Hello and welcome back to The Collision. A lot has happened in the past week, from Hunter Biden getting indicted on tax fraud to the special counsel investigating Donald Trump requesting the Supreme Court settle a dispute about presidential immunity—and the sooner, the better.
We’ll get into both topics in a bit.
The Docket
- The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to formalize an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. The party-line vote saw all 221 Republicans support the inquiry after the White House indicated it would not consider subpoenas from the investigating committees valid unless the inquiry were official. That resistance is reportedly what compelled the holdout Republicans skeptical of the impeachment investigation to get on board, even if some of them say the evidence of wrongdoing by Biden is lacking.
- Hunter Biden refused to testify before House Republicans on Wednesday, defying a subpoena. Instead, the president’s son held a press conference outside the Capitol to demand a public hearing rather than the private interview requested by the House Oversight and Judiciary committees. The GOP chairman of those respective committees, Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan, said Wednesday they will “initiate contempt of Congress proceedings.”
- Testimony ended Wednesday in former President Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York. Trump was scheduled to testify on Monday for a second time—this time, as a witness for his defense team—but the Republican frontrunner announced last weekend that he would not. Judge Arthur Engoron will render a verdict sometime early next year over just how much Trump will owe after making a summary judgment that the former president had inflated his wealth. Engoron will also make a judgment about whether Trump will be prevented from running his business.
- A fun scoop from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “The apology letters written by two of the attorneys who struck plea agreements in the Fulton County election interference case are just one sentence long and hand-written on lined notebook paper.” Be sure to click over to see these apology letters from Scott Hall, Sidney Powell, and Kenneth Chesebro.
SCOTUS May Weigh In on Presidential Immunity
This week, special counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court to answer the question: Is Donald Trump immune from prosecution because he was president at the time of his alleged crimes? Tanya Chutkan, the federal judge presiding over Trump’s election interference trial in Washington, decided earlier this month he did not have absolute immunity from prosecution. Smith is now trying to skip the next step—allowing Trump’s team to appeal the question to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit—and go straight to the Supreme Court.
Chutkan wrote in her opinion that Trump’s “four-year service as commander in chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens.” But, of course, that misses the point a bit. The question isn’t whether Trump is immune from criminal process for the rest of his life because he was once president. The question is whether Trump can be prosecuted for official acts he took while president if a later president believes those acts violated federal criminal statutes.
Michael Warren is a politics editor at The Dispatch and is based in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the company in 2023, he was an on-air reporter at CNN and a senior writer at the Weekly Standard. When Mike is not reporting, writing, editing, and podcasting, he is probably spending time with his wife and three sons.
Sarah Isgur is a senior editor at The Dispatch and is based in northern Virginia. Prior to joining the company in 2019, she had worked in every branch of the federal government and on three presidential campaigns. She’s also a ABC News contributor and the author of Last Branch Standing, a deep dive into the inner workings of the Supreme Court. When Sarah is not hosting podcasts or writing newsletters, she’s probably sending uplifting stories about spiders to Jonah, who only pretends to love all animals.
