As observers just keep waiting for further arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court on former President Donald Trump’s claims of sweeping legal protections supposedly held by mere virtue of once being in the White House, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is speaking out, per CBS journalist Scott MacFarlane.
Schiff argued to MacFarlane that the “delay now is willful on the court’s part. They moved w/ great swiftness..addressing whether Trump can appear on the ballot. They move quickly when they want to.” (That’s the quote the journalist shared on X, formerly Twitter.)
The nation’s highest court, where three of its nine members were originally nominated for their current roles by Trump himself when he was still president, already faced similar criticism around the point when they agreed to hear these further arguments at all, forcing even more delay to the anticipated trial in the involved criminal case. The case that’s the backdrop for all of this is the federal criminal matter accusing Trump of engaging in a range of conspiracies effectively together constituting attempted election interference around 2020-2021. It covers what he was (in some cases, very prominently) doing after the 2020 presidential election.
Trump claims that he holds presidential immunity that should shut down the case, something that prosecutors argue is unsupported by factors including history and the law. They warned in a recent filing that some of Trump’s arguments would lead to the idea that presidents can be considered free from legal prohibitions against very serious acts.
“Federal criminal law applies to the President,” prosecutors contended before the Supreme Court this month. “Petitioner suggests that unless a criminal statute expressly names the President, the statute does not apply. That radical suggestion, which would free the President from virtually all criminal law—even crimes such as bribery, murder, treason, and sedition—is unfounded.”
