President Trump’s request that the Supreme Court rebuff Special Counsel Jack Smith’s plea for an expedited hearing on the question of presidential immunity throws into sharp relief the  stakes in the fight over scheduling of the January 6 prosecution.  

The 45th president writes that Mr. Smith’s request for “certiorari before judgment” — meaning before immunity has been ruled on by the United States Circuit Court for the District of Columbia  — is inapt for one of the “most complex, intricate, and momentous issues that this Court will be called on to decide.” 

In calling for “ordinary review procedures,” Mr. Trump urges the justices to turn aside from Mr. Smith’s “extraordinary” request for an immediate decision from a tribunal known for its deliberation. “In 234 years of American history,” his attorneys write, “no President ever faced criminal prosecution for his official acts,” which they assert Mr. Trump does in respect of January 6. 

Mr. Trump asserts that Mr. Smith’s shpilkes is political. It is, he avers, owing to the prosecutor’s  “partisan interest in ensuring that President Trump will be subjected to a months-long criminal trial at the height of a presidential campaign where he is the leading candidate and the only serious opponent of the current Administration.”

In addition to contesting that Mr. Smith’s understanding of the “public interest” — that is the reasoning the special counsel attaches to the request for the delay —  is “self-serving,” Mr. Trump, though, also makes a more intricate argument for why the judicious thing would be for the Nine to move deliberately rather than dramatically. 

In the ordinary course, the 45th president observes, review is available to a losing party who seeks a second hearing. Here, though, Mr. Smith won on the question of whether Mr. Trump’s actions after the 2020 election were covered by presidential immunity. Judge Chutkan resoundingly found that they were not, reminding Mr. Trump that he is no “king.”

Yet it is Mr. Smith, not Mr. Trump, who has brought the case to the high court. He likely reckons that a decisive win on the immunity question before the justices will foreclose a vital artery of potential appeal for his adversary. That, in turn, would aid the special counsel in wrapping up the trial in advance of the election. Mr. Trump casts this bid for expedited appeal as the overreach of a sore winner.

Mr. Trump argues that the special counsel “confuses the public interest with a partisan interest of his superior, President Biden.” He adds that “tens of millions of American voters plainly disagree” and maintains that “politicization of the trial schedule—including in this petition—departs from the best traditions of the U.S. Department of Justice,” which employs Mr. Smith.