Former President Donald Trump appealed to the US Supreme Court on Monday (12) claiming that he is entitled to presidential immunity so that he will not be prosecuted in the case in which he is accused of having conspired to alter the results of the elections in the country in 2020. This is one of four lawsuits he is currently responding to.
It is worth remembering that last week, a US court had already ruled that he does not have this right and that he can be tried for involvement in the invasion of the US Congress. His defense asked the Supreme Court to suspend this decision.
Three of the Supreme Court’s nine justices were nominated by Trump, ensuring a 6-3 conservative majority on the Court.
As a result, the defense’s claim was that Trump was president at the time and, therefore, was entitled to legal protections, such as being prevented from being criminally prosecuted.
The prosecution, however, argued that he acted as a candidate and not as president when he pressured officials to try to change the outcome of the election.
After Democrat Joe Biden was elected president of the United States in 2020, Trump spent weeks publicly insisting that he was actually the one who had won. On January 6, 2021, he encouraged a crowd to go to the Capitol as Biden’s election was made official.
Last Tuesday (6), however, judges at the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in the United States, rejected the request. The trial in this case had been scheduled for March this year, but the judges decided to postpone it, and have not yet set a new date.
Trump’s defense wants the trial to take place only after the US presidential elections in November.
