The Supreme Court’s ruling on immunity gave the Trump case its first hearing

The 2020 U.S. Capitol Siege Case against Donald Trump and the Special Counsel Team: The Case for the Indictment and the Prosecutor

Lawyers for former President Donald Trump and special counsel Jack Smith clashed in a Washington courtroom Thursday over how much of the 2020 election interference case against him should survive — and how quickly they should move as millions of Americans prepare to cast ballots this fall.

This year, voters will decide the race for the presidency — and, by extension, whether Trump will ever face justice on charges that he led overlapping conspiracies to try to cling to power.

A D. C. grand jury indictment accuses Trump of a series of actions that led to the siege at the U.S. Capitol. If he regains the White House, Trump is expected to direct new Justice Department leaders to drop the landmark case.

Thomas Windom, a prosecutor working for the Justice Department special counsel team, said only the judge would control whether any new evidence should become public this year. He wanted the Chutkan to consider Trump’s immunity first so that he could get one more appeal back to the Supreme Court.

Windom said prosecutors would file a lengthy motion within three weeks to support their argument that Trump was acting as a political candidate for personal gain and not as a president during his time in office.

It is not easy to know how the court’s decision applies to each item of evidence that may come in at a trial, said a George Washington University law professor.

The special counsel team and the judge have an agreement about how to proceed. But there’s virtually no common ground, a point underscored by their late-night court filing the Friday before Labor Day weekend.

The prosecutors want to start with the issue of presidential immunity. They’ve signaled they believe the immunity described by the Supreme Court majority “does not apply” to the new indictment or to “additional unplead categories of evidence the Government intends to introduce at trial and will proffer in its brief.”

If Chutkan agrees, “there could be a lot of allegations coming out in the next couple of months about what’s the proof at trial,” said Eliason, the GWU law professor.

The Case for Donald J. Pence, the Superseding Indictment and the U.S. Senate Election Count: The Case Against the Vice President of the United States

“The superseding indictment is an effort to respond to the direct instructions of the Supreme Court as to how to effectuate a new indictment in an ongoing case,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said. I’m quite confident the special counsel followed the policies of the Justice Department, and I’m positive he did so.

Perhaps the biggest battle will be about the former Vice President of the United States. Trump is accused of pressuring Pence to delay the electoral count on Jan. 6, 2021, as a mob yelled, “hang Mike Pence” outside the Capitol building.

Prosecutors took pains in the new indictment to point out that Pence had been acting in his role as president of the Senate on Jan. 6, 2021 — and that “the Defendant had no official responsibilities related to the certification proceeding, but he did have a personal interest as a candidate in being named the winner of the election.”

The case already had been on pause for more than eight months while the Supreme Court weighed whether Trump and future presidents enjoy immunity from prosecution for their official acts in the White House.

Chutkan, a former public defender who has sought to move the case past numerous legal and logistical pitfalls, will have the responsibility of drawing those lines. Anything she does will be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court again, so there’s no chance for a trial before November — and maybe not even in 2025.

Looming over the case is this year’s election calendar. Three years ago, a riot occurred at the U.S. Capitol and Donald Trump was not present at the courthouse in D.C. The Economic Club of New York was where he gave the speech.

His lawyers did the talking for him—and they worried aloud about what kind of evidence prosecutors might make public in the coming weeks, “at a very sensitive time in our nation’s history.”

CP-Violating Attorneys for the Pence Assassination and Their Interaction with the Public in High-Energy Elections

But Chutkan flatly rejected the idea that the political calendar, or Trump’s position on the ballot as the Republican nominee for president, should play any role in her decisions.

It is possible that the Trump legal team will respond in a few months, because some of their attorneys filed a lengthy brief in a separate lawsuit against Trump in New York.

The lawyer for the president said the allegations concerning the vice president, and whether they deserved immunity, should be decided right away. He said if grand jurors heard evidence about Pence, and those allegations are protected by immunity, the entire indictment should be dismissed as tainted.

It will be up to her if she calls for in-person proceedings to hear witnesses directly, or if she chooses to unseal FBI witness interviews.