There’s been a mysterious subplot running through President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court appeal against writer E. Jean Carroll.

For months now, his petition has been pending in his effort to upend the $5 million in damages awarded to Carroll by a New York jury that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.

Yet the justices keep rescheduling the petition from consideration at their private conferences where they decide which new cases to take up. The court doesn’t explain why it reschedules petitions.

I speculated in the most recent edition of the Deadline: Legal Newsletter that perhaps the court, or at least some of the justices, have wanted to put off considering Trump’s petition in order to weigh it alongside another one he has coming, in his separate but related appeal in the case in which Carroll won $83.3 million in defamation damages.

I noted that, on top of involving more money, the second appeal raises issues of presidential immunity and federal government intervention that the high court majority that previously granted Trump broad criminal immunity may be more interested in than the less legally enticing (to the justices) evidentiary issues he raised in the pending petition. (The forthcoming petition involves statements Trump made while he was president during his first term.)

On Tuesday, the same day Trump’s petition was rescheduled yet again, one of his personal lawyers wrote to the justices to suggest that they “may wish to consider the petitions together” once the upcoming one is filed.

That lawyer, Justin Smith, whom Trump has nominated for a federal judgeship, said in the letter that the president plans to bring that new petition to the justices “within the next month.” Smith made a brief case for considering the petitions together by writing that they involve “the same parties” and overlap because they both stem from rejections of Trump by the same New York-based appeals court over dissent from judges he appointed.

Smith’s letter comes after recent reports of a Trump Justice Department probe that could implicate Carroll.

Even if Trump files the new petition very soon, that doesn’t mean we will soon know what the justices will do with it. Carroll will still have a chance to respond before the justices decide whether to grant review; it takes four justices to agree to grant review. And, as we have seen with the already pending appeal, the justices aren’t on any deadline to decide what to do with either petition.

Even if the justices decide to grant review in one or both of the petitions, the cases wouldn’t be argued until the next court term, which starts in October, with a decision not due until next summer.

The justices are currently in the process of releasing this term’s final opinions after wrapping up hearings in April. They grant review of new cases on a rolling basis throughout the term before they break for the summer. Just before they start their next term in October, they hold a big private conference (known as the “long conference”) in which they consider petitions that have piled up over the summer.

We still don’t know when the second Trump v. Carroll petition will be first up for consideration at one of the justices’ conferences. But since it hasn’t even been filed yet, it’s not imminent.

Smith’s letter doesn’t solve the mystery of what is happening with Trump’s pending petition behind the scenes. Indeed, especially if the court has been rescheduling it to await the forthcoming petition, then the letter might not add much besides a vague time frame in which to expect that new petition. But whether it’s because Smith suggested it or not, it won’t be surprising if the justices wait to act on both petitions until they’re both fully briefed.

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