How a Supreme Court Immunity Ruling Could Affect Trump's Election Case

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In arguments on Thursday, the justices appeared to signal two ways they could help Donald Trump as he fights charges that he plotted to overturn the 2020 election.

The justices seemed to indicate that their ruling could lead to some allegations being stripped from the federal indictment in former President Donald J. Trump's election interference case.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times

If the Supreme Court's hearing on Thursday about former President Donald J. Trump's claims of executive immunity is any indication of how the court might ultimately rule, the justices could end up helping Mr. Trump in two ways.

The justices signaled that their ruling, when it comes, could lead to some allegations being stripped from the federal indictment charging Mr. Trump with plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

And because the process of determining which accusations to keep and which to throw away could take several months, it would all but kill the chance of Mr. Trump standing trial on charges that he tried to subvert the last election before voters get to decide whether to choose him again in this one.

Near the end of the arguments, however, Justice Amy Coney Barrett abruptly floated a way that prosecutors could maneuver around that time-consuming morass. If the special counsel, Jack Smith, wanted to move more quickly, she said, and avoid the ordeal of lower courts reviewing his indictment line by line, deciding what should stay and what should go, he could always do the job himself.

That suggestion, which Mr. Smith's team seemed to grudgingly accept as a possibility, hinted at the ways in which the hearing on Thursday focused not only on lofty issues of presidential power and constitutional law, but also touched on more practical elements of how Mr. Trump's criminal case could proceed after the court's decision.

However the justices rule on the question of granting presidents a degree of immunity from criminal prosecution, the result will have a direct and immediate effect on the election interference case, one of the most important prosecutions Mr. Trump faces.

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