Former President Donald Trump’s immunity challenge in the Supreme Court has the potential to be one of the hardest to parse for meaning in real time.
Here’s some possible outcomes:
No immunity: The simplest outcome would be for the Supreme Court to rule that former presidents are not entitled to immunity from criminal prosecution. That was the conclusion the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit reached in February in a unanimous opinion.
That ruling could allow Trump’s trial to get underway almost immediately.
Some degree of immunity: The justices could reach more broadly by granting some degree of immunity for “official” actions. Based on the oral arguments, it appeared there was support for doing so.
That outcome would raise a number of substantial questions, including what counts as an “official” action. Trump based most of his argument on a 1982 decision called Nixon v. Fitzgerald in which the Supreme Court ruled that presidents enjoy “absolute immunity” from civil lawsuits for official actions to the “outer perimeter” of their duties.
Sending the case back for trial: The Supreme Court’s decision could explicitly make clear that some of Trump’s actions were private. Or it could set a standard for lower courts to use to decide what’s official and what’s not. How the justices deal with that will determine how quickly – or whether – prosecutor Jack Smith’s case can proceed. It could also raise the possibility of further pre-trial legal wrangling, unless the Supreme Court explicitly ruled out appeals of those decisions.