With its controversial 6-3 immunity ruling in Trump v. the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that presidents enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for "official" acts but not for "unofficial" acts. Now, Judge Tanya Chutkan — the Barack Obama appointee assigned to special counsel Jack Smith's election interference case — must sort through the elements of the indictment and try to determine what qualifies as "official" conduct and what is "unofficial" conduct.
The process could be complicated and time-consuming, making it unlikely that the case will go to trial before the 2024 presidential election in November. But legal expert Tristan Snell believes there is a "silver lining" for Smith.
On X, formerly Twitter, Snell posted, "WTF is going to happen now in the DC case after the Supreme Court immunity ruling? There is a silver lining here."
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Snell added, "Judge Chutkan now takes back over — with a 'fact-specific analysis' on whether Trump's actions were 'official acts' or not. This could be brutal for Trump."
In his July 1 X thread, Snell explained, "The case now gets remanded back to the District Court, where Judge Chutkan is in charge. She's been ordered to engage in proceedings to determine whether Trump's actions were 'official acts' of the office of the President, or 'unofficial acts' of a candidate or citizen."
According to Snell, "This (is) not a trivial task. For every single action Trump is accused of, we now need to know the 5 W's and H: what he did, who he was with, where he was, when he did it, how he did it, and why he did it We need testimony from the people he was with. We need to see evidence."
Snell continued, "If he was in a conversation with Mike Pence, was it to discuss actual government policy or something within their official jobs? Or was it to talk about the election, about Trump's legal challenges to the election *as a candidate,* etc.? So we need testimony from Mike Pence."
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