The appeal is about evidence used, not the charges themselves. Part of the ruling yesterday said that it was now not even admissible to use evidence from official acts to support charges for unofficial acts. Trump argued before the case that a portion of the evidence was inadmissible as official acts and had the motion rejected. He is now again arguing that his motion was incorrectly rejected in light of the SC ruling yesterday.
The appeal is unlikely to succeed, but it’s at worst a delaying tactic that might be extended numerous times under different appeals. And at best, no one knows wtf an official act is so it’s not out of the realm of possibility in today’s judicial environment that he can get a court to grant him his win.
I surmised above that it could be along the lines of double checking to make sure any of the evidence used was not related to his official duties while he was president. I’m going out on a limb and suggest that Cohen would be the most compromised. Stormy obviously not an official duty, unless it was in the oval office with a cigar
It spans into his time in office. As I’ve already said, the case used evidence of trump’s acts in office that he tried to have dismissed on the basis they were official acts so inadmissible under the theory he had already put to the Supreme Court.
It was an absurd motion that has already been thrown out with prejudice in other courts when they tried to get the Muller investigation shut down. Short of the argument finding a similarly in the tank judge as Canon hearing it there is no way this would stand up on appeal. It’s more now just a question of timeline.
EDIT: But in reality Cannon’s handling of the case had already pushed this to the point where a pre-election verdict was extremely unlikely.
If I am understanding this correctly, both cases by Smith will be dismissed.
On November 18, 2022, by Order Number 5559-2022, Attorney General Garland
appointed John L. Smith, an attorney from outside the United States Government, to serve as Special Counsel for the United States Department of Justice. Special Counsel Smith was not nominated by the President or confirmed by the Senate.
No. This is specific to the Florida case and the motion has not even been filed in the DC insurrection case because they don’t have any other judges will be so brazenly partisan as to pretend to buy the argument
What they have argued is the unconstitutionality of § 600.3 of the special counsel regulation
Like I’ve said before, not only did no one pretend to believe this argument prior to Canon, Trump’s team has tried this in other courts only to get laughed out.
Might Trump yet face a reckoning , of sorts , for Jan 6 before the election ? As with anything legalistic concerning him , I probably wouldn’t bet on it.
I don’t see how it is possible. It is not just the timeline, but the part of the ruling that barred using any evidence from official acts as part of cases brought against unofficial acts makes it damn near impossible to bring any case against someone for anything they did while president. Further complicating it is incredibly sloppy job they (purposefully) did in separating and testing these issues meaning that minimum any case brought for unofficial acts would be wrapped in lengthy pre-trial hearings over the applicability of the bulk of the evidence the case was based on. The Jan 6th case is particularly impacted in that because of the way the “soft coup” part of the plot, the bit more important to the case than the riot, was done under the pretense of official acts.
It’s almost as if there was collusion between Roberts , the Heritage Foundation and the Trump campaign to come up with a way to completely immunise him from prosecution. Surely not.
Yeah, the heritage society has reached popular consciousness for its role in getting ideologues onto the court, but its role in shaping our abiding judicial interpretations is far more cohesive than that. They have an entire wing devoted to finding the right cases to put in front of the court and we are now increasingly aware of the behind scenes coordination ensuring that the court takes the right cases and gives the right explanations in their opinions that then open the door to the next case in the heritage pipeline being seen.
If you look specifically at the abortion issue you can see the tactic in play. Heritage kept lining up abortion case after abortion case to push through the courts accepting that they would lose them, but the very nature of keeping the issue present in the court allowed the court to argue it was not a settled issue, despite generations of rulings all aligned with the protections given under Roe. It was all just a game designed to keep the issue on a holding pattern long enough for them to get enough justices on the court to finally through out the precedent. But that required not just getting the right judges on the court, but a coordination in keeping the right being taken up by the court in the interim.
