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The U.S. Supreme Court is unlikely to grant Donald Trump immunity from prosecution, legal experts have said.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Trump's claim that he has presidential immunity from his election fraud trial in Washington D.C.
Regardless of the outcome, the Supreme Court has helped Trump's goal of delaying the case until after the 2024 presidential election.
If elected president, Trump has several options to end the trial, including pardoning himself or appointing a favorable attorney general to drop the case.
If the Supreme Court takes its conventional timeline for cases, it could push the start of the trial into October or November.
If it takes an expedited route, the election fraud case could start as early as July.
The trial is frozen while the Supreme Court makes its decision.
As the court is to consider the question of presidential immunity in broad terms, it could also help Trump enormously in his federal case in Florida, where he is accused of hoarding classified documents after he left the White House in 2021.
Greg Germain, a law professor at Syracuse University in New York, told Newsweek that he believes Trump will not succeed in the Supreme Court.
"I'm fairly confident that the court will hold that Trump is not immune from claims that he attempted to interfere with the election process for personal gain, or took classified government documents while leaving office."
"So other than causing some delay, I would expect a thoughtful decision from the Supreme Court allowing the prosecutions to proceed," he said.
Germain noted that the court is considering presidential immunity as a concept, but it generally does not apply to cases where the president is performing acts for personal gain.
"It's an interesting legal issue when phrased in the abstract, because a president should certainly be immune from criminal prosecution for some core official acts, but not for acts done for personal gain or unconnected with the president's official duties. The president should be immune from wartime decisions, for example," he said.
Newsweek sought email comment from Trump's attorney on Thursday.
Trump had asked the Supreme Court to place a stay on his election fraud trial while it considered whether to take his presidential immunity case.
According to Peter Shane, a constitutional law lecturer at New York University, that request for a stay could have been an opportunity for the court to end Trump's presidential immunity claim, especially as the Washington D.C circuit appellate court had already denied him immunity.
"I think the D.C. circuit's opinion was so well done and so clearly correct that I would have welcomed a decision to treat the stay application as a petition for cert and then to deny it," Shane told Newsweek.
The former president's legal team has argued in the appellate court that presidential immunity should invalidate his federal election subversion charges, which followed an investigation by Special Counsel Jack Smith.
Smith's investigation focused on Trump's actions leading up to and during the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, when a group of his supporters violently protested the election, which Trump has said was stolen. Smith's investigation also looked into alleged efforts to submit false slates of pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College. Indicted on four felony counts, Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges and maintains that he is innocent of any wrongdoing.
He remains the frontrunner to take the Republican nomination in the 2024 presidential election.
The Supreme Court wrote in its unsigned order on Wednesday that it would answer the following question: "Whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office."
Separately, Trump is facing 40 federal charges over allegations he retained classified papers after leaving the White House in January 2021 and then obstructed efforts by the relevant authorities to have them returned.
In August 2022, Trump's Mar-a-Lago private members club was raided by federal agents who recovered large numbers of classified papers. Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in the 2024 presidential race, has pleaded not guilty to all charges and strongly denies any wrongdoing.
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About the writer
Sean O'Driscoll is a Newsweek Senior Crime and Courts Reporter based in Ireland. His focus is reporting on U.S. law. ... Read more