The other, much more recent, was the way special counsel Robert Mueller handled the investigation into whether Trump and his allies played ball with Russian operatives in order to sway the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.Unlike Smith, Mueller was particularly rules-bound and reserved. He never wanted to rock the procedural boat. His extremely low-key approach hampered the outcome of his important investigation.With the help of attorney general Bill Barr’s dishonest work in interpreting it favorably on Trump’s behalf, Mueller’s report dwindled into something that ultimately didn’t matter much – though it should have. Trump ran around claiming he was entirely cleared and that it was all a hoax, though that was far from true.Smith is a different cat. Thinking strategically at all times, he knows he needs to stay on track for a March trial date in order to hold Trump accountable.If that doesn’t happen, the strategy of delaying the trial until after the November election could – if Trump is elected – allow him to install an unpatriotic loyalist as attorney general and wriggle out of the mess that he created.That makes what happens next so consequential. (Smith wisely is hedging his bet by asking the court of appeals to rule immediately, too, should the supreme court decide not to take on the matter after all.)“It may be the most important democracy decision of our lifetimes,” Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has argued.Could be – for two reasons.One is that some members of the voting public, the non-cult members at least, might be affected by a guilty verdict. Given Trump’s obvious authoritarian plans for a second term, his election could be a death knell for US democracy.The other is that no president, or former president, should be above the law.Let’s hope that the supreme court – whatever its shortcomings – does its duty, takes on this question, and rules in accordance with our nation’s founding principles.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist More