On Tuesday, a federal appeals court handed down two widely anticipated documents rejecting a particularly unpersuasive legal argument by former President Donald Trump.
The first was a 57-page opinion rejecting Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution for his failed attempts to overthrow President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Trump claimed he was immune because the president cannot be prosecuted for “official acts” he engages in while in office. But this argument borders on frivolousness, and it would have had astonishing implications if the courts actually bought it — which they did not.
The second, more important document that the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed down Tuesday is a single-page judgment that effectively lays out the schedule for resuming Trump’s federal prosecution for attempted election theft.
It’s unlikely that either Trump or his lawyers actually thought the courts would rule that sitting presidents have a right to commit crimes. Instead, Trump’s legal strategy is to delay his criminal trials as much as possible, in the hopes that he will be elected president before he is convicted and then can order the Justice Department to drop his federal prosecutions.
Trump’s immunity claim is part of this strategy. Often, when an appeals court hears a case, the trial court that was previously assigned that case loses jurisdiction over the matter until the appeal is resolved.
Thus, by presenting this immunity argument to the DC Circuit, Trump stripped Judge Tanya Chutkan, the federal judge hearing his election theft trial, of jurisdiction over the case. As a result, Chutkan was forced to delay his criminal trial until that appeal is over. Last Friday, she officially postponed Trump’s trial, which was supposed to begin on March 4.
And that brings us to the details of the second document the DC Circuit handed down on Tuesday, which lays out both how Trump can delay this…
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