Watergate prosecutor predicts 'Trump is losing' these two major court battles in 2024

Even though the Michigan supreme court ruled Wednesday that former President Donald Trump can stay on the 2024 Republican primary ballot, a former federal prosecutor said that won't soothe the ex-president's legal and political woes.

Jill Wine-Banks — who was one of the Department of Justice's top prosecutors in the Watergate scandal of the 1970s — tweeted the news of the Michigan supreme court's decision, noting that despite leaving Trump on the primary ballot, it left the door open to exclude him from the general election ballot at a later date. Wine-Banks said the latest decision from the Mitten State's high court "increases chances SCOTUS will decide meaning of 14thA, Sec3," referring to the Supreme Court of the United States' pending decision on the Colorado supreme court disqualifying Trump based on the insurrection clause in the 14th Amendment.

"If you're having trouble figuring out who's on first, here's the scorecard. Trump is losing -- even though Michigan Supreme Court ruled, unlike Colorado's, that he could stay on the primary ballot, Colorado is right and SCOTUS will have to decide the conflict between states," Wine-Banks posted to X (formerly Twitter).

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"Plus, I predict Trump will lose against Smith on claims he has immunity, is protected by double jeopardy because of impeachment, and that Jan 6 is not a violation of obstruction of official proceeding," Wine-banks added in a separate tweet. "Law and facts and precedent say [that] Smith will win."

Wine-Banks' assertion that SCOTUS will uphold the Anderson v. Griswold decision from the Colorado supreme court that blocked the former president from appearing on the Centennial State's GOP primary ballot is an opinion shared by several other prominent legal experts. Last week, University of Baltimore School of Law professor Kimberly Wehle wrote that the Anderson decision was guided by the same "judicial conservatism" of originalism and textualism that numerous SCOTUS justices — including justices Trump appointed during his presidency — have used to guide their previous rulings.

"If the purportedly conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court are intellectually honest about their jurisprudential approach to the law, this case should not be hard," Wehle wrote in an essay for The Atlantic. "For conservative justices to abandon that hierarchy now, on a case this consequential, would destroy whatever guise of impartiality the Court has left."

Additionally, Sidney Blumenthal — a senior adviser to former President Bill Clinton — wrote that siding with Trump in the Anderson case would undercut the legitimacy SCOTUS needs to have its decisions carry weight. In an op-ed for The Guardian, Blumenthal said the Court's conservative bloc "faces a brutal dilemma: either uphold Trump’s disqualification or shred the doctrine on which their conservative jurisprudence stands."

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