The Supreme Court now has all the legal documents it will need to act on former President Donald Trump’s claim that he is constitutionally immune to criminal prosecution, raising the question of how soon the Justices will move.

Trump’s legal team, in one of the few times that they have acted to file court papers swiftly, took only one day to send to the Court their 15-page reply to arguments by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith urging the Court to move rapidly.  Thursday evening’s filing, though, asked the Court to take its time to review his immunity claim.

“Reaching a decision on immunity will require careful and deliberate review [by the Court] of myriad historical sources,” the new document said, adding that the Justices might even have to arrange for the development of new facts before any trial could begin.

Prosecutor Smith has said that, if the Court moves quickly, Trump’s trial on criminal charges growing out of the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol three years ago could begin in about three months.

In reply, Trump’s lawyers quoted a conservative law professor’s comment that it would be “wildly unfair” for Trump to have to begin defending himself at a trial without a good deal more time to prepare for that proceeding.  The trial in the case involving charges related to the January 6, 2021, uprising will involve “almost 13 million pages” of documents, “thousands of hours of video footage, and hundreds of potential witnesses,” the Trump team wrote.

The trial involving the January 6 charges had been scheduled to start in Washington, D.C., on March 4, but District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan put it off because of Trump’s sweeping claim of legal immunity.  It is a long-standing rule in federal criminal cases that an immunity claim should be settled before a trial can begin.

With the filing of Trump’s reply brief, the next move will be the Court’s.  Although the Justices will be meeting Friday in private to discuss pending cases, the fact that the Trump case papers have just been completed probably means that it is too soon for the Court to act at that conference.

In fact, under a schedule that Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., spelled out earlier this week, the filings on Trump’s appeal would not have been completed until some time next week.  Lawyers on both sides took a good deal less time to file.

One reason why Roberts may have chosen that timing is that the Court is currently busy preparing for a new round of hearings starting next Tuesday and, besides, it is spending some time right now working on a decision in the historic case testing whether Trump will be disqualified from running because of the 14^th Amendment and its application to the January 6 events.   That case was heard on February 8 on an expedited schedule; it is separate from the new case on the immunity question.

The Court will not be in session next Monday; that is a legal holiday.  It could release decisions on cases it has heard earlier this term as soon as Tuesday morning.

The Trump team’s Thursday filing in the immunity controversy devoted its most energetic arguments to a theme that the team had relied upon repeatedly as Trump’s legal woes multiplied: that all of the charges against him are politically motivated, designed to interfere with his presidential election campaign this year.  Trump faces 91 criminal charges, under federal or state law, in four separate jurisdictions – federal charges in Washington, D.C., and Fort Pierce, FL, and state charges in Atlanta and New York City.  The New York trial now has a starting date of March 25, which probably will make it the first of the four to begin.

The new Trump document argued that Prosecutor Smith is pressing for a prompt trial for political reasons.  Smith, the lawyers added, “seeks to bring President Trump to trial and to secure a conviction before the November election in which President Trump is the leading candidate against President Biden….This Court need not disregard what is obvious to everyone else.”

The filing also suggested that Smith’s “partisan motivation…threatens to tarnish this Court’s own procedures with a similar appearance of partisanship and political motivation.”