Trump goes to the Supreme Court to obtain immunity for his alleged crimes

Donald Trump returns to the Supreme Court.

The man who has appointed a third of the nine judges at the top of the American judicial system appears again and again on the court's agenda this year.

The former president's lawyers have notified this Monday that they will appeal against the ruling of the Washington Court of Appeals that denied him immunity for the commission of possible crimes while he was the tenant of the White House.

Whether the judges accept or reject the appeal, Trump wins, at the very least, time.

He has already managed to delay the process and has so far avoided sitting in the dock in the middle of the Republican Party primaries.

Now, he asks that the case remain paralyzed.

The discussion about immunity refers to the Washington case in which the former president has been charged with trying to alter the result of the 2020 elections, which he lost to Joe Biden, to cling to power.

However, the judges' doctrine can be extended to all four charges for 91 alleged crimes against him.

This same Monday, Trump appeared for a procedural procedure before the Florida court that is processing his accusation for the retention of secret documents after leaving the White House.

Trump takes to the Supreme Court his extreme argument that a president or former president can only be tried before a court if he has previously been convicted in a political process

(impeachment)

by Congress.

In this almost absolute immunity, Trump's defense argues that he could not even be tried for ordering a special forces commando to assassinate his political rivals.

It is difficult for him to imagine that the Supreme Court, despite its majority of six conservative judges against three progressive ones, could adopt such reasoning, but even if the Supreme Court rejects the appeal, Trump continues to buy time.

Perhaps for this reason, the judges issued, along with their sentence, a parallel order in which they gave Trump only until this Monday to appeal to the Supreme Court before the case was reactivated.

Trump's defense therefore had two alternatives: appeal to the full Court of Appeals, but have the case continue to be processed, or go to the Supreme Court to remain paralyzed, which is what he has done.

Normally, an appeal does not paralyze the processing of a case, but on this occasion it has, because what is at stake is the very essence of whether or not the former president can be prosecuted.

Trump has notified that he is going to formally appeal the decision to the Supreme Court and requests that, in the meantime, the procedure continue to be stopped.

This will allow him to continue delaying the investigation and delaying the oral trial.

Both the judge handling the case and the Court of Appeals rejected the former president's immunity in very strong terms.

“For purposes of this criminal case, former President Trump has become Citizen Trump, with all the defenses of any other criminal defendant.

But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as president no longer protects him against this accusation,” the 57-page ruling said in its introduction.

“It would be a surprising paradox if the president, who has the ultimate constitutional duty of ensuring faithful compliance with the laws, were the only position capable of challenging them with impunity,” the judges developed in the foundations of the decision.

“We cannot accept that the position of the presidency places its former occupants above the law forever,” they said in another of their sentences.

In the charge sheet for this case, which marked Trump's third indictment, special prosecutor Jack Smith accuses him of four crimes: conspiracy to defraud the US Government, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction or attempted obstruction of a proceeding. officer and conspiracy to violate civil rights.

The start of the trial, initially scheduled for March 4 by Judge Tanya Chutkan, has been delayed indefinitely.

That leaves the trail clear for his first accusation, for commercial falsehoods in payments to hide scandals in the 2016 presidential campaign (one of them to porn actress Stormy Daniels, to silence an alleged extramarital affair).

This is initially scheduled before a New York State court, for five weeks starting on March 25, 2024. Chutkan had spoken to the New York judge to warn him that it might need to be postponed if the Washington trial began, but that This is no longer the case.

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