Even the Trump campaign is surprised how much water SCOTUS is carrying for them.
Trump’s lawyers and other confidants had widely expected — and had told the former president as much — that the court maneuver would delay the election subversion trial, but perhaps only to around the summer. For months, Trump attorneys were actively preparing themselves and their client to face a trial, over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in the violent Jan. 6 assault at the U.S. Capitol, right around the time of the Republican Party’s nominating convention, the sources add.
If the federal trial were to proceed during this election year, much of Team Trump had predicted it would be significantly more damaging politically to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee than, for instance, his ongoing criminal hush-money trial in Manhattan.
“We planned for that exhausting schedule and split screen,” says a person involved with the planning.
But the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, which Trump built as president, came through for him in a way that many Trump advisers didn’t believe was probable. When news broke in late February that the court would take up Trump’s claims of vast immunity, Trumpland was so elated that a lawyer close to Trump told Rolling Stone they were “literally popping champagne.”
Meanwhile…
One stunned judge asked Trump’s lawyers, “Could a president who ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival, and is not impeached, would he be subject to criminal prosecution?”
The response from Trump’s lawyer, John Sauer, was chilling: “If he were impeached and convicted first … my answer is qualified yes, there is a political process that would have to occur first,” he said. In other words, under Trump’s vision of immunity, he could not be prosecuted for ordering an assassination — he would first have to be impeached and convicted.
At the Supreme Court, Sauer has argued the justices should not concern themselves with “lurid hypotheticals” that “almost certainly never will occur, and would virtually certainly result in impeachment and Senate conviction … if they did occur.”
LOL at thinking the GOP would impeach and convict him for having a liberal politician assassinated.
