Donald Trump's Striking Out in Court

Donald Trump was handed another legal setback on Wednesday after a U.S. appeals court ruled the former president cannot assert presidential immunity in a defamation lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.

Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, faces myriad legal troubles, with trials looming at the state and federal level. He has denied any wrongdoing in all cases. Carroll's second defamation case against Trump is scheduled to begin January 16, which will determine how much Trump must pay in damages.

Carroll's lawsuit sought at least $10 million in damages from Trump over comments he made in June 2019 when he was president after she first publicly accused him of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. Trump denied knowing Carroll, said she was not his "type," and that she made up the sexual assault claim to promote her upcoming memoir.

On Wednesday, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan upheld a federal judge's decision to reject Trump's claim of immunity, finding Trump had waited too long to raise it as a defense.

"It IS HEREBY ORDERED, ADJUDGED and DECREED that the July 5, 2023 order of the district court is AFFIRMED insofar as it rejected Defendant's presidential immunity defense and denied his request for leave to amend his answer to add presidential immunity as a defense," court documents stated.

Newsweek has reached out to Trump via email for comment.

While Carroll, a longtime advice columnist, sued in November 2019, Trump waited until December 2022 before asserting that presidential immunity shielded him from her lawsuit.

In June, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who will oversee the trial, rejected Trump's bid to dismiss Carroll's case and later refused to let Trump raise an immunity defense, citing the delay in seeking to invoke it and the public interest in accountability.

The 2nd Circuit on Wednesday said those decisions were correct.

"We are pleased that the Second Circuit affirmed Judge Kaplan's rulings and that we can now move forward with trial next month on January 16," Roberta Kaplan, Carroll's lawyer, who is not related to the judge, said in a statement.

However, in response to the ruling, Trump attorney Alina Habba called it "fundamentally flawed" in a statement and said the former president will seek the Supreme Court's review.

This follows a similar immunity defense Trump has pursued in his federal criminal case in Washington in which he is accused of unlawfully trying to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election.

Earlier this month Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the federal election interference case brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Special Counsel Jack Smith, issued a ruling, finding that Trump is not immune from prosecution stemming from his election interference attempts just because he was president at the time, as his legal team had argued.

"Former Presidents enjoy no special conditions on their federal criminal liability," Chutkan wrote. "Defendant may be subject to federal investigation, indictment, prosecution, conviction, and punishment for any criminal acts undertaken while in office."

This comes after Trump and his lawyers applied for a vast array of classified documents in his Washington, D.C., election subversion case.

The request could delay Trump's trial by months, as it has in Trump's Florida case, in which he made a similar request where attorneys have to view the disclosed documents in secured rooms and use ultra-secure laptops.

Prosecutors in both cases have previously complained that Trump is deliberately aiming to delay his trials until after the 2024 election.

However, legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner warned in November that Trump's efforts to delay his criminal trials may backfire.

In an MSNBC opinion column published in November, Kirschner, a staunch Trump critic, said that the plan to postpone may backfire.

"But while Trump might welcome the delay in the classified documents trial, this result may have some unanticipated consequences for him," Kirschner wrote.