Background: Special counsel Jack Smith speaks to the media about an indictment of former President Donald Trump, Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2023, at an office of the Department of Justice in Washington (AP Photo: J. Scott Applewhite). Inset: Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks to the crowd during a caucus event, Dec. 2, 2023, at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (Geoff Stellfox/The Gazette via AP).
On the heels of a federal judge regaining jurisdiction in Donald Trump‘s Jan. 6 election subversion case, attorneys working under special counsel Jack Smith have asked for a brief delay to file a proposed agenda for additional proceedings in light of the “new precedent” the Supreme Court set with its sweeping ruling on presidential immunity.
As Law&Crime previously reported, presiding U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan set a status conference for the parties for Aug. 16. It was expected that she would begin to sort through a proposed schedule and broach the subject of which elements of the four-count felony indictment would remain.
“The Government continues to assess the new precedent set forth last month in the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States,” prosecutor Molly Gaston wrote in a 2-page filing on Thursday. “Although those consultations are well underway, the Government has not finalized its position on the most appropriate schedule for the parties to brief issues related to the decision.”
As such, Smith’s team has now asked for an Aug. 30 deadline to submit another joint status report.
Lawyers for Trump, including Todd Blanche and John Lauro, were unopposed to the request but did note in the Aug. 8 filing that Trump is unavailable on Sept. 6 and Sept. 16 for a status conference.
The next few weeks for Trump are jam-packed: he has a number of briefing deadlines to meet, including deadlines relating to the appeal of the E. Jean Carroll defamation case and pretrial discovery deadlines in lawsuits brought against him over three years ago by police and lawmakers who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Trump’s sentencing for his 34-count felony conviction in his hush-money and election interference case in New York is scheduled for Sept. 18.
Trump on Thursday also said he would debate Vice President Kamala Harris on Sept. 10 after previously backing out, The Associated Press reported.
When the Supreme Court issued its 6-3 opinion on Trump’s immunity question, Chief Justice John Roberts barred prosecution of a president for official acts within “his core constitutional powers.”
Some narrow exceptions were carved out by the justices for prosecution of former presidents for private conduct or unofficial acts. Remarkably, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed in her dissent: not even Trump’s own lawyers had argued he had immunity for unofficial acts, so the distinction between official or unofficial by the high court’s majority struck her as a clever way to grant presidents even greater power than already afforded.
A trial in the Jan. 6 case will likely not occur before the end of 2024 and it is nearly a forgone conclusion at this stage in proceedings that no matter what Chutkan decides in the immediate weeks ahead, Trump’s team will challenge those rulings and again try to bring the issues to the Supreme Court.
Chutkan has long expressed that she intends to keep the proceedings as streamlined as possible, though, and as Law&Crime reported, she wasted no time issuing orders as soon as the case returned to her court from appeal.
For example, in a recent 16-page order, Chutkan tidily rejected Trump’s claims of selective and vindictive prosecution in the subversion case, saying Trump had misrepresented the allegations and evidence against him in a motion to dismiss on those grounds.
“At the outset, the court must address — as it has before — Defendant’s improper reframing of the allegations against him,” Chutkan wrote, adding: “He declares that the Indictment amounts only to a Government ‘theory … that it is illegal to dispute the outcome of an election and work with others to propose alternate electors.’ … That description mischaracterizes his alleged conduct.”
“Defendant is charged with knowingly making false statements in furtherance of criminal conspiracies and for obstruction of election certification proceedings,” the judge also noted. “The Indictment does not charge Defendant for publicly disputing the election outcome and merely ‘working with others’ to propose alternate electors.”
Trump is criminally charged in Washington, D.C., for allegedly conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election by advancing phony claims of widespread voter fraud and using those claims to obstruct the certification of the election by Congress on Jan. 6. He is also charged with intimidating voters — a violation of the Ku Klux Klan Act — in the run-up to and on Jan. 6, 2021
As Law&Crime reported, prosecutors allege Trump foisted pressure campaigns on his own vice president and state election officials in order to carry out the scheme. Smith alleges Trump threatened some of the highest-ranking members of the Justice Department to go along with the scam, too. To that end, Smith alleges that Jeffrey Clark, Trump’s co-conspirator and former Justice Department lawyer, worked to weaponize the department in the waning days of Trump’s presidency, including by drafting a letter that falsely stated widespread voting fraud was a major concern by the DOJ in 2020 battleground states.
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