Donald Trump was scheduled to be in court in Washington, DC on March 4 for the beginning of his trial stemming from the January 6 Capitol Hill riot. The plans of Judge Tanya Chutkan were thrown into disarray, however, when Trump’s lawyers filed a motion claiming immunity against the charges. Jack Smith, who is behind the charges, asked the Supreme Court to preemptively rule on the immunity question, but they declined his request. As a result, Chutkan has now vacated the March 4 trial date, placing the matter on hold until a full review of the immunity question is completed. This should give the former President some extra breathing room and time to focus on this year’s campaign. (NY Post)

DC federal Judge Tanya Chutkan vacated the planned March 4 trial date, noting the court was still awaiting a key decision on Trump’s bid to toss the case on the grounds that he has presidential immunity from the charges.

Chutkan’s order means that the first of four planned criminal trials against the 77-year-old Trump will begin in Manhattan next month on charges that he falsified business records to hide hush money payments to two women who claimed he had carried on extramarital affairs with them.

The postponement of the DC case — brought by Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith — comes as a federal appeals court continues to weigh Trump’s immunity argument.

This decision could move the eventual trial date back considerably, assuming the trial ever happens. A federal appeals court is currently considering the immunity claim and we don’t know how long that will take. Even if they find against Trump, the question can still be pushed to the Supreme Court. The Supremes did not deny Trump’s claim of immunity. They simply refused to hear the appeal until the question had worked its way through the lower courts.

I’m still not sure how that appeal will play out because Trump’s legal team is arguing such a narrowly defined explanation in the appeal. In general terms, I agree that a sitting president is immune from criminal prosecution for any actions he takes as part of his official duties. But his attorneys are specifically claiming that a president can be criminally prosecuted but only after he (or she) has been impeached and convicted. That theory would imply that no president could ever be taken to trial for anything if the Senate failed to convict them in an impeachment hearing while he was still in office.

It seems as if a stronger argument would be that Trump can’t be put on trial for any actions he took as part of his presidential duties. And he didn’t personally do anything criminal to begin with. Trump was guilty of giving a speech. That’s about it. In that speech, he even talked about the people at his rally going to Capitol Hill to “peacefully protest.” If a president can be sent to jail for that, then every living ex-president should already be behind bars.

This delay by Judge Chutkan won’t have any impact on Trump’s other pending legal dates. He’ll still be going to court in New York to face the preposterous charges claiming fraudulent business practices in a case where no victims of such fraud were produced. The Georgia trial over the 2020 election results in that state looks equally shaky. The one trial where he may have trouble is the classified documents case in Florida. That’s obviously politically motivated as well, but I don’t know that you can get those charges dismissed simply by pointing out that none of the other presidents and vice presidents who took classified documents were prosecuted. He might try arguing that he declassified them all, but with no records from his time in office to back that up it could be a tough sell. We shall see how all four of them play out, though some may not be concluded until after Trump is (hopefully) back in office.