Trump seeks to use Supreme Court’s immunity ruling to quash classified docs case in Florida

Trump seeks to use Supreme Court’s immunity ruling to quash classified docs case in Florida

Trump seeks to use Supreme Court’s immunity ruling to quash classified docs case in Florida, Donald Trump is hoping that the Supreme Court decision in his election interference case can prove to deliver him a third procedural win, this time in the case in which he is accused of hoarding government secrets after he left office.

The decision offers the former president a number of fresh opportunities to challenge special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment, legal experts say.

On Friday, he asked Judge Aileen Cannon to further delay the case — which still doesn't have a trial date due to a slew of slow-moving motions still to be decided — to allow the impact of the decision to be weighed. Trump also asked the judge to look to Justice Clarence Thomas' dissent to bolster his argument that Smith's existence as a prosecutor shouldn't be allowed to continue.

But those are not the only options that Trump may seek to scuttle the case after the latest decision from the court. The Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that presidents are shielded from prosecution for official acts and garner “at least a presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution” for acts “within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility.”

While Trump is not entitled to immunity for unofficial acts, the burden is on the government when there is a close call.

Much of the indictment focuses on Trump's time after leaving office, which legal experts say makes it harder to argue they are "official acts." But Trump is not without options.

Trump has tried to argue that he denoted the documents as "personal" when he was still in office, meaning they can't be treated like sensitive government secrets. Federal prosecutors have rebuked Trump’s argument that the Presidential Records Act allowed him to designate as personal the documents he took from the White House.

Legal experts said they expect the defense to revisit arguments about how and when Trump could declassify classified documents as he left the White House.

“The outcome will depend on whether Judge Cannon characterizes Trump’s decision at the end of his Presidency to transport the documents to Mar-a-Lago as an official act of designating the documents as personal, and whether she views that act as an essential premise on which the criminal charges depend,” said Joel Johnson, an associate professor at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law. He said the court’s decision could prove beneficial to Trump.

“I expect that his legal team will double down on its argument that he designated the documents as personal before leaving office and that, in doing so, he was performing an official act—which is afforded at least a presumption of immunity from criminal prosecution under this morning’s Supreme Court decision,” Johnson said in an email. “Because the criminal charges flow from that official act, Trump’s team will likely argue, they should be dismissed on the basis of presidential immunity.”

Other experts said that while they were skeptical of this argument, Cannon, who has spent long days listening to lawyers argue defense motions to dismiss the charges on a broad range of grounds, may be inclined to hear it.

“On its face, the case is about the failure to do an official act. So you hope that the immunity decision wouldn’t have any impact,” said Jeffrey Cohen, an associate professor of Law at Boston College. But Cohen, a former Assistant United States Attorney in the district of Massachusetts, said his “fear is that the ambiguity in which the court wrote the immunity decision will give the defense in the classified document case confused basis to challenge the case.”