The Trial of the Century Will Begin . . . Later

There was some breathless commentary this week about the fact that the proposed March 4 trial date in Biden special counsel Jack Smith’s election-interference case against former president Donald Trump has been removed from the court’s calendar. In fact, this is just an administrative recognition of what, for weeks, has been an inevitable postponement.

I explained a few weeks back that the former president’s strategy has been “delay, delay, delay.” The immunity issue, on which (as this is written) we are still awaiting a decision from the three-judge D.C. Circuit panel, is more important to Trump because it was appealable pre-trial than because of the substance of his immunity claim (which is unlikely to prevail — indeed, the case is on appeal because the lower court already ruled against the former president). To repeat, when a case is on appeal, jurisdiction over it is transferred to the appellate court, which means the district-court judge — here, Judge Tanya Chutkan — cannot act on it.