The Daily Fuckup

Jack Smith tried to pull Donald Trump’s immunity fight out of the usual legal crawl on Dec. 11, 2023, when the special counsel asked the Supreme Court to take the case and decide it quickly. The filing targeted Trump’s claim that he cannot be prosecuted for conduct tied to his effort to overturn the 2020 election, and it sought to move the issue straight to the high court before the lower-court process could drag on. The Supreme Court docket shows the petition was filed that day, and the court later denied the request to take the case before judgment on Dec. 22, 2023. ([justice.gov](https://www.justice.gov/osg/brief/united-states-v-trump?utm_source=openai))

The move did not resolve the immunity question. It was an attempt to accelerate it. Smith’s filing asked the justices to bypass the slower path through the D.C. Circuit and settle a threshold question that could decide whether the election-subversion case proceeds at all. Trump had already been pressing the opposite argument: that the case should pause while he pursued immunity claims in court. The special counsel’s answer was to ask for a faster ruling, not to let the issue sit while the calendar worked in Trump’s favor. ([justice.gov](https://www.justice.gov/osg/brief/united-states-v-trump?utm_source=openai))

That timing mattered because the immunity dispute sits at the center of the prosecution, not on the edges. If Trump were right, the case could be narrowed or delayed sharply. If the claim failed, the prosecution would keep moving with one of Trump’s main defenses weakened. Smith’s petition was designed to cut down on delay and force a ruling while the election year was already approaching, keeping the case from disappearing into months of appellate back-and-forth. The strategy was procedural, but the stakes were plain: whether a former president can face criminal charges for actions taken while trying to stay in power after losing an election. ([justice.gov](https://www.justice.gov/osg/brief/united-states-v-trump?utm_source=openai))

Even so, the filing was not itself a win for prosecutors. On Dec. 11, the best description was that Smith had asked for an expedited path. The justices did not grant that request immediately, and the Supreme Court later refused to take the case before judgment on Dec. 22. That left the immunity fight alive, but not yet broken in Smith’s favor. The government’s message was clear anyway: it wanted the case moving, and it did not want Trump to turn appellate procedure into an open-ended stall. ([justice.gov](https://www.justice.gov/osg/brief/united-states-v-trump?utm_source=openai))