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Jack Smith has had a tough time prosecuting Donald Trump, especially considering his D.C. election subversion prosecution has been frozen pending Supreme Court action, but a former prosecutor said on Sunday that the special counsel has one more trick up his sleeve.

Trump faces charges in that case related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, as well as related efforts to allegedly undermine the presidential election in 2020 when Joe Biden beat the former president. With the case tied up, however, analysts have suggested that it won't reach trial before the election.

Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade appeared on MSNBC over the weekend to discuss the pending case.

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The host asked McQuade, "Which way are you expecting them to rule tomorrow? Who then gets to decide which of Trump's actions on January 6 can be subject to criminal prosecution?"

McQuade responds, saying, "Well, that is a line drawing I think we are going to see."

"I don't think it's going to be -- everything is immune or nothing is immune. I think that we will engage in some line drawing. It could be, one argument is, anything that Donald Trump did in his capacity as president is immune, and that which he did in his capacity as a candidate is not immune," she said. "If, for example, that is where they decide to draw the line, they need to have a hearing to go through all of the allegations in the indictment and decide, was Donald Trump acting in his capacity as president when he did this, or is candidate?"

She continues:

"I think much of it is no question as candidate. To me, in my mind, the one area of question is directions to the Justice Department, which, although they may have been abuse of his power, may arguably have been within his power."

Then, she says, the prosecutor could still make one more move:

"Jack Smith has one more card to play, which is to dismiss any allegations that are arguably within the scope of presidential power and proceeding with what is left, which would be a bulk of the indictment," she said. "I think ultimately, this case is going to go to trial and the allegations are going to stay, the indictment is going to be there. The question is, when will that be there?"

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Former President Donald Trump's MAGA supporters are despairing over a surprising voice of dissent in the Supreme Court's Jan. 6 ruling — a move that legal experts believe means she will rule against Trump's presidential immunity claim.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett's decision to oppose the court's ruling — which raises the bar for prosecutors to prove Jan. 6-related cases — spurred several legal experts to suggest she may rule against absolute immunity for the former president.

"One more data point for immunity," wrote Lee Kovarsky, a law professor at the University of Texas. "Justice Barrett does NOT sound like someone who has changed her mind in Trump's direction since oral argument."

Trump in April presented arguments to the Supreme Court that his public office protected him from prosecution in special counsel Jack Smith's federal election interference case.

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Smith argued Trump acted as a private citizen when he roused a mob of followers to attack the U.S. Capitol in a failed attempt to prevent President Joe Biden from taking office.

On Friday, Patrick Amoresano, a retired attorney and Republican, said Barrett, one of three justices appointed by the former president, was proving a surprise to those who believed she'd walk the conservative party line.

On Thursday, Barrett ruled in favor of a Biden administration policy and against conservative states that tried to block it.

"Barrett has become a real wildcard on the Court," wrote Amoresano. "One has to wonder how she'll vote on the issue of Trump's alleged immunity for election interference."

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Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a professor of Law at Stetson University, highlighted a specific passage from Barrett's dissent that she argues speaks volumes.

"By atextually narrowing §1512(c)(2)," Barrett wrote, "the Court has failed to respect the prerogatives of the political branches."

Torres-Spelliscy responded with a "wow" and added, "This could mean strange bedfellows for presidential immunity on Monday."

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Several MAGA supporters took to X Friday morning to complain of a lack of loyalty to Trump and make a similar prediction.

"Barrett is going to rule against Pres. Immunity," declared @bucksdeplorable. "Complete and total anti-Trump lib."

"Amy Coney Barrett has been awful," added @MiddleMAGA.com. "I bet she dissents in the Trump immunity ruling."

Christian Vanderbrouk, a contributor to the Bulwark and onetime administration official of former President George W. Bush, echoed the prediction but not the sentiment.

"Barrett's dissent gives me hope for Trump's presidential immunity case," Vanderbrouk wrote.

Democrats were jolted out of complacency about president Joe Biden's age with his alarming performance during his first debate against Donald Trump, and many party members are wondering what other options there might be.

The 81-year-old president and his supporters have brushed off concerns about his age by citing his accomplishments and pointing out that Trump is only three years younger, but the weaknesses cited by Biden's detractors were on clear display from the moment he first opened his mouth, reported Washington Post columnist Aaron Blake.

"The Democratic Party has spent much of the 2024 campaign burying its head in the sand over Americans’ concerns about President Biden’s age and mental sharpness," Blake wrote. "Rather than reckon with the problem, its most influential voices have cast it as an overblown media construct."

"But the party abruptly jerked its head out of that sand Thursday night, after a meandering, occasionally incoherent and almost universally panned first-debate performance from Biden," he added. "At its most pronounced, this has led to calls for Biden to step aside, including from those loyal to him."

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Biden has insisted he's staying in the race, but many Democrats who had been eager supporters and apologists for the octogenarian chief executive until he took the debate stage are suddenly looking past him for a new standard bearer.

"That instantaneous reaction is hugely significant, in and of itself," Blake wrote. "It’s the kind of conversation you avoid — and the party has strained to avoid — until you view it as absolutely necessary. Going there and then having Biden stay would only damage him further, because a bunch of allies would have said either implicitly or explicitly that he is not up to the task."

Blake listed 10 potential options starting, of course, with vice president Kamala Harris, who's about as unpopular as the president, but then moving on to a crop of likely contenders for 2028 whose timelines may be bumped forward by an election cycle.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer tops most lists as a female governor from a crucial state who already enjoys a national profile, while other governors like Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Gavin Newsom of California, Jared Polis of Colorado, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania are all likely to run for president in four years – if not sooner.

Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg nearly won both the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries in 2020 as the mayor of a midsize Midwestern city and can skillfully debate Fox News hosts and Republican lawmakers, and senators Rafael Warnock of Georgia and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota could make sense.

Michelle Obama "is the fantasy option for Democrats," Blake wrote, but she has expressed no interest in running for office at all.

"It’s truly a desperate plan and one that features many hurdles," Blake wrote. "It would almost surely require Biden’s assent to step aside — he holds almost all of the pledged delegates to August’s Democratic National Convention — and even then the process for replacing him is fraught. It’s not even clear that an alternative would render the party better off."

Attorney General Merrick Garland said that the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on how "obstruction of an official proceeding" can be used in Jan. 6 charges won't have much of an impact.

MSNBC contributor and Just Security fellow Adam Klasfeld quoted Garland saying, "The vast majority of the more than 1,400 defendants charged for their illegal actions on Jan. 6 will not be affected by this decision."

A pie chart from Just Security shows that of the 1,417 people charged, 71 defendants still awaiting trial have the law in question. This is approximately 5 percent of the charges. Most of those currently in prison are still facing charges and have other charges involved in their cases.

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Donald Trump is also among those charged in the Jan. 6 cases, but the cases have not yet gone to trial.

"There are no cases in which the Department charged a January 6 defendant only with the offense at issue in Fischer. For the cases affected by today’s decision, the Department will take appropriate steps to comply with the Court’s ruling," Garland also said.

Of the defendants who face misdemeanors, just 2.3 percent, or 33 people, face charges using Section 1512(c)(2), the law the Court decided on Friday. Those defendants also face other crimes, but are also only misdemeanors.

“January 6 was an unprecedented attack on the cornerstone of our system of government — the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next," Garland said in the Justice Department statement. "I am disappointed by today’s decision, which limits an important federal statute that the Department has sought to use to ensure that those most responsible for that attack face appropriate consequences."

Garland also promised, "We will continue to use all available tools to hold accountable those criminally responsible for the January 6 attack on our democracy.”

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The U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 to allow an Oregon city to target homeless people for sleeping on public property.

The ruling handed down Friday overturns a 2022 decision by 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, with the court's conservatives finding that the measures enacted by Grants Pass city officials do not violate the Constitution's Eighth Amendment banning cruel and unusual punishment, reported NBC News.

The ordinances prohibit sleeping or camping on publicly owned property and impose fines of up to several hundred dollars and exclusion orders banning individuals from public property.

The appeals court had ruled 2-1 that the city cannot “enforce its anti-camping ordinances against homeless persons for the mere act of sleeping outside with rudimentary protection from the elements, or for sleeping in their car at night, when there is no other place in the city for them to go.”

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That ruling had applied to all nine states in the 9th Circuit's jurisdiction, some of which have large populations of homeless people, including California.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor read from her dissent from the bench, saying "sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime."

"For some people, sleeping outside is their only option," Sotomayor said. "The City of Grants Pass jails and fines those people for sleeping anywhere in public at any time, including in their cars, if they use as little as a blanket to keep warm or a rolled-up shirt as a pillow. For people with no access to shelter, that punishes them for being homeless. That is unconscionable and unconstitutional."

The Supreme Court ruled Friday on two pivotal cases that strip federal agencies of substantial power to interpret the law.

Supreme Court Justices issued rulings in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce — both challenges to a decades-old precedent that says courts must defer to government agencies’s interpretation of statutes.

The vote was 6-3 in the former and 6-2 in the latter, from which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was recused, to overrule the court's 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

Chief Justice John Roberts authored the opinion and Justice Elena Kagan the dissent.

"Rather than safeguarding reliance interests, Chevron affirmatively destroys them," Roberts wrote, "Under Chevron, a statutory ambiguity, no matter why it is there, becomes a license authorizing an agency to change positions as much as it likes."

Kagan condemned the decision in no uncertain terms as blatant power-grab.

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"In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law," she writes.

"As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar. It defends that move as one (suddenly) required by the (nearly 80-year-old) Administrative Procedure Act. But the Act makes no such demand. Today’s decision is not one Congress directed. It is entirely the majority’s choice."