'Speaks volumes': Legal experts directly accuse SCOTUS of favoring Trump over rule of law

Donald Trump's legal team is seeking to delay the appeals process in regards to his claim of presidential immunity related to criminal charges that he interfered in the 2020 election — and two legal experts blasted the Supreme Court Tuesday for letting him do it.

Andrew Weissmann and Ryan Goodman, two NYU School of Law professors, wrote in the Atlantic that Trump has no legal ground whatsoever to delay a ruling in his plea for presidential immunity. According to them, he's seeking to slow down the immunity appeals process for one obvious reason: to postpone the trial date – "hopefully pushing it into a time when, as president, he would control the Department of Justice and thus could squash the prosecution altogether."

Weissmann and Goodman argue that the Supreme Court "has shamed itself by being a party to this, when the sole issue before the Court is presidential immunity."

Trump claims he should have presidential immunity shielding him from prosecution in the federal election interference case. When his claim was shot down by the judge in the case, prosecutor Jack Smith pushed for it to go straight to the Supreme Court, leapfrogging lower courts to speed up the process. But Trump opposed that move.

Instead, the Supreme Court passed it to the circuit court, which rejected the argument and it finally came back to SCOTUS — which scheduled the hearing for the last day of this session.

Weissmann and Goodman see the Court's scheduling the immunity case for a "leisurely" April 25 hearing as an example of its "lollygagging." While it's too late to change the date, Weissmann and Goodman argue that the Court should press Trump's attorneys on why he thinks a delay is necessary rather than a quick resolution.

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"And then they should rule with dispatch because there is still time, albeit barely, to vindicate the public’s right to a speedy trial," they write.

Trump would've likely preferred to have a speedy resolution of the immunity issue if he weren't seeking to avoid a trial before the November election and possibly having a conviction influence the opinions of voters, Weissmann and Goodman contend, adding that anyone "with a legitimate claim of immunity has every interest in not suffering a single day more under the opprobrium of multiple criminal charges, not to mention being under pretrial bail conditions and a gag order."

"The law itself recognizes the need for speed on this issue. With questions of immunity, courts permit an appeal in advance of a trial and forgo the usual rule that appeals are permitted only after a verdict is reached," Weissmann and Goodman write.

"The hope, in allowing for this, is to relieve someone from the opprobrium and burden of a trial, if the defendant is indeed immune. For the Court to set such a prolonged schedule — antithetical to the appropriate time frame for the only issue actually before the justices — speaks volumes about the role the Court has chosen to play in advancing the interests of the former president over the rule of law."

Read the full op-ed over at The Atlantic.

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