They’re saying he’s Jack Smith’s secret weapon
You’ve all no doubt heard that the Special Prosecutor has asked the Supreme Court to decide if Trump is immune from criminal charges and they agreed to decide whether to hear it by this week. Since that time, the appeals court did agree to hear it so there’s no way of knowing if that will affect the Supremes’ decision.
When the filing was revealed all the legal beagles on TV were atwitter about the fact that it was signed by a DOJ attorney who is apparently considered one of the super-duper legal heavyweights in the country. This piece in Vanity Fair suggests that he may be Smith’s secret weapon:
Borrowing from the Jaworski playbook, as well as the precedent set in the resulting landmark United States v. Nixon, special counsel Jack Smith has urged today’s Supreme Court to agree to resolve a vexing question of the Trump years and to do so as quickly as possible: Can a president stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, shoot someone dead, and be immune from criminal prosecution because the shooting occurred while he was president?
No, Smith didn’t frame his request so colloquially. However, he might have been justified in invoking Nixon’s infamous line, “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Instead, he asked the justices to decide a question that he called “central to our democracy”: whether Trump is “absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office.” Separately, the special counsel is seeking a resolution for a secondary question: whether Trump’s prior impeachment and acquittal over his failed attempt to remain in power after the events of January 6 insulates him from criminal prosecution.
[The words were likely written] by the special counsel’s secret weapon in this fast-track appeal: Michael Dreeben, a longtime former Justice Department official, served for decades in the Office for the Solicitor General, which is charged with representing the government before the Supreme Court. He’s the “counsel of record” in this case—the person who will most certainly argue this case if and when it’s officially added to the docket. His name caught me and many others by surprise—Dreeben is a person the justices pay close attention to, with more than 100 oral arguments under his belt for both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Dreeben is also a thorn in Trump’s side in a subtler way: As a member of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, he has been described as “the biggest brain in criminal law in the country”—whatever that means—and someone who can think several steps ahead. Indeed, Dreeben has most certainly already foreseen the practical effect of Trump continuing to insist presidents deserve king-like absolute immunity…
This is the fun part where we game the whole thing out:
As it happens, this flurry of activity in the courts, and that to come, isn’t the only development Smith and his office will have to play three-dimensional chess with. On the same day that Chutkan hit the pause button in the election subversion case, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a long-running dispute involving a trio of January 6 defendants who claim that the Justice Department overreached in prosecuting them for obstructing Congress. The reason these slow-moving cases matter, as Roger Parloff has written extensively over at Lawfare, is their overlap with two of Trump’s charges in DC—and because 300-plus people who were present at the Capitol siege have been charged under the same law.
Since the early days of the Justice Department’s probe of the insurrection, federal prosecutors have turned to a subsection of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002—enacted in the wake of the Enron scandal—that makes it a crime to impede an official government proceeding. Hundreds have been charged under it. But to the defendants, that law is merely a document-tampering statute that doesn’t apply to obstructing the joint session of Congress on January 6. Yet a coterie of trial judges across the political spectrum have rejected that argument; the only exception has been Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee who last year agreed that a charge of obstruction was only appropriate if it concerned “a record, a document, or other object” associated with the Capitol breach.
I won’t attempt to parse the language of 18 U.S.C. 1512(c)(2), the law being challenged, which criminalizes anyone who “corruptly … otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” But suffice it to say, a divided DC Circuit concluded that the language was unambiguous and covered the conduct of these three January 6 defendants. “Under the most natural reading of the statute, § 1512(c)(2) applies to all forms of corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding,” above and beyond simply document-tampering, wrote US Circuit Judge Florence Pan, a Joe Biden appointee.
If that weren’t head-spinning enough, Jack Smith isn’t the one overseeing these cases and the hundreds of other January 6 prosecutions that are similar to it—the Justice Department and the US Attorney’s Office in Washington are. As a result, in principle, he’s not directly involved with how Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar defends these prosecutions before the justices. As she put it in a brief urging the court to decline hearing these appeals: Even accepting that the law under attack is an evidence-tampering statute doesn’t help the defendants. “Preventing the Members of Congress from validating the state certificates thus constitutes evidence-focused obstruction,” Prelogar wrote.
Court observers are abuzz, if not outright skeptical, that a majority on the Supreme Court has any appetite for undermining hundreds of federal prosecutions, let alone ones against Trump. If there’s any comfort in this tangled web, it is that the justices have had very little tolerance for anything related to Trump’s disruption of the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. From rejecting his and Texas’s long-shot bid to overturn the election results in the states Biden won to siding with the January 6 committee to declining his intervention in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents dispute, their patience appears to be wearing thin. If that pattern holds, there’s a reasonable chance that a majority won’t let him get away with subverting what remains of our democracy.
I’ll confess that did make my head spin a little bit. (Maybe it’s time for me to take a walk and have a drink!) But it’s fascinating stuff even if I don’t actually have much faith in the Supreme Court to do the right thing. But you never know. The idea of overturning all the January 6th cases does seem a bit much.
Stay tuned. This is going to be one of the most momentous times in American judicial history. Let’s just hope it’s momentous in a good way for a change…
Happy Hollandaise, everyone!