Prosecutors from special counsel Jack Smith’s office last week urged the Supreme Court to allow the 2020 election interference case against Donald Trump to proceed to trial without delay, the Associated Press reported.
In a February 12 request to the Supreme Court, Trump’s attorneys asked the justices to extend the delay in the trial while the Court considers taking up the question of presidential immunity.
In a February 6 decision, a 3-judge panel from the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the trial judge’s December 1 ruling that Trump was not immune from criminal prosecution.
When the defense appealed the December ruling, the judge in the case, US District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan suspended the case pending appeal and later postponed the March 4 trial date.
In responding to the defense’s request, prosecutors told the Supreme Court that the case was of “unique national importance” and argued that delaying “the resolution of these charges” would “frustrate the public interest in a speedy and fair verdict.”
Without citing Trump’s status as the presumptive Republican nominee or the impending November election, prosecutors argued that the “national interest in resolving those charges without further delay is compelling,” since the charges “strike at the heart of our democracy.”
Prosecutors argued that the allegations against Trump in the case “should be the last place to recognize a novel form of absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution.
The defense has argued that Trump’s actions in attempting to stay in office were shielded from prosecution since they fell under his official duties as president.
Both Judge Chutkan and the appellate court rejected that argument.
In her December ruling, Chutkan said presidential immunity was never meant to act as a lifetime “get-out-of-jail-free pass.”
The appellate court agreed, with the judges ruling that the presidential immunity “that may have protected” Trump when he was in office “no longer protects him.”
In urging the Supreme Court to reject Trump’s request to hear the case, prosecutors said the lower courts’ decisions “underscore” that the possibility that the Supreme Court would agree with the defense’s “unprecedented legal position” was “remote.”