The super-conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court is refusing Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request to rule on ex-president and criminal defendant Donald Trump’s claim he has “absolute immunity” and cannot be prosecuted for any crimes he may have committed during his time as President.
Smith had requested the nation’s highest court take up this question: “Whether a former President is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted before the criminal proceedings begin.”
Trump is claiming both absolute immunity and ineligible for prosecution because the U.S. Senate found him not guilty after the House impeached him.
The justices’ response to Smith’s request was a short as possible: “Petition for a writ of certiorari before judgment DENIED.”
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At times the court will say which justices voted a certain way, or if one justice accepted or denied the request without sending to the full court.
“The court’s decision is a major blow to Smith, who made an extraordinary gamble when he asked the justices to take the rare step of skipping a federal appeals court and quickly deciding a fundamental issue in his election subversion criminal case against Trump,” CNN reported Friday afternoon.
“The public interest in a prompt resolution of this case favors an immediate, definitive decision by this Court,” Smith had said in his request, asking the justices to allow him to skip over, or “leapfrog” the appellate court. “The charges here are of the utmost gravity,” he added, in his filing, CNN had reported earlier.
Smith was counting on the nation’s highest court to rule quickly, pointing to its decision a half-century ago in another caae against another president, Richard Nixon.
“Here, the stakes are at least as high, if not higher: the resolution of the question presented is pivotal to whether the former President himself will stand trial – which is scheduled to begin less than three months in the future,” he wrote.