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Trump’s Supreme Court Stay Bid Sat Pending on Feb. 17 as Immunity Fight Moved Forward
As of Feb. 17, 2024, Trump’s request to stay the D.C. Circuit mandate was still pending, and the Supreme Court had not yet issued any order.
Edition · February 17, 2024
Trump’s Immunity Gambit Runs Into the Supreme Court Wall
On February 17, 2024, the former president’s legal team was still trying to buy time in his election-interference case — and the push was getting uglier, louder, and more obviously about delay than law.
The day’s biggest Trump-world screwup was the increasingly naked attempt to stall the federal election-interference case by leaning on immunity theories that lower courts had already knocked down. The special counsel was pressing the Supreme Court to let the case move forward, while Trump’s lawyers were still trying to freeze it, which only sharpened the sense that the whole strategy was about outrunning the calendar, not vindicating principle. Separate reporting also showed the broader Trump legal machine continuing to bleed cash on defense while public-facing claims of persecution kept getting more aggressive.
Closing take
The throughline here is simple: when the defense stops sounding like a defense and starts sounding like a timeout request, everybody notices. That was the Trump posture on February 17 — delay first, argument second, and accountability never — which is not exactly a confidence-building legal theory.
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Trump’s Legal Spending Machine Keeps Burning Cash While He Talks Tough
Fresh disclosures and reporting around February showed Trump’s political operation pouring millions into legal bills, undercutting the idea that the party’s standard-bearer was an outsider victim of the system rather than a defendant feeding the system’s lawyers. The spending was growing fast enough to raise real questions about resources, priorities, and how long the money can keep flowing.