Chief Justice Roberts urged swift immunity ruling in Trump’s favor – report | US Supreme Court

John Roberts Jr. used his position as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court to urge his colleagues to rule quickly — and in favor of — Donald Trump ahead of the decision that granted him and other presidents immunity for official acts, a New York Times investigation found Sunday.

The new report details what happened behind the scenes at the nation’s highest court during three recent high court decisions that focused on — and generally favored — the former Republican president.

Based on leaked memos, documentation of the proceedings and interviews with court insiders, the Times report suggests that Roberts — who was appointed to the high court during the presidency of Republican George W. Bush — played an unusually active role in the three cases at issue. And he wrote the majority opinions on all three.

In addition to the ruling on the president’s immunity, the decisions collectively blocked the removal of any official — including Trump — from a federal ballot. They also declared that the administration had overstepped its bounds on obstruction of justice charges brought against participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack that the former president’s supporters targeted on Congress.

According to The Times, Roberts sent a memo to his Supreme Court colleagues last February about the criminal charges against Trump for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.

In the leaked memo, the Times reported that he criticized a lower court decision that allowed the case to proceed — and argued to the other justices that Trump was protected by presidential immunity. He reportedly said the Supreme Court should hear the case and give Trump more protection from prosecution.

“I think it is likely that we will look at the separation of powers analysis differently,” the Times quoted Roberts as saying in the private memo to the other Supreme Court justices.

According to the Times, some conservative justices wanted to delay the decision on the presidential immunity case until Trump was done with his second term in the White House in November. But Roberts pushed for an early hearing and decision — and ultimately wrote the majority opinion himself.

Before the opinion and ruling were made public, the Times reported that Justice Brett Kavanaugh had praised Roberts for the ruling, calling it “extraordinary.” Their conservative colleague Justice Neil Gorsuch — who, like Kavanaugh, was appointed to the Supreme Court during the Trump presidency — called it “remarkable.”

The ruling, which came on July 1, established that former presidents are entitled to some immunity from criminal prosecution. Conservatives and liberals alike saw it as a huge victory for Trump, who — amid a series of legal challenges — is awaiting sentencing on a May conviction for falsifying corporate records to cover up hush-money payments to a porn star who claimed to have had an extramarital sexual encounter with him.

The high court then returned the case to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the federal case against Trump for allegedly participating in an illegal effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election. That left her with the task of figuring out how to apply the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision.

The Times also reported that Roberts told his colleagues he wanted the decision to be unanimous and unsigned in the case over whether individual states could remove Trump from the ballot based on language in the U.S. Constitution prohibiting insurrection.

All nine justices initially agreed that Trump should remain on state ballots. But then, the Times reports, four conservative justices proposed amendments to the ruling, including a proposal that Congress should approve the enforcement of the Constitution’s ban on insurrectionists.

Four justices — liberals Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and conservative Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett — reportedly dissented, saying they felt it went too far and writing concurring statements of dissent, the Times reported.

Ultimately, Roberts sided with the four remaining justices — conservative colleagues Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito Jr. — in an opinion he wrote himself and that was unsigned.

In the third case the Times investigated, involving obstruction of justice charges against participants in the Capitol attack, Roberts had originally assigned Alito to write the majority opinion.

But then in May, Roberts — in an unusual move — informed the court that he would write the opinion himself. The chief justice’s action came just days after Alito was embroiled in scandal over reports that his wife flew an upside-down flag outside the couple’s home following the attack on the Capitol. Flying upside-down flags, a universal sign of distress, has been linked to a movement that amplified Trump’s lies about the 2020 election that was wrongly stolen from him.

The Times wrote that it was unclear whether there was a connection between the flag scandal and Roberts’ decision to write the op-ed on the Capitol attack, in which a 6-3 conservative majority ruled that the federal government could not apply its obstruction of justice statute so broadly. The justices did not respond to the outlet’s request for comment.