Welcome to this week’s edition of the Deadline: Legal Newsletter, a roundup of top legal stories, including the latest developments from the Supreme Court, Donald Trump’s legal cases and more. Click here to have the newsletter delivered straight to your inbox every Friday this Supreme Court term.
The Supreme Court has two separate disputes before it that could upend Donald Trump’s federal election subversion prosecution. In the first one, special counsel Jack Smith is pressing the justices to step in early and decide Trump’s immunity claim, while the appeal proceeds on a fast track at the D.C. Circuit, which Smith wants to leapfrog. Trump’s response to Smith’s high court petition is due Dec. 20, after which the justices will choose whether to intervene or let the appeal play out in the D.C. Circuit. In the unlikely event the appellate courts say Trump is immune, then Smith’s election prosecution goes away and Trump is left with three indictments to fight as he runs for office in 2024.
The other dispute before the Supreme Court doesn’t directly involve Trump but could affect his prosecution, too. That’s the appeal of Jan. 6 defendant Joseph Fischer, which the justices agreed Wednesday to review. Like many others in the Justice Department’s Capitol attack cases, Fischer was charged with violating an obstruction law that Trump also faces. With the former president’s trial in Washington set for March and a decision in Fischer’s case over the scope of that law possibly not coming until late June, it’s yet another moving part in the drama of getting Trump in front of a jury in a criminal case.
Could potential delays in the Washington case mean Trump’s hush money prosecution in New York will be the first of his four criminal trials to go forward? MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann posed that interesting question. How the Supreme Court acts in the coming weeks could help to answer it.
The justices also jumped back…
Read the full article here