The Supreme Court released a slew of new rulings on Friday morning, but, once again, none of them included the decision weighing heaviest on Americans’ minds—whether Donald Trump should be granted king-like immunity for his criminal indictments.
Friday marks 114 days since the case was accepted by the high court—an inexcusable amount of time to rule on something so consequential to the country, a top legal expert tells The Daily Beast.
Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said Friday it’s clear that the Supreme Court, which has operated with a comfortable conservative majority since Trump’s presidency, is doing the ex-president’s bidding.
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With each day that passes without a decision, the chances of a Trump trial before the 2024 election grow slimmer.
“They’re obviously delaying to benefit Donald Trump,” he said.
Tribe said, realistically, an appropriate time for the court to reach a decision on Trump would have been sometime in December, and Trump’s trial would’ve been completed by now.
Instead, it’s taken the Supreme Court more than twice the time to rule on Trump’s immunity—a matter an appeals court comprehensively rejected—than it took to rule on the much more complex United States vs. Richard Nixon case, which took 54 days.
What’s more, the arguments in Trump’s case were so outlandish that it should have been easy for the court to dispatch with them quickly, one former Supreme Court law clerk said this week.
Tribe says he believes the delay is simply that—a way to buy Trump more time. If he were to win the presidency before he’s convicted, he’d almost certainly use his power to wipe away any charges.
Tribe isn’t alone in his theory. Robert Reich, an attorney who was once Secretary of Labor, said Friday that “the Supreme Court’s far-right justices are effectively giving Trump the immunity he’s seeking” merely by delay.
Robert J. DeNault, a white collar criminal defense attorney in New York, said the delay in ruling is “hard to justify.”
The court’s deadline to release a decision is next Friday, June 28, but Tribe fears the conservative majority may have something more sinister up their sleeve.
While just a theory, he said it’s possible the court is contemplating two things—slating Trump’s case for “re-argument,” which would delay things even longer, or potentially ruling that special prosecutors like Jack Smith, whose team brought the election-subversion charges at the heart of Trump’s case, are unconstitutional.
“It would be a massive win for the MAGA movement,” he said of the hypotheticals.
