CHARLESTON — West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey has joined a coalition of 22 states asking the U.S. Supreme Court to grant a request to pause the D.C. Circuit’s ruling in former President Donald Trump’s immunity case on charges he plotted to overturn the 2020 election results.
“Jack Smith’s convoluted reasoning on the timing of the case is absurd, to say the least — when it took the special prosecutor two years to lodge charges,” Morrisey said. “It’s obvious Smith is rushing this and wants to try the case before the 2024 presidential election.
“How much more political can this get?”
If nothing else, the coalition says the timing is suspicious and “warrants explanation.”
“But the United States has never offered one,” the coalition wrote in the brief. “But the public has its theory: Commentators across the political spectrum have connected the dots between the rush to trial and the looming November 2024 election.
“President Biden himself, in November 2022, declared that Donald Trump ‘will not take power …. I’m making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next president again.’”
On February 12, Trump’s attorneys asked the Supreme Court to stay the unanimous decision from the D.C. Circuit the previous week that rejected his claims of immunity from election subversion charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
“Conducting a months-long criminal trial of President Trump at the height of election season will radically disrupt President Trump’s ability to campaign against President Biden,” Trump’s attorneys wrote in their request, also saying the ruling “threatens immediate irreparable injury to the First Amendment interests of President Trump and tens of millions of American voters, who are entitled to hear President Trump’s campaign message as they decide how to cast their ballots in November.”
Morrisey joined the Alabama-led brief with Alaska, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.
