Poor Ankush Khardori. The Trump-despising Politico senior writer is not taking the July 1 Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity well. Keep in mind that Khardori is the self-confessed charter member of the anti-Trump legal echo chamber who gushed over Nancy Pelosi describing the Trump indictments with such loving words as “exquisite” as well as “beautiful and intricate.”
As one could guess, Khardori’s reaction on Tuesday to the Supreme Court’s decision ignited his rage to heights of hyperbole as reflected in the title of his angry diatribe, “The Supreme Court Gave Trump a Stunning Gift — and Rewrote the Constitution.”
Khardori went so far over the edge that he demanded that the J-6 trial be sped up at such a furious rate so that even if the trial could not be concluded by election day, then at least it could jam up candidate Donald Trump by having the trial already proceeding by November 5:
Special counsel Jack Smith and his colleagues at the Justice Department have been put in a terribly difficult position, but they should advance the case as aggressively as possible, even if that means that it cannot be fully resolved by Election Day.
…One way to go forward would be for Chutkan to solicit briefs as quickly as possible on the parties’ position on the status of the indictment in the wake of the court’s ruling. Trump will continue to argue that it should all be dismissed or held in abeyance for some reason or another, but Smith and his team can present their best case for continuing the prosecution after the Supreme Court’s ruling.
If for some reason there are evidentiary questions that need to be resolved, those hearings should happen as quickly as possible, and the government should present as much evidence as is reasonably possible — including evidence concerning the conduct on Trump’s part that remains at issue in the prosecution, and including evidence that has not yet become public.
Prosecutors usually do not like to have trial witnesses testify in pretrial proceedings — among other things, because they can potentially be impeached at trial with any inconsistent statements — but this is the rare situation where that preference should be ignored. If there are hearings of any sort before November where it would be appropriate, prosecutors should consider calling people like Raffensperger and even Pence.
Chutkan’s overriding objective should be to move this case as expeditiously as possible before November, even if that means trying to resolve all of these questions and perhaps even scheduling a trial that may not end before Election Day.
Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! Such an urgency for speed sounds more appropriate for building an emergency space vehicle to escape a doomed Planet Earth in “When Worlds Collide” than to achieve a politically weaponized lawfare trial by election day.
Who deserves blame for this sorry state of affairs? Khardori blames Trump first, but ultimately blames everybody in DC:
The person who is responsible for this regrettable state of affairs, first and foremost, is Trump himself — for engaging in the outrageous conduct that necessitated the prosecution in the first place. But this saga could also have been avoided if Senate Republicans had convicted Trump in his second impeachment, after Jan. 6, and put the nail in the coffin of his political career once and for all.
After that, blame the Biden administration. Had the Justice Department done its job correctly, Trump could have been tried, convicted and perhaps off the political stage by now. The needless delay in bringing the case created the very obvious risk that the country now confronts — that Trump might lawfully return to power without facing criminal accountability for his conduct. If he is reelected, this case will be vaporized one way or another.
The Supreme Court’s decision is a failure of law in the purest sense. It is, in fact, politics masquerading as law. But today’s outcome also represents a failure of politics — or, more to the point, of politicians. Many of them, on both sides of the aisle, made bad decisions that contributed to Monday’s outcome. All of them share some responsibility for where we find ourselves.