President Donald Trump has been trying to get E. Jean Carroll to return the $5 million (plus interest) that she finally received this month from the case in which a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Trump argued for clawing back the funds because he has a pending rehearing petition at the Supreme Court, where he’s again trying to convince the justices to take up his appeal in the case that resulted in that jury award.
After the justices declined to review his initial petition in June, the federal judge in New York who presided over the case ordered the funds released to Carroll earlier this month. Trump’s attempt to halt the judge’s order is pending in a federal appeals court.
But the Supreme Court just signaled that it could soon issue an order that brings a truly final resolution to the matter.
The Supreme Court docket shows that, on Thursday, the court “distributed” Trump’s rehearing petition to the justices, which is a routine step before they decide whether to grant or deny review. Though the court is on a summer recess before the next term starts in October, the justices publish order lists over the summer that mainly contain petition denials. They issued such a list earlier this week.
According to the court calendar, the next list is scheduled for release on Aug. 17, so we could see action on Trump’s rehearing petition then.
That action would most likely be a denial.
As the trial judge noted in his July 8 ruling rejecting further delay, successful Supreme Court rehearing petitions are “rare birds.” On that note, Carroll’s lawyers said that, as far as they knew, only once in the last 75 years has the court agreed to straight up reconsider its denial of a petition, and that was in the landmark case of Boumediene v. Bush about the rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees. They said more recent reconsiderations — the latest one being in 2018 — involved the justices sending cases back to lower courts for further review, rather than the justices taking up full review themselves.
“If successful petitions for rehearing are ‘rare birds,’” then Trump’s pending rehearing petition “cannot possibly get off the ground,” Carroll’s lawyers said in their opposition to Trump’s claw-back motion in the circuit court.
We may learn Aug. 17 whether the justices agree. They haven’t requested a response from Carroll and, under court rules, they won’t grant a rehearing petition without first doing so, unless there are “extraordinary circumstances.” It’s unclear what those circumstances would be here.
In the meantime, we could hear before that from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit on Trump’s motion to force Carroll to return the funds. The long-shot nature of his Supreme Court rehearing petition is only one of her arguments against that temporary relief in the circuit court, another one being that a prior stipulation between the parties said that she gets the money upon the denial of Trump’s petition, which already happened in June, not his rehearing petition.
Whatever happens with his circuit motion and high court rehearing petition, there will still be the separate matter of his appeal in the other case Carroll won against him that resulted in an $83.3 million defamation award. Unlike the $5 million case, that one stems from Trump’s defamation of Carroll while he was president (during his first term), and he is pressing claims of presidential immunity in that appeal. One of his lawyers said he will be filing that new petition by July 28.
In the pending rehearing petition, Trump said his forthcoming petition in the $83.3 million case gives the justices a good reason to reconsider the $5 million case denial, because he said his presidential acts were wrongly used as evidence against him in the $5 million case, too. Therefore, he argued in the rehearing petition, resolution of his forthcoming $83.3 million petition will “bear on the proper disposition” of the $5 million case because of the Supreme Court’s 2024 presidential immunity ruling in Trump’s favor, which curbed the use of official presidential acts as evidence to impose liability for other conduct.
Of course, the justices knew about the forthcoming petition in the $83.3 million case when they rejected his $5 million petition in June. So it’s unclear what new information has come to light that would warrant reconsideration. But we should learn soon enough, possibly Aug. 17, whether the court will finally put an end to the litigation in the $5 million case, though that would still leave open the question of how the litigation over the much larger award will conclude. We might not know whether the justices are interested in reviewing that second case until the fall, at least. Even if they deny Trump’s rehearing petition in the first case, they would still be free to review the second one.
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