President Donald Trump on Friday used a U.S. Supreme Court decision granting broad immunity to former presidents to ask the federal judge overseeing his criminal case for storing classified documents to narrow the scope of the charge, which he said is an unprosecutable “official” act.
The Supreme Court ruled this week that former presidents enjoyed a certain degree of immunity from criminal prosecution for certain actions they took while in office, which also means that evidence of those actions cannot be introduced as evidence in any trial, even if it wasn’t part of the indictment.
The ruling’s framework for criminal liability for former presidents includes three categories: core presidential functions, which carry absolute immunity; official acts of the presidency, which carry presumed immunity; and unofficial acts, which do not carry immunity.
Trump’s legal team’s request did not specify which parts of the indictment they believe qualify for official conduct immunity, but if U.S. District Judge Eileen Cannon agrees to hear the charges, it would almost certainly delay the trial for several more months.
The motion not only demonstrated the far-reaching impact of the immunity decision – which now affects Trump’s documents lawsuit in Florida, even though the ruling originated in a pretrial appeal in Washington of the former president’s 2020 election subversion case – but also made clear that Trump is trying to use the ruling to undermine the very essence of the case.
of 10-page document from Trump’s lawyers They asked Cannon for permission to file new arguments, arguing that the immunity decision undermines the prosecution’s position that Cannon does not have immunity and “further demonstrates that the prosecution’s argument that the allegations are ‘unmerited’ is politically motivated.”
But Trump’s motion was doubly notable in that it also asked Cannon to suspend all other proceedings in the case until special counsel Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors could determine whether they had the authority to bring the case in the first place.
In a recent motion to dismiss the case, Trump’s lawyers argued that Smith was improperly appointed because he was not nominated by the president or confirmed by the Senate like other federal employees, and that Attorney General Merrick Garland had no legal authority to make the appointment on his own.
At a recent hearing in federal district court in Fort Pierce, Florida, prosecutors countered that under the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution, Garland has the authority to appoint “junior officials” like a special counsel to act as his subordinates, and the motion appeared destined for dismissal.
But as part of the Supreme Court’s ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas gave new impetus to the idea: “If this unprecedented prosecution proceeds, the lower courts must answer these important questions about the appointment of a special counsel,” Justice Thomas wrote, albeit in reference to the 2020 election litigation.
