The Supreme Court is unlikely to “intercede” in former President Donald Trump’s various criminal cases—as he said on Aug. 4 the court “must” do—at least not until the cases have moved past the initial stages, legal experts told The Epoch Times.
The Supreme Court might act at some point but not by itself on its own initiative, they added, saying the justices would probably only act if Mr. Trump’s lawyers formally brought an appeal to them.
Mr. Trump, who characterizes the federal and state charges pending against him as interference in the 2024 presidential campaign, appointed three conservative justices to the nine-member court— Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—during his time in office. There are now six members of the court’s conservative bloc and three members of its liberal bloc, up from five conservatives and four liberals before his presidency.
At 8:26 a.m. on Aug. 4, he wrote on the TruthSocial micro-blogging site that he hoped the nation’s highest court would get involved in the legal proceedings against him, which he argues are politically motivated prosecutions launched by Democrats intent on doing him harm.
“CRAZY! My political opponent has hit me with a barrage of weak lawsuits, including D.A., A.G., and others, which require massive amounts of my time & money to adjudicate,” he wrote.
“Resources that would have gone into Ads and Rallies, will now have to be spent fighting these Radical Left Thugs in numerous courts throughout the Country. I am leading in all Polls, including against Crooked Joe [Biden], but this is not a level playing field. It is Election Interference, & the Supreme Court must intercede. MAGA!”
Mr. Trump is currently facing a total of 78 charges in three separate criminal cases. He faces hundreds of years in prison and millions of dollars in fines. This is the first time in U.S. history a former president has been charged with a crime. Mr. Trump was also impeached twice by the U.S. House of Representatives but acquitted both times by the U.S. Senate.
Special counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, brought four federal criminal conspiracy charges stemming from alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The case is pending in federal court in the nation’s capital.
Mr. Smith also brought 40 federal felony counts for the allegedly illegal retention of U.S. defense information related to 337 documents with classified markings, obstruction, and lying to the government. The case is pending in federal court in Florida.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, brought 34 state felony counts in New York for falsifying business records with the intent to hide the commission of a second crime.
The charges arise from the alleged payment of so-called hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. Ms. Daniels claims she had an affair with Mr. Trump, who denies the allegation. The legal claim is that the payments were identified in accounting records as legal expenses when in reality they were reimbursing Mr. Trump’s then-attorney Michael Cohen for payments to Ms. Daniels. The trial is scheduled for March 25, 2024.
Apart from the 78 charges, Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, has said she will bring separate state charges against Mr. Trump by Sept. 1.
Those charges may arise from a Jan. 2, 2021, telephone call Mr. Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, in what the media characterized as an effort to “find” enough votes to secure the state’s votes in the Electoral College. A transcript of the call that was later released showed Mr. Trump said he believed hundreds of thousands of ballots had been cast illegally in the state.
Ms. Willis is also reportedly investigating the alternative set of electors who met on Dec. 14, 2020, and voted for Mr. Trump, even though the official count indicated President Joe Biden won the popular vote in the state.
‘Last Indictments are Laughable’
Curt Levey, an attorney who is president of the Committee for Justice, a conservative legal advocacy nonprofit, said it seems that Mr. Trump’s statement about Supreme Court intercession is an example of him making “a wish.”
“And I understand the wish,” Mr. Levey told The Epoch Times in an interview.
“These last indictments are laughable in the sense,” that Mr. Smith, the special counsel who is overseeing the cases about the attempt to reverse the 2020 election results and the handling of classified materials, would probably “get zero votes in the Supreme Court” as happened when the court reversed the federal bribery convictions the prosecutor secured against former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.
The former Republican governor was convicted of receiving improper gifts and loans from a donor, but in 2016, the Supreme Court unanimously threw out the convictions. In the court’s opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts criticized the prosecution for its “boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute.”
“And I think this is even more of a stretch,” Mr. Levey added.
The Supreme Court will probably “vindicate” Mr. Trump on the election-related charges at some point, but he said the question is how the case will get to the nation’s highest court. The court won’t act on its own, so the nation’s former chief executive is probably thinking more along the lines of an interlocutory appeal, which refers to an appeal made while a case is still proceeding, he said.
The Supreme Court “doesn’t have to take any case,” but if it decided to do so, it could proceed on the so-called shadow docket where this is no oral argument, or it could take the more conventional route and order oral arguments in an interlocutory appeal.
The court could get involved early on or it could wait a few years to act, “and this assumes that since the Supreme Court never reaches out on its own … that his lawyers will make the proper motions and take the proper appeals when they’re denied by this district court judge.”
“You and I would probably have little luck on an interlocutory appeal, but you can bet the justices will pay full attention” to an appeal brought by Mr. Trump, he said.
The Supreme Court has, in a number of cases, “discouraged the broad use of federal statutes to criminalize politics, and I think that that would be all the more true in the middle of the election.”
“There are very strong arguments to be made for why the Supreme Court should weigh in early here, and the Supreme Court does take practical realities into account when making these decisions,” he said, adding that only four of the nine justices have to agree to hear an appeal for it to move forward to the oral argument stage.
There is no guarantee, of course, but Mr. Trump is likely “to eventually get his day in the Supreme Court with regard to the federal charges,” Mr. Levey said.
With the state and local charges, “there is a less obvious route of appeal.” The highest state courts in Georgia and New York “would have the final say; however, a good lawyer should be able to find a federal angle and go into federal court, and then from there, you would go up to the Supreme Court.”
‘Unprecedented Territory’
Mark Miller, an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm that challenges government overreach, said it is unlikely the Supreme Court would take Mr. Trump’s cases at its own initiative or this early in the process before any trials have gotten underway.
“It seems very unlikely the Supreme Court would, in any sense, take the case immediately,” he said in an interview.
“I wouldn’t expect that the court would reach down and somehow interfere” at this early stage, he said.
But Mr. Miller acknowledged “we’re in unprecedented territory” with the cases being pursued against a former president who is campaigning to return to the White House.
Just because the Supreme Court has “never done something before, it doesn’t mean they can’t do it, but it would be stunning for it to do something just out of the blue.”
“Usually, someone asks the Supreme Court to take action, and certainly President Trump’s lawyers could find an angle to try and get the Supreme Court to jump in here. But even if they did that, I would think it’s very unlikely that the justices would vote to hear the case when the case itself is in its infancy,” Mr. Miller said.
The Epoch Times reached out to the Supreme Court for comment through its public information office. No response was received as of press time.
From The Epoch Times