The fallout....

How the Supreme Court just threw Trump’s 2024 trial schedule into turmoil

Trump is now unlikely to face criminal charges for election subversion until late summer or fall, at the earliest.

By KYLE CHENEY and JOSH GERSTEIN

As voters cast ballots this fall to decide whether Donald Trump should win another presidential election, a federal jury may be weighing whether he attempted to steal the last one.

That’s one of the plausible outcomes of Wednesday’s decision by the Supreme Court to take up Trump’s claim that he’s immune from prosecution for his efforts to subvert the 2020 election.

In fact, by taking up the immunity question and keeping the case on hold in the meantime, the justices have all but guaranteed that Trump cannot stand trial on the federal election charges until the waning weeks of campaign season, at the earliest.

If that happens, Trump may have to juggle courtroom appearances with debates and swing state speeches. The trial, which is expected to last several months, could even overlap with Election Day itself.

The justices’ 200-word unsigned order made no sweeping pronouncements, but it nevertheless scrambled special counsel Jack Smith’s determined, if unspoken, effort to bring Trump to trial before the election.

Here’s a look at the fallout:

Trial stays on ice, won’t be defrosted for months

Pretrial proceedings in the Washington D.C.-based federal election case — in which Trump is charged with conspiring to deprive Americans of their right to vote — have been stalled since Dec. 7 while he has litigated his novel “presidential immunity” claim. Trump contends that his attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory were part of his official duties as president and cannot be the basis for criminal charges.

Lower courts have resoundingly rejected the immunity claim, and many legal experts expect the Supreme Court to ultimately reject it as well. But by setting arguments for late April and keeping the case on ice in the meantime, the justices virtually ensured that the trial — which was originally scheduled to begin March 4 — cannot begin until late summer or fall.

That’s because the justices are unlikely to rule on the immunity claim until May or, more likely, June. Once they do (assuming they reject Trump’s immunity bid), the freeze will lift and pretrial proceedings can finally resume — but the trial judge, Tanya Chutkan, has indicated that she would then give Trump about three extra months to prepare for a new trial date.

The timeline sets up a series of exceedingly fraught choices for Chutkan, an appointee of former President Barack Obama who had seemed determined to move the case to trial quickly before it became frozen in December. Would she force the Republican presidential nominee into court during those politically pivotal months for a trial that could run headlong into Election Day? Would she excuse Trump from attending the trial in person so that he could campaign? Or would she postpone the trial until after the election?

Chutkan has, so far, insisted that Trump’s political campaign would have no bearing on her scheduling decisions — and she recently contemplated being in trial as late as August.

Nevertheless, Trump’s trial schedule has enormous practical consequences. If the trial spills into 2025 and Trump is elected president, he could unravel it altogether by appointing an attorney general who would dismiss the case. Trump’s detractors on the left and right seemed to recognize this prospect on Wednesday and decried the Supreme Court for allowing further delay.

“The Supreme Court is placing itself on trial,” former Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday after the court’s order.

“Delaying the January 6 trial suppresses critical evidence that Americans deserve to hear,” former Rep. Liz Cheney said.

Trump, on the other hand, made clear he welcomed the high court’s involvement, claiming that unidentified legal scholars were “extremely thankful” that the justices took up the case.

Cannon in the driver’s seat

Another consequence of the Supreme Court’s action: Suddenly, Judge Aileen Cannon has even more power than she already did.

The Florida-based federal judge, appointed by Trump in 2020, is expected as soon as Friday to reconfigure the timeline for Trump’s other federal criminal trial — on charges of refusing to return a hoard of highly classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate and obstructing an investigation into the matter.

That trial is officially scheduled for May 20, but has seemed primed for delay amid protracted fights about classified evidence. The former president is expected to be on hand in Cannon’s Fort Pierce, Florida courtroom Friday as prosecutors and defense lawyers battle over the schedule for the case.

A decision by Cannon to push back the Florida case could clog the calendar in late summer, making a 2024 trial in Washington on the federal election charges all but impossible, even if the Supreme Court lifts the freeze in the election case soon after it is argued.

New York, New York

The first criminal case against Trump could end up being the last. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is slated to put Trump on trial there March 25, a date cemented earlier this month by the judge overseeing that case, Justice Juan Merchan. Trump is charged with falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to a porn star in the final weeks of the 2016 election.

Bragg’s trial was once considered likely to give way to Trump’s two federal trials, but the delays in the federal cases have cleared a path for it to begin on schedule. With Trump’s other criminal trials in flux, and potentially on hold until after the election, the New York case is the only one that seems certain to occur this year.

Trump’s other state-level criminal trial — a case brought by Georgia prosecutors that mirrors the federal allegations he is facing in Washington — has already been in turmoil for weeks, as defendants seek to disqualify the lead prosecutor, Fani Willis. The trial, which Willis has asked to begin in August, has not yet been scheduled by Judge Scott McAfee. And the Supreme Court’s eventual immunity ruling may have implications for that case as well.

SCOTUS takes its time

Trump opponents are already grumbling that the justices have taken their sweet time mulling their options to resolve the former president’s broad claims of immunity.

Back in December, Smith asked the justices to allow Trump’s immunity appeal to leapfrog the D.C. Circuit and be heard promptly at the Supreme Court. The justices took 11 days to consider the request before turning him down.

When the matter came back to the court earlier this month, Trump was the one asking for the justices’ intervention. The court gave Smith a leisurely week to respond to the request. He took only one day.

Then, two weeks passed, leading to speculation that the court was going to turn down the former president and decline to hear the immunity claim — an outcome that would have allowed the trial proceedings to resume right away. Perhaps the two weeks of silence, the thinking went, were the result of one or more justices writing dissents from a decision not to take up the issue.

But the court defied those expectations by announcing Wednesday that it will take up Trump’s immunity appeal after all, agreeing to hear the case during the week of April 22 — among the last oral argument of the term.

To be sure, the court is moving the case far more quickly than a garden-variety one. Petitions granted in February or later are typically set for argument in the following term, meaning October or thereafter.

But the court can move faster when it wants to. In a separate high-stakes Trump-related case — involving whether states can disqualify him from their ballots — the justices scheduled expedited arguments 36 days after Trump sought the court’s review. (Those arguments occurred on Feb. 8, and a decision is still pending.)

By contrast, in the criminal immunity fight, the court will hear arguments at least 70 days after Trump sought review.

And in the post-election fight between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000, the Supreme Court moved with extraordinary speed, taking just one day to block a Florida Supreme Court ruling requiring a partial recount of the ballots. Oral arguments in the case were heard two days later, and the justices took just one more day to issue their 5-4 decision handing Bush the victory.