'You got to be kidding me': A storm foretold

Legal experts outraged over latest SCOTUS announcement.

Two months after the US Supreme Court heard Donald Trump lawyers argue for the former president's immunity against federal prosecution, the high court has yet to issue a ruling — and won't until at least next week.

Politico's Josh Gerstein reported Wednesday via X (formerly Twitter), "#SCOTUS announces Wednesday June 26 as expected day for release of additional opinion(s). (Tomorrow aka Friday June 21 was already announced.)"

Several legal experts immediately slammed the majority conservative court's move.

Constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis said, "You have GOT to be kidding me. July here we come? Or bury us in everything that it’s hard to digest?"

Max Burns wrote, "The Supreme Court works two days a week for 30 minutes per day, and they feel zero accountability to the American people to deliver timely opinions on major questions of law."

The Nation's Elie Mystal lamented, "Oh, so they're gonna release immunity the day *before* the debate. Cool... cool... (walks into the ocean)."

Democracy Docket founder Mark Elias wrote via X (formerly Twitter), "Through delay, the Supreme Court has effectively conveyed immunity on Donald Trump. He has gotten what he wanted—to push off his federal criminal trial until after the election."

The legal expert also spoke with MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace, saying, "Let's be clear, there is nothing in the Constitution that gives presidents immunity. In fact, quite to the contrary, the text of the Constitution suggests that presidents don't have immunity, since the legislative branch does explicitly have immunity that is not shared with the executive branch."

Elias emphasized, "But at least some members of the Supreme Court, by manipulating the calendar, by simply deciding to hear a case they didn't have to, and then sitting on how case that quickly that case got decided, they have granted Donald Trump the relief he sought, which is that there will be no trial before the November election. And that is a tragedy for democracy. It is a thumb on the scale, and frankly, it does nothing other than undermine peoples' confidence in the US Supreme Court as neutral arbiters."

Let the secrets fly

Roger Stone'; Judge Cannon is a staunch Trump loyalist

Cannon has repeatedly delayed the trial, and Ty Cobb — a former Trump White House lawyer turned Trump critic — has attacked her for showing a "palpable bias" in Trump's favor.

Trump ally Roger Stone, according to The New Republic's Hafiz Rashid, has implied that Cannon is a staunch Trump loyalist. And the New York Times is reporting that two of Cannon's "more experienced colleagues" urged her to "pass up" the case after it was assigned to her in June 2023.

Rashid notes that liberal filmmaker Lauren Windsor secretly recorded Stone during a March 19 event at Mar-a-Lago. And he commented, "We are beating them. I think the judge is on the verge of dismissing the charges against him in Florida."

Former federal prosecutor Joyce White Vance, known for her work as a legal analyst for MSNBC, discussed Stone's comments in her June 20 SubStack column.

Vance wrote, "To the extent Stone is insinuating something more sinister, that they have judges in their pocket, that's entirely different, entirely wrong."

The former federal prosecutor also said of Stone, "Perhaps he's just making it up when he says Judge Cannon will soon dismiss the case against Donald Trump and that they have other judges available during the election. But given his background and history, it would be foolish not to be concerned."

According to New York Times reporters Charlie Savage and Alan Feuer, one of the federal judges who approached Cannon in 2023 and urged her to "decline the high-profile" Mar-a-Lago documents case was Cecilia M. Altonaga.

"But Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, wanted to keep the case and refused the judges' entreaties," Savage and Feuer report. "Her assignment drew attention because she has scant trial experience and had previously shown unusual favor to Mr. Trump by intervening in a way that helped him in the criminal investigation that led to his indictment, only to be reversed in a sharply critical rebuke by a conservative appeals court panel."

The Times journalists add, "The extraordinary and previously undisclosed effort by Judge Cannon's colleagues to persuade her to step aside adds another dimension to the increasing criticism of how she has gone on to handle the case."

Rashid notes the Times' reporting in his New Republic article.

Rashid observes, "Stone's words, if he is hinting at Cannon working with Trump, would seemingly be corroborated by a Thursday New York Times report revealing that the Trump-appointed judge was urged by senior federal judges to hand off Trump's classified documents case to other judges with more experience, who didn’t have previous involvement interfering in the case, as Cannon had. Cecilia Altonaga, the chief U.S. district judge for the Southern District of Florida and Cannon's superior, even reached out to Cannon and told her taking the case would be 'bad optics.'"

In new audio obtained by Rolling Stone, documentary filmmaker Lauren Windsor and journalist Ally Sammarco spoke with Stone at an event at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this year while posing as conservative Catholics who were fans of the far-right activist. At one point in his conversation with Sammarco, Stone told her that Trump's 2024 campaign is far more prepared than the former president's 2020 campaign to dispute election results. He even suggested that Trump has friends in high places who will lend him a hand when election results are litigated.

"At least this time when they do it, you have a lawyer and a judge — his home phone number standing by — so you can stop it," Stone told Sammarco. "We made no preparations last time, none … There are technical, legal steps that we have to take to try and have a more honest election. We’re not there yet, but there’s things that can be done."

Sammarco asked Stone a leading question about how the Trump campaign planned to stop "voter fraud" like "ballot harvesting," and the Trump advisor assured her that for some friendly MAGA-adjacent state governments, "it’ll be easier to stop. In other places, it won’t."

"We should be suing in half a dozen places,” Stone continued. “I mean we’re finally now on an offensive footing."

Other parts of Sammarco's conversation with Stone captured him praising the Trump-led takeover of the Republican National Committee and the elevation of his daughter-in-law, Lara, to become co-chair of the GOP's national campaign apparatus. He said this change means Republicans can spend "lots more" money on challenging elections. He then boasted about favorable "changes in state law, real-time voter list monitoring, going to court as we just did to challenge some of the vote laws," and bragged that the campaign "went into court to sue in Michigan over the hand [written] ballots."

While Stone didn't say the name of the judge the campaign is allegedly close with, he did tell Windsor that the campaign was prepared to mount a multi-state offensive to disrupt certification of election results using "lawyers, judges [and] technology." He also hinted that Trumpworld viewed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon — whom Trump appointed to the judiciary just months before he was voted out of office — as a fellow traveler, given her repeated accommodations of Trump's delay tactics in the federal classified documents case.

"We are beating them,” Stone is heard saying to Sammarco. “[Trump’s] trial in Georgia is falling apart. I think the judge is on the verge of dismissing the charges against him in Florida. They’re delayed in New York City and they’re now delayed in Washington.”