Special counsel Jack Smith has the tools on his own to make sure the Supreme Court responds to former President Donald Trump's stay request in the immunity challenge to his criminal charges as quickly as possible, legal expert Lisa Rubin argued on MSNBC's "Deadline: White House" on Tuesday — a matter where prompt action could decide whether or not the former president stands trial before the election at all.
"Lisa, to say time is of the essence, an understatement," said anchor Alicia Menendez. "Your sense of when Jack Smith gets this done?"
"Probably before the end of the week," said Rubin. "The justices have a day on their calendar for — expressly marked off as a conference day. That's going to be at the very least a day where the justices get together and talk about cases they could hear. If you're Jack Smith, because a reply from Donald Trump is not called for, you want that brief in before that conference and allow the justices an opportunity to potentially act on Donald Trump's stay motion by the end of the week. That doesn't necessarily mean they will, but that they could."
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"Talk about what could happen," said Menendez. "What else could happen?"
"They could order a reply brief from Trump, or Trump asks for a reply," said Rubin. "They could take their time and wait until the deadline and then hold it over until they're ready to make a decision. I looked at some past stays involving Donald Trump. One thing I found is in the case where Donald Trump was litigating with the January 6th Committee over his assertion of executive privilege, he asked for the Supreme Court to do a review and asked for a stay simultaneously. That's different than this. In that case the petition and motion were filed on December 23, 2021. The court made its decision a little bit less than a month later."
So ultimately, she added, "if that past is prologue, even though there's a week deadline here, we could have an up or down answer on the stay itself within three to four weeks, even if, as in the executive privilege case, the cert wasn't decided until four weeks later."
Watch the video below or at the link.
Lisa Rubin details Jack Smith's next steps at Supreme Courtwww.youtube.com
