Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor who also spent time on the Russia investigation led by Robert Mueller, shared criticism this weekend of the U.S. Supreme Court’s handling of controversial legal arguments from former President Donald Trump.
Amid a criminal case accusing him of attempted election subversion, Trump is claiming that he holds wide-ranging legal protections for actions taken as part of his presidential responsibilities that should shield him from even the possibility of the case. That category — his official duties as president — is where Trump groups what he was doing after the last presidential election in challenging what in reality were tens of millions of duly documented votes for Joe Biden.
Earlier, the prosecutors in the election-related case against Trump asked the Supreme Court to intervene more speedily than the routine to decide on Trump’s immunity claims, but the court rejected that prospect. Their choice left further decision-making to a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., which subsequently rebutted Trump’s claims of legal protection to the extent some questioned if the Supreme Court would even then take up additional appeals from Trump making the same arguments. Well, they did, extending the accompanying delay of the anticipated trial in this case, no matter the consistent rejections so far of Trump’s claims he should somehow be free from even possible consequences.
“Trump claims he is immune from criminal suit. He has no legally cognizable reason to have opposed Jack Smith’s efforts to obtain a speedy resolution of that issue by the courts. Instead, he fought to slow walk the issue, and the S Ct is now complicit in that endeavor,” Weissmann wrote Saturday on X (formerly called Twitter). “Trump, of course, does not ever want to have a trial, but that is not a reason for the courts to delay a criminal case, but that is what the S Ct’s lollygagging schedule has accomplished. And may result in no trial, ever.”
