Trump has some immunity in D.C. election interference case, Supreme Court rules: Highlights (2024)

Trump’s Georgia election case gets more complications after immunity decision

Trump said tonight that Biden's remarks from the White House were meant to distract from his performance on the campaign trail.

"Another attack by Crooked Joe Biden against his Political Opponent. This is a really bad and incompetent guy. Wanted to deflect from his horrible campaign performance!" Trump said on his social media site, Truth Social.

Reporting from Washington

Special counsel Jack Smith is not, as of now, planning to ask the Supreme Court to move more quickly than usual to issue its official judgment based on today’s ruling.

The final judgment is what triggers the process for the case to get back to the district court. As it stands, the Supreme Court’s mandate will not issue for at least 32 days.

It’s unclear why Smith’s office is not asking for this to happen faster.One interpretation is that either way, there won’t be a trial before the election so there is no longer any time pressure.

Trump's attorneys in his New York hush money case indicated in a letter to the presiding judge that they want him to postpone sentencing and set aside the trial verdict as a result of the Supreme Court's presidential immunity ruling.

The lawyers said they want to brief state Judge Juan Merchan on the relevance of the high court's immunity decision and an argument that decision confirmed that the Manhattan district attorney should not have been able to offer evidence at trial about Trump’s official acts.

Trump's attorneys are seeking to throw out his conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records and postpone next week’s sentencing, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Reporting from Washington

Biden tonight calledthe Supreme Court decisionon presidential immunity “a terrible disservice to the people of this nation.”

“This nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America. Each, each of us is equal before the law. No one, no one is above the law, not even the president of the United States. [With] today’s Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity, that fundamentally changed for all practical purposes,” Biden said.

Biden said the decision means there are now “virtually no limits on what the president can do,” a sentiment that echoed the dissents written by the liberal justices on the court.

“I dissent,” Biden said in concluding his brief remarks from the White House.

Read the full story here.

Biden said tonight that the Supreme Court's ruling means there are “virtually no limits” on presidential power.

He said voters deserved to have an answer through the courts before Election Day about what took place on Jan. 6, 2021.

"Now, because of today's decision, that is highly, highly unlikely. It's a terrible disservice to the people of this nation," he said.

Biden added that the high court's ruling means voters in November will be charged with deciding whether they want to elect Trump "now knowing he’ll be more emboldened to do whatever he pleases, whenever he wants to do it."

Biden is beginning to speak in remarks that are expected to be brief and in response to the decision.

Trump hailed the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, while the White House said that “nobody is above the law” and the country needs leaders like Biden. NBC News’ Hallie Jackson reports.

The White House this evening said that Biden will deliver remarks at 7:45 p.m. about today's presidential immunity ruling.

Biden was initially scheduled to return to the White House from Camp David, Maryland, after 8 p.m.

Across the street from the Supreme Court, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee today sued Attorney General Merrick Garland as part of its effort to obtain audiotapes from special counsel Robert Hur’s interview of Biden tied to his handling of classified documents.

"Garland violated, and continues to violate, his legal obligation by refusing to produce to the Committee the audio recordings of the Special Counsel’s interviews with President Biden and Mark Zwonitzer when those recordings are not covered by executive privilege, and, even if they were, executive privilege has been waived," House attorneys wrote.

The panel’s lawsuit seeks a court order requiring Garland to produce the audio recordings of Hur's interviews with Biden and Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter of Biden's 2017 memoir.

Reporting from Washington

When President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon in 1974, it was under the assumption that his predecessor could have been prosecuted for his efforts to impede the investigation into the Watergate scandal.

But under the new rule implemented by the Supreme Court today that partially immunized Donald Trump in his election interference case, there may not have been any need for such a pardon.

“Richard Nixon would have had a pass,” John Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel, said on a call with reporters today.

Read the full story here.

The Supreme Court’spresidential immunity decisionwill further delay Trump’s Washingtoncriminal caserelated to hisefforts to stop the transfer of powerin the lead-up to theJan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, virtually guaranteeing that Trump’s trial won’t start before Election Day.

Instead, the high court’s ruling sets the stage for hearings before U.S. District JudgeTanya Chutkanon what allegations in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment should be considered official acts and, therefore, potentially immune from prosecution. Her ultimate decisions could then be subjected to further appeal, meaning that a Trump trial is unlikely to happen until well into 2025. If Trump wins in November, a trial is unlikely to happen at all.

Read the full story here.

Hillary Clinton reacted to the Supreme Court's immunity ruling on X, writing that she agreed with the final line of Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissenting opinion: "With fear for our democracy, I dissent."

"It will be up to the American people this November to hold Donald Trump accountable," Clinton said.

Former Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, who was at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot, was outside the Supreme Court for the decision today.

In a statement, he said, "The Supreme Court just further stripped the guardrails of democracy. It’s Absurd and dangerous."

He added: "The GOP and right wing leaning Supreme Court have gone rogue, detached from reality and abandoned the truth. If Biden invokes a mob and sends it to attack the Supreme Court/congress, would the GOP accept that or hold Biden accountable?"

Posting a picture on X of an article with the headline "The President Can Now Assassinate You, Officially," he also said, "The Supreme Court failed to recognize that they themselves could be targeted."

Neither Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell nor Senate Minority Whip John Thune has issued a statement since the immunity ruling.

But notably, after McConnell voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial, the Senate GOP leader said “former presidents are not immune from being held accountable”in both criminal and civil courts.

"In the language of today, President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office as an ordinary citizen unless the statute of limitations is run, still liable for everything he did while he was in office," he said. "He didn’t get away with anything yet. Yet. We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one."