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Tag: jack smith
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Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling and Trump’s 2024 campaign
Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling and Trump’s 2024 campaign – CBS News
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Trump fake elector in Wisconsin describes how he says he was tricked | 60 Minutes
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Trump fake elector in Wisconsin describes how he says he was tricked | 60 Minutes – CBS News
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Trump Had a Good Day in One Court
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Donald Trump on Thursday in Manhattan criminal court, where David Pecker continued his testimony.
Photo: Mark Peterson/PoolEven now, “President Donald Trump,” is still a phrase that requires conceptual gymnastics — a leap from the tabloid depths to the heights of power. Consider a pair of scenes, in a pair of courtrooms, Thursday morning. Promptly at 10 a.m., in Washington, to the ritual incantation of “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” nine black robed justices of the Supreme Court filed in to hear arguments in a case that could determine whether a president can be prosecuted for committing crimes while in office. Meanwhile, Trump was mired in Manhattan criminal court, listening as David Pecker, the former chief executive of the National Enquirer, testified about hushing up Trump’s alleged affair with a Playboy model, and once discussing the arrangement in the presence of the FBI director.
High, low. Low, high. They say justice is blind, but with Trump, it’s dizzy.
Let’s start at the top. In the marbled Supreme Court chamber, the mood was grave as the justices considered whether presidential immunity exists to protect Trump from prosecution for crimes related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “There are some things that are so fundamentally evil that they have to be protected against,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who posed a hypothetical about a president who ordered assassinations of political rivals. Her colleague Elena Kagan broached the scenario of mounting a military coup. Brett Kavanaugh warned of steamrolling prosecutors. Ketanji Brown Jackson theorized that White House might one day become a “seat of criminal activity.” Samuel Alito raised the possibility that the United States might be devolving into a cycle in which each president prosecutes his predecessor, as sometimes happens in the developing world. Neil Gorsuch, never one shrink from grandiosity, said the court needed to write “a rule for the ages.”
The second hand on the large antique clock hanging over the bench kept sweeping forward. Each tick brought Trump that much closer to his goal: getting to November. His immunity appeal makes a number of arguments, some mildly plausible and some risible, but for now they hardly matter. The appeal has already created the best thing Trump could have hoped for: a long delay. If the justices take a reasonable amount of time to make a decision, a trial in Washington — where even Trump’s lawyers admit he faces a high likelihood of conviction — is certain to be pushed past the election. And so just being in the Supreme Court in April represented an enormous victory for Trump, who wasn’t, in the literal sense, actually there. He had been hoping to attend oral arguments in person, but Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing his other case, had told him his presence was required in Manhattan, telling him that “having a trial” was “also a big deal.”
So Trump was forced to sit through another undignified day of testimony by Pecker, the silver-haired sleaze merchant who said he considered Trump a “friend” and “my mentor.” As he spoke, Trump would lean back in his chair, sometimes with his eyes closed, listening to a laborious account of the work it took to keep damaging stories about Trump out of the public domain before the 2016 election. “I wanted to protect my company, I wanted to protect myself and I also wanted to protect Donald Trump,” Pecker said. Prosecutors from the district attorney’s office sought to show that the two men had engaged in a conspiracy that continued after the 2016 election. Pecker testified that Jared Kushner had pulled him up to see President-elect Trump at Trump Tower during the transition, where he joined a meeting that included then FBI Director James Comey, and Trump asked him about his alleged former mistress, Karen McDougal.
Because Trump allegedly made the payoffs to McDougal and Stormy Daniels before he was elected, his immunity claim before the Supreme Court would not have helped him in the New York case, but if the Court does find he has some protection, it would likely end or severely hinder the other three cases against him. (Under questioning from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the attorney representing the Justice Department, Michael Dreeben, conceded that an immunity doctrine that applied to the January 6 case would likely also cover the substantially similar state case in Georgia.) John Sauer, a raspy-voiced appellate attorney for Trump, told the justices that the Framers intended to protect presidents from this sort of criminal liability. As proof, Sauer cited the fact that for “234 years of American history, no president was ever prosecuted for his official acts.” He suggested that without such immunity there could be “no presidency as we know it,” and raised that the possibility of future prosecution would make presidents vulnerable to “blackmail and extortion” by opponents.
“I understood it to be the status quo,” said Justice Jackson, who pointed out that it had long been presumed that presidents could be prosecuted after leaving office. Sauer responded by quoting something that Benjamin Franklin said at the Constitutional Convention.
“So what was up with the pardon of President Nixon?” Jackson retorted.
It is conservatives who usually accuse liberals of reading previously invisible meaning into the Constitution, and the Democratic appointees on the Court seemed to relish the opportunity to play up the irony. “The Framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution,” said Justice Kagan. “They knew how to. There were immunity clauses in some state constitutions.” But, she said, “They were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law.” Kagan focused on the most un-originalist element of Trump’s appeal: its interpretation of the impeachment clause of the Constitution. By any normal reading, it’s an accountability mechanism, but Trump seeks to turn it into a nearly impenetrable liability shield. Under Trump’s theory, a president could not be prosecuted for anything he did officially — no matter how illegal or immoral — unless he was first impeached and convicted by Congress.
Kagan brought up a series of doomsday scenarios. Would it be an “official act” for a president to sell nuclear secrets? What if a president ordered a coup? DId he have to be impeached in order to be held responsible? Each time, Sauer was forced to dissemble, saying the answers to each hypothetical were “fact-specific” and “context-specific.”
“That answer sounds to me,” Kagan said, sardonically, “as though it’s like, ‘Yeah, under my test, it’s an official act, but that sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?’”
After about 90 minutes, Dreeben, a veteran Justice Department attorney on the staff of Special Counsel Jack Smith, rose to speak, saying Trump’s “novel theory” would allow presidents to get away with “bribery, treason, sedition, murder, and, here, conspiring to use fraud to overturn the results of an election and perpetuate himself in power.” There seems to be little chance that any of the justices will go along with that. Trump’s own appointees seemed to be at pains to distance themselves from any defense of his actions. Barrett seemed particularly skeptical in her questioning. Both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said they were less concerned with the “here and now of this case,” as Kavanaugh put it, than with creating a durable standard for the future.
Kavanaugh grew impassioned as he criticized what he called “one of the court’s biggest mistakes,” a 1980s Supreme Court decision that upheld the law creating the independent counsel, a prosecutorial office meant to investigate high officeholders. He seemed to be speaking from experience: He once played a key role in Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation of Bill Clinton — which led to Clinton’s impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky affair — and he may have been alluding to Starr when he questioned Dreeben about the “risk” that the president could be victimized by “a creative prosecutor who wants to go after a president.” (Then again, maybe Kavanaugh was subtly needling Dreeben himself, who previously worked on a variety public corruption investigations, including Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump.) At any rate, the justice sounded determined to make sure that any decision on Trump’s immunity would be tailored narrowly, to prevent presidents from being prosecuted frequently.
By the end of the hearing, it sounded as if the Court was trending in the direction of a ruling that would potentially offer Trump immunity for some of his actions and not others. Barrett, in her questioning of Sauer, went through a long list of offenses alleged in the indictment, and compelled him to answer that some of them — like sending private attorneys off to put together fraudulent slates of electors — were in no way official actions. When Sauer proposed the Court strip the indictment of official acts, Chief Justice John Roberts said that would be like a “one-legged stool.” With Dreeben, Barrett explored the idea that the January 6 case might still be able to proceed, with only those indisputably private actions being presented to the jury as crimes. It seemed as if she were trying to offer a way out.
Unfortunately for Dreeben and his boss, Smith, it was hard to count five votes for a resolution that would allow them to take their case to trial before November. Roberts sounded particularly dubious of an appellate court ruling that resoundingly resolved the immunity issue in Smith’s favor, calling its reasoning “tautological.” Of the justices, Roberts, a proceduralist to his core, sounded the most inclined to punt the issue back to the district court, asking for it to come up with a test that would draw a distinction between the president’s official and private actions. If that happens, the Washington trial will be delayed many months. If Trump wins the election in the meantime, that will put the question to rest—unless Trump starts prosecuting his predecessors.
Justice Jackson suggested that her colleagues’ concerns about unintended consequences were misplaced. If anything, she said, a ruling that affirmed absolute presidential immunity would have the opposite of a “chilling” effect on the presidency. “If the potential for criminal liability is taken off the table,” she asked Sauer, “wouldn’t there be a significant risk that future presidents would be emboldened to commit crimes with abandon while they’re in office?” At roughly the same time, in New York, prosecutors displayed a photo of David Pecker with Trump at the White House, showing him as he discussed how he and the president had discussed the McDougal payoff during a walk in the portico. Justice Jackson’s concern wasn’t just a hypothetical. The White House, according to the Manhattan prosecutors, had already been a “seat of criminal activity.”
“Today was breathtaking,” Trump said Thursday afternoon after he emerged from the courtroom, where his defense attorney Emil Bove had begun his cross examination of Pecker. “I was forced to be here, and I’m glad I was, because it was a very interesting day in a certain way. But the U.S. Supreme Court had a monumental hearing on immunity.” He claimed that, if deprived of immunity as he conceived it, the presidency would become merely a “ceremonial” office.
“We want presidents that can get things done and bring people together,” Trump said. “The justices were on their game. So let’s see how that all pans out. But again, I say presidential immunity: very powerful. Presidential immunity is imperative, or you practically won’t have a country anymore.” With that, the ex-president left the courthouse. The screen split again and he returned to his campaign.
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Jack Smith urges Supreme Court to reject Trump immunity bid in election case
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Jack Smith urges Supreme Court to reject Trump immunity bid in election case – CBS News
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Recapping Trump’s legal issues | Feb. 19, 2024
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Recapping Trump’s legal issues | Feb. 19, 2024 – CBS News
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Trump fake elector in Wisconsin describes how he says he was tricked | 60 Minutes
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Trump fake elector in Wisconsin describes how he says he was tricked | 60 Minutes – CBS News
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2/18/2024: Crisis in the Red Sea; Fake Electors; Finding Cillian Murphy
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2/18/2024: Crisis in the Red Sea; Fake Electors; Finding Cillian Murphy – CBS News
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Regretful Wisconsin fake elector says he was tricked into signing phony document claiming Trump won in 2020
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The month after the presidential election in 2020, Democratic and Republican electors representing the candidate who won the popular vote in their states gathered across the country to formally cast electoral votes for president.
But in seven states that Joe Biden won, Republican electors got together anyway and cast phony votes for Donald Trump. They’ve become known as fake electors. And according to federal prosecutors, they were part of a plan to overturn the election, orchestrated by pro-Trump attorneys with Trump’s support. State criminal charges have been filed against fake electors in Georgia, Michigan and Nevada.
Wisconsin’s fake electors haven’t been charged, and several weeks ago, one of them, Andrew Hitt, an attorney and former chairman of the state Republican Party, agreed to sit down with us to explain how he says he and Wisconsin’s other GOP electors were tricked by the Trump campaign.
Anderson Cooper: You were head of the Republican Party in Wisconsin. Were you a big Trump supporter?
Andrew Hitt: I worked tirelessly for him. I, you know, day and night–
60 Minutes
ANDREW HITT: Let’s put it together for the president of the United States one more time!
Andrew Hitt: — oftentimes phone calls would start by 6:00 in the morning, and wouldn’t end until 10:30 at night. I did everything I possibly could.
DONALD TRUMP: The Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Andrew Hitt.
Andrew Hitt was often singled out by President Trump at rallies in Wisconsin.
DONALD TRUMP: Andrew Hitt!
DONALD TRUMP: Andrew Hitt!
DONALD TRUMP: How we doing, Andrew? Gonna win this state? We gotta win it.
But Trump didn’t win in Wisconsin. He lost to Joe Biden by some 20,700 votes. The Trump campaign appealed, challenging more than 200,000 absentee ballots on technical grounds in two Democratic counties.
RUDY GIULIANI: If you count the lawful votes, Trump won Wisconsin by a good margin.
Andrew Hitt: That was false. What he said was false.
Anderson Cooper: The Trump campaign wanted the votes in Dane County and Milwaukee County tossed. Did you support that idea?
Andrew Hitt: – it wasn’t something that I was comfortable with.
Anderson Cooper: Dane County and Milwaukee County in Wisconsin– are the most liberal counties. The majority of the Black population in Wisconsin live in those two counties.
Andrew Hitt: Correct. Correct.
Anderson Cooper: Personally, you did not believe all those absentee ballots should be thrown out?
Andrew Hitt: Well, I voted that way, you know. I voted that way.
Anderson Cooper: You didn’t think your own vote should be thrown out?
Andrew Hitt: No.
On Nov. 30, Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers certified Joe Biden’s victory — authorizing the state’s Democratic electors to gather at the state capitol on Dec. 14 to cast their electoral votes for Biden.
But days earlier Andrew Hitt says he received a call from the Republican National Committee.
Anderson Cooper: What was the reach out to you?
Andrew Hitt: “Can we get a list of the Wisconsin Republican electors?”
Anderson Cooper: That made you suspicious?
Andrew Hitt: It did.
Andrew Hitt: I was already concerned that they were gonna try to say that the Democratic electors were not proper in Wisconsin because of fraud.
Anderson Cooper: You didn’t believe there was any widespread fraud–
Andrew Hitt: No, and I was very involved, obviously, in the election.
Hitt was one of 10 republicans nominated to be an elector if Trump won in Wisconsin. On Dec. 4, he says, he was advised by the state GOP’s outside legal counsel to gather the other Republican electors on Dec. 14 at the Capitol and as a contingency, sign a document claiming Trump won the state in case a court overturned the election in Wisconsin.
Anderson Cooper: In case the legal arguments that the Trump team is making actually win in court?
Andrew Hitt: Right. And I remember asking, “How– how can this be? That a court overturns the election and, just because we don’t meet and fill out this paperwork on the 14th, that Trump would forfeit Wisconsin?” And the– legal analysis back was, “The statute’s very clear: The electors have to meet at noon at the Capitol in Wisconsin on December 14th.”
60 Minutes
That morning the state Supreme Court — in a 4-3 ruling — rejected the Trump campaign’s attempt to throw out more than 200,000 votes. But Andrew Hitt says he and the other Republican electors met anyway to cast fake votes because he’d been told the Trump campaign would appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Kenneth Chesebro, a pro-Trump attorney — who was an alleged architect of the fake electors plan — showed up to watch.
Andrew Hitt: We got specific advice from our lawyers that these documents were meaningless unless a court said they had meaning.
Anderson Cooper: You are deciding to sign this document as an elector, and getting the other electors to sign this document based on a court challenge that you yourself don’t believe has legitimacy.
Andrew Hitt: I wouldn’t say it doesn’t have legitimacy– that’s different than not personally agreeing with it.
Anderson Cooper: You personally don’t believe that legitimate votes by Wisconsin residents should be tossed out. And yet, you are signing a document in support of a lawsuit which is alleging just that.
Andrew Hitt: And if I didn’t do that, and the court did throw out those votes, it would have been solely my fault that Trump wouldn’t have won Wisconsin.
DONALD TRUMP: Ah, beautiful kids Andrew. Good. Good. I’m going to blame you Andrew if they don’t do it.
Andrew Hitt: Can you imagine the repercussions on myself, my family, if it was me, Andrew Hitt, who prevented Donald Trump from winning Wisconsin.
Anderson Cooper: You’re saying you were scared?
Andrew Hitt: Absolutely.
Anderson Cooper: Scared of Trump supporters in your state?
Andrew Hitt: It was not a safe time. If my lawyer is right, and the whole reason Trump loses Wisconsin is because of me, I would be scared to death.
Anderson Cooper: Signing legal documents of such consequence that you don’t believe in and you don’t believe the underlying reason for the documents, it’s– I mean, it’s not exactly a profile in courage.
Andrew Hitt: No.
Anderson Cooper: How do you feel about that now?
Andrew Hitt: I mean, terrible. If I knew what I knew now, I wouldn’t have done it. It was kept from us that there was this alternate scheme, alternate motive.
That alleged alternate scheme is a prominent part of special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of the former president.
JACK SMITH: …charging Donald J. Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States.
According to Smith, what began as a legal strategy in Wisconsin evolved into “a corrupt plan” involving six other states as well.
ARIZONA GOP ELECTORS: Donald J. Trump, of the state of Florida. Number of votes, 11.
Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
MICHIGAN WOMAN: He said we can’t enter.
POLICE: The electors are already here – they’ve been checked in.
Where some of the fake electors couldn’t convince police to let them into the Capitol.
Jack Smith cites this Dec. 6 memo written by Ken Chesebro detailing ways “the Trump campaign can prevent Biden from amassing 270 electoral votes on January 6…”
Smith alleges the multistate scheme was designed to “create a fake controversy” and “position the vice president… to supplant legitimate electors with [Trump’s] fake electors and certify [him] as president.”
By Jan. 4, according to internal emails, some in the Trump campaign were panicking. They believed the fake electors’ documents from Michigan and Wisconsin hadn’t arrived in Vice President Mike Pence’s Senate office.
Anderson Cooper: Your colleague texted you, “Freakin’ Trump idiots want someone to fly original elector papers to the Senate president.” You wrote, “This is just nuts.” What was nuts about it?
Andrew Hitt: I mean, we have the certification coming on the 6th. Um, how– how do you not have the paperwork?
Anderson Cooper: I mean you’ve said that you only went along with this plan to preserve Trump’s candidacy in the event of a court ruling. January 4th, just two days before January 6th, did you really think that was still possible?
Andrew Hitt: Well, remember, the Wisconsin Supreme Court had been appealed. And so January 4th, it seemed like, yeah, it’s possible that a much more conservative United States Supreme Court could overturn a four-three decision.
To get the paperwork to Washington, they picked Alesha Guenther, then a 23-year-old law school student working part time for Wisconsin’s Republican Party.
60 Minutes
Alesha Guenther: I was on break from law school, um– and wanted to make some extra money (laugh) for– to pay for books and worked for the party for my month off of school. So on January 4th, I got a call from the Executive Director of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, since I was helping out at the time–
Anderson Cooper: What did you think when you got the text?
Alesha Guenther: At first, I didn’t know what it was. And then, he followed up and asked, you know, that the Trump campaign wanted these papers flown out to DC because they had gotten lost in the mail.
Guenther says she picked up the papers here at the state party headquarters, and on Jan. 5 flew to Washington.
ALESHA GUENTHER: So this is the email-
She showed us her email chain with Ken Chesebro and the Trump campaign’s senior advisor, Mike Roman.
Alesha Guenther: -explaining that I should only give the documents to Ken Chesebro. So, um, and then, they asked me to meet up with him outside the Trump Hotel.
Anderson Cooper: I mean, it sounds very secretive.
Alesha Guenther: Yeah, I thought that that email was pretty odd and dramatic-
Anderson Cooper: And you knew what was happening on January 6th?
Anderson Cooper: -in terms of the– the certification of the vote.
Alesha Guenther: I don’t know if I was very tuned into that. Truly because I thought that a court of law would have need to– needed to overturn the election for those documents to be used.
Anderson Cooper: Did you know what Chesebro looked like?
Alesha Guenther: So he had actually sent me a selfie.
Anderson Cooper: He– he sent you a selfie–
Alesha Guenther: Yes.
Anderson Cooper: –so that you would know it was him-
Alesha Guenther: Yeah.
Anderson Cooper: Can I see it?
Alesha Guenther: Yeah.
She still has the photo saved on her phone.
Anderson Cooper: That’s– that’s Ken Chesebro.
Alesha Guenther: Uh-huh (affirm).
Anderson Cooper: What did he say to you?
Alesha Guenther: He kind of took a dramatic step back, and looked at me, and said, “You might have just made history.”
Ken Chesebro told investigators he delivered the Wisconsin documents to Capitol Hill. The next day, on Jan. 6, he can be seen in videos outside the capitol near conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
ADAM SCHIFF: I now want to look even more deeply at the fake electors scheme…
According to the January 6th Select Committee, an aide to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson tried to arrange to get the fake electors slates to Vice President Pence.
DONALD TRUMP: And I hope Mike is gonna do the right thing, I hope so. I hope so. Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.
But Pence’s aide refused, texting “do not give that to him,” according to the committee.
When the Senate chamber had to be evacuated, the real electoral votes in these boxes were taken to safety. and when Congress resumed, they were returned into the House chamber.
MIKE PENCE: Pursuant to Senate concurrent resolution…
Vice President Pence announced the election results and closed the session at 3:44 a.m. Jan. 7.
The Supreme Court ultimately declined to hear the Trump campaign’s lawsuit in Wisconsin.
Anderson Cooper: What do you think about Donald Trump continuing to claim that the 2020 election was stolen?
Andrew Hitt: I mean, it wasn’t stolen. It wasn’t stolen in Wisconsin.
This past December, Andrew Hitt and Wisconsin’s other Republican electors settled a civil lawsuit against them by some of the state’s Democratic electors. They admitted they signed a document that was “used as part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results.”
Hitt resigned as chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party in August 2021.
He’s cooperated with the January 6th committee.
ANDREW HITT, SOT: -using our electors in ways that we weren’t told about, um, and we wouldn’t have supported.
And, he says, he’s also cooperated with federal prosecutors. He maintains he and the other fake electors in Wisconsin were tricked.
Andrew Hitt: Whenever anybody sees our text messages, our emails, our documents, they understand, they know they- their conclusion is we were tricked.
The January 6th Committee saw it. Jack Smith specifically in his indictment refers to some of the electors were tricked. That was us.Anderson Cooper: The former president is known to watch “60 Minutes.” If he’s watching, what would you want to say to him?
Andrew Hitt: I would say that this country needs to move forward. That we need a leader who is– tackles serious problems and serious issues that this country faces. And we need faith in our institutions again. And the next president of the United States needs to do that.
Anderson Cooper: And in your opinion, that’s not him.
Andrew Hitt: That is not him. Correct.
Produced by Sarah Koch. Associate producer, Madeleine Carlisle. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by April Wilson.
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Jack Smith’s “clean hands” could help remove Aileen Cannon: attorney
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Special counsel Jack Smith‘s “clean” record could help remove Judge Aileen Cannon from the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case against former President Donald Trump, a legal expert has said.
On Tuesday February 6, Cannon rejected special counsel Smith’s bid to keep the identities of government witnesses secret in the ongoing case involving the former president. Smith later wrote, in a court filing asking her to reconsider the decision, that the judge had made a “clear error” that could expose many potential witnesses to threats.
Cannon, a Republican, was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida by Trump during his presidency. She is overseeing the case in which Trump has been charged with 40 federal charges over allegations he retained classified papers after leaving the White House and subsequently obstructed efforts to have them returned. He has entered a not guilty plea and has denied all allegations against him.
Special counsel Jack Smith delivers remarks on an unsealed indictment including four felony counts against former U.S. President Donald Trump on August 1, 2023 in Washington, DC. Smith recently said the judge in the classified…
GETTY
Writing in her newsletter “Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance,” the former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama said the ruling by Cannon could actually play in favor of Smith and U.S. government. Newsweek has contacted the Department of Justice via the contact form on its website.
Vance, who was nominated to become U.S. attorney by then President Barack Obama, argues that Smith’s good faith approach to Cannon’s rulings may help him in the long run should a higher court seek to remove her from the case. “[T]he government is showing its efforts to comply with the Judge’s orders in good faith. That record of ‘clean hands’ will prove helpful to the government if the case ends up before the 11th Circuit and would strengthen the case for removing Judge Cannon if her rulings on matters this week continue to be off base,” Vance wrote.
Vance wrote that despite the ruling in his favor, the provision of witness names to the defense is not a “clean win” for Trump. “Any use he makes of the information would be highly problematic for him,” she wrote. “So, the government has some small comfort in this situation.”
Legal experts have criticized Cannon’s decision to unseal the identities of potential witnesses. “It’s really one after another, and the way she’s handled this case shows her clear bias for Trump and the defense,” former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told Business Insider.
“Obviously Trump appointed her, but he couldn’t have gotten a better draw. Really at every stage of the proceedings so far, she’s allowed Trump to delay—so there’s almost no chance that that trial is going to happen before the November election. And of course, if Trump is elected and he regains control of the White House, the prosecution goes away.”
MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “If information about an ongoing federal investigation into threats to a prosecution witness is not worthy of an ex parte, under seal filing, I don’t know what is.”
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Trump immunity claim denied by appeals court: Here’s what that means
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Trump immunity claim denied by appeals court: Here’s what that means – CBS News
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Trump Defense Shattered As Appeals Court Rejects Criminal Immunity
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A federal appeals court gutted Trump’s defense by ruling that he is a private citizen and is not immune from 1/6 prosecution.
What Did The Federal Appeals Court Rule?
The federal appeals court ruled that Trump does not have criminal immunity. Donald Trump is a private citizen, and his prosecution has no impact on the presidency.
The judges wrote in their ruling:
For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.
…
It would be a striking paradox if the President, who alone is vested with the constitutional duty to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, were the sole officer capable of defying those laws with impunity.
…
Moreover, past Presidents have understood themselves to be subject to impeachment and criminal liability, at least under certain circumstances, so the possibility of chilling executive action is already in effect.
What Does This Mean For Trump’s 1/6 Criminal Case?
The ruling means that Trump’s 1/6 criminal case is back on barring a stay.
As Andrew Weissmann pointed out, the ruling also gives Trump just six days to appeal, which means that unless he gets a stay, the federal criminal case is back on track.
BREAKING: DC Circuit gives Trump only until 2/12 before it will issue the mandate, which would permit Chutkan to go forward. So Trump would need a stay to extend that date.
— Andrew Weissmann (weissmann11 on Threads)🌻 (@AWeissmann_) February 6, 2024
The ruling was a nightmare for Trump, whose legal team had to know that the immunity claim was bogus. Trump’s claims of immunity are not supported by the Constitution or common sense. The courts aren’t allowing Trump to stall. The notion that Trump could run out the clock on Jack Smith until after the 2024 election just took a major blow.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
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Jason Easley
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Jack Smith Drops The Hammer On Trump’s Classified Docs Lies
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Jack Smith took on Trump’s lies and laid out the timeline while concluding that Trump’s legal problems are his own making in a new court filing.
How Did Jack Smith Debunk Trump’s Lies?
Smith spent nearly one-third of a 68-page court filing debunking Trump’s lies about the classified documents case:
As the exhibits and an accurate timeline attest, the defendants’ narrative overlooks the fact that various federal agencies confronted and appropriately responded to an extraordinary situation resulting entirely from the defendants’ conduct. NARA first sought over a protracted period to retrieve documents from Trump’s PRA representatives, whose responses were dilatory, shifting, and incomplete. As NARA attempted to carry out its statutory responsibilities from 2021 into 2022, highly classified documents sat in a ballroom, bathroom, office space, and a basement storage room at a social club traversed by thousands of members, employees, and guests.
NARA rightly involved other government agencies that had equities and authorities that it did not, as necessary to navigate an unprecedented situation. The White House Counsel’s office became involved because of the need to consult its personnel about missing Trump Administration Presidential records. DOJ became involved because of the Attorney General’s authority to retrieve records through court action and later to assess whether a criminal inquiry was warranted—all well outside of NARA’s archival function. And the Intelligence Community became relevant once the alarming fact emerged that Trump’s boxes contained classified records that he had no authority to keep, let alone store in boxes at his residence. Where the defendants perceive “bias,” “weaponize[d] use of authorities, and a “sham referral,” all attributed to an undifferentiated “Biden Administration,” ECF No. 262 at 5-9, the record shows only different government agencies, with specific portfolios and responsibilities, at work to solve an increasingly vexing and concerning problem.
That is hardly surprising, and it in no way, shape, or form supports the defendants well know, that it is false. Rather, the fact that the two cases have overlapping witnesses has resulted in some degree of overlapping discovery production, out of an abundance of caution. But, in any event, the defendants’ mischaracterization has no bearing on the motion to
compel, since the Government has considered all of the prosecutors in the Special Counsel’s Office part of the prosecution team, as it has stated in its correspondence with defense counsel. See Exhibit 27. hyperbolic claim of “politically motivated operatives” launching a “crusade against President Trump.” Id. at 1.The defendants’ legal problems are solely of their own making.
Jack Smith Sets The Record Straight
The Special Counsel set the record straight with a point-by-point debunking that pointed to the evidence that the classified documents case has nothing to do with the presidential election. Smith showed that the origins of the case go back to the end of the Trump administration and have nothing to do with Trump running for president. There were reports before Trump announced his candidate that the opposite was true. Trump is running for president because he thought that his candidacy would shield him from prosecution and potential conviction.
The Trump defense is based on an imaginary timeline, conspiracy theories, and lies.
Trump and his lawyers don’t have evidence of his innocence, but Jack Smith has overwhelming evidence that could prove the former president’s guilt.
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Did the FBI Miss a Hidden Room at Mar-a-Lago?
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If you’re going to raid a former president’s compound looking for classified documents he allegedly pilfered from the White House, then attempted to conceal from authorities, it’s probably a good idea to search inside his locked closets and hidden rooms. But according to a new report from ABC News, FBI agents may have missed a few potential hiding places when they searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August of 2022. Per the report, before indicting Trump and two employees in the classified-documents case, special counsel Jack Smith’s team questioned witnesses about two apparently unsearched spaces in Trump’s Florida residence:
According to sources, some investigators involved in the case came to later believe that [a] closet, which was locked on the day of the search, should have been opened and checked. As investigators would later learn, Trump allegedly had the closet’s lock changed while his attorney was in Mar-a-Lago’s basement, searching for classified documents in a storage room that he was told would have all such documents. Trump’s alleged efforts to conceal classified documents from both the FBI and his own attorney are a key part of Smith’s indictment against Trump in Florida …
In addition to the closet, the FBI also didn’t search what authorities have called a “hidden room” connected to Trump’s bedroom, sources said. Smith’s investigators were later told that, in the days right after the search, some of Trump’s employees heard that the FBI had missed at least one room at Mar-a-Lago, the sources said.
Per the same sources, when the agents “couldn’t locate a key for [the closet] and were told the space behind the door — an old stairwell turned into a closet with shelves — went nowhere, so they decided not to break it open.”
And they said that the FBI agents weren’t made aware of the so-called hidden room until afterward:
Though agents searched Trump’s bedroom, a small door in one of the walls was concealed behind a large dresser and a big TV, sources said. The space behind the wall was the “hidden room,” which maintenance workers sporadically entered to access cables running through it, sources said.
But an unnamed senior FBI official who spoke with ABC News maintained that the search went according to plan:
Based on information gathered throughout the course of the investigation, areas were identified and searched pursuant to the search warrant … Discussions took place that day about additional areas of the property and it was determined that actions already taken met the parameters of the search warrant.
The report stresses that it’s not clear Trump ever stored any classified documents in the closet or the “hidden room” to begin with. The classified documents the agents did recover during the raid were found in Trump’s office and in a basement storage room. There were additional classified documents at Trump’s properties, however. A Trump attorney subsequently found some and handed them over to the Justice Department after conducting another search of the former president’s properties, including Mar-a-Lago.
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In new filing, Trump lawyers foreshadow potential lines of defense in classified documents case
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawyers for former President Donald Trump foreshadowed elements of their defense in the criminal case charging him with illegally retaining classified documents, saying in a motion filed Tuesday that they will dispute prosecutors’ allegations that the estate where the records were stored was not secure.
The defense team also said in a wide-ranging court filing that they are seeking communication between the Justice Department prosecution team and associates of President Joe Biden in hopes of advancing their claims that the classified documents case is “politically motivated” and designed to harm Trump’s 2024 campaign.
The brief, which asks a judge to compel special counsel Jack Smith’s team to turn over a trove of information, offers the most expansive view yet of potential lines of defense in one of the four criminal cases Trump faces as he seeks to capture the Republican nomination and reclaim the White House.
It offers a blend of legal analysis and political bombast that has come to be expected in Trump team motions. For instance, it references Trump’s record victory this week in the Iowa caucuses and decries the charges as “partisan election interference” — familiar statements from the ex-president’s lawyers that seem intended to appeal as much to voters on the campaign trail as to the judge presiding over the case.
“The Special Counsel’s Office has disregarded basic discovery obligations and DOJ policies in an effort to support the Biden Administration’s egregious efforts to weaponize the criminal justice system in pursuit of an objective that President Biden cannot achieve on the campaign trail: slowing down President Trump’s leading campaign in the 2024 presidential election,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
Despite Trump’s repeated claims, there is no evidence of any coordination between the Justice Department and the White House, which has said it had no advance knowledge of the FBI’s August 2022 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate that recovered dozens of classified documents he had taken with him when he left the White House. Attorney General Merrick Garland months later appointed Smith as special counsel as a way to try to insulate the Justice Department from claims of political bias.
A spokesman for Smith declined to comment Tuesday night. Prosecutors will have a chance to respond to the filing, and are likely to tell U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that much of the material defense lawyers are seeking is not relevant to the case.
A June 2023 indictment charging Trump with dozens of felony counts alleges that investigators found boxes of sensitive documents recklessly stored at Mar-a-Lago in spaces including a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, his bedroom and a storage room. Prosecutors have said the documents he stowed, refused to return and in some cases showed to visitors risked jeopardizing not only relations with foreign nations but also the safety of troops and confidential sources.
But defense lawyers said in their motion that they intend to dispute allegations that “Mar-a-Lago was not secure and that there was a risk that materials stored at those premises could be compromised.”
They argued that prosecutors should be forced to disclose all information related to what they have previously described as “temporary secure locations” at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties. They contended that such evidence would refute prosecutors’ allegations because the Secret Service took steps to secure the residences and made arrangements for him to review and discuss classified information.
Trump’s lawyers also referenced what they said was an Energy Department action in June, after the charges were filed, to “retroactively terminate” a security clearance for the former president.
They demanded more information about that, saying evidence of a post-presidential possession of a security clearance was relevant for potential arguments of “good-faith and non-criminal states of mind relating to possession of classified materials.”
The case is currently scheduled for trial on May 20, but that date may be pushed back.
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Jack Smith Beats Trump As Appeals Court Rules For Special Counsel In Twitter Case
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An appeals court ruled that Special Counsel Jack Smith can have access to Donald Trump’s private Twitter communications.
A federal appeals court won’t reconsider a ruling that allowed special counsel Jack Smith to access private communications from Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
…
The four conservatives ultimately agreed with seven Democratic-appointed judges on the court that the earlier decision of the three-judge panel — which upheld a $350,000 contempt fine against Twitter — should not be revisited by the full bench of the appeals court. Indeed, despite the lengthy exposition on the merits of executive privilege, no D.C. Circuit judge even called for a vote on rehearing the case by the full bench.
It is revealing that none of the judges who heard the case called on the full bench to hear it.
Trump and Elon Musk have tried to keep Trump’s Twitter communications out of the hands of Special Counsel Smith, but investigators have had the data for months, and the Special Counsel has a ton of data on Trump including private messages, location, and drafts of tweets that Trump wrote.
Since Trump loved his Twitter account and was addicted to it, federal prosecutors have a treasure trove of information on the former president’s activities after the election and through the 1/6 attack.
Jack Smith has been building a detailed case against Trump, and the Twitter data is a piece of the puzzle that could debunk many of Trump’s false claims about his own movements and behavior.
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We have been honored to be able to put your interests first for 14 years as we only answer to our readers and we will not compromise on that fundamental, core PoliticusUSA value.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
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Jack Smith will “absolutely” indict six more Trump allies: Ex-prosecutor
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Six unnamed co-conspirators of Donald Trump are likely to be indicted by Department of Justice (DOJ) special counsel Jack Smith, according to former federal prosecutor and legal analyst Glenn Kirschner on Saturday.
Trump is currently contending with four criminal indictments at the state and federal levels, totaling 91 criminal charges in all. Among these cases is the federal one brought by the DOJ and Smith pertaining to Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which ultimately led to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Trump, the frontrunner in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, has maintained his innocence in the case and accused all of the cases against him of being attempts to undermine his political prospects.
The federal indictment for election interference also notably mentions six other alleged co-conspirators in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In a video posted to YouTube on Saturday, Kirschner, a former assistant U.S. attorney turned outspoken critic of the former president, told MSNBC contributor Brian Tyler Cohen on The Legal Breakdown that further indictments will “absolutely” be passed down onto these unnamed co-conspirators.
“We know that in the Trump indictment…there are six unindicted co-conspirators,” Kirschner said. “Now, they are listed, they are described, but they’re not named, but we basically know who they are…They do include people like Mark Meadows, and Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell, and John Eastman, and Kenneth Chesebro.”
Former President Donald Trump is seen in a courthouse. Six unnamed co-conspirators of Trump are likely to be indicted by Department of Justice (DOJ) special counsel Jack Smith, according to former prosecutor and legal analyst Glenn Kirschner on Saturday.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
He continued: “You have heard me say before, I am not a betting man, I am not a high roller, one dollar is my betting limit. I would bet the full buck on those six unindicted co-conspirators being indicted…[Smith] will absolutely, in my opinion, indict those six, though perhaps waiting for Donald Trump’s trial to run its course first.”
Newsweek reached out to other legal experts via email for comment.
The several Trump allies listed by Kirschner as the likely unindicted co-conspirators were all notably among the 18 co-defendants charged in the former president’s election interference indictment in Fulton County, Georgia, which similarly stems from his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Among those names, Powell and Chesebro have already accepted plea deals in exchange for future testimony, and might be liable to do the same in the federal case.
Elsewhere in his Saturday appearance on Cohen’s YouTube channel, Kirschner addressed the possibility of Trump continuing to campaign for president even if he is convicted of criminal charges, which the former president has pledged to do and which the U.S. Constitution does not prohibit in most cases. Kirschner referred to this as a “weak spot” in the founding document.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Special counsel Jack Smith urges appeals court to reject Trump’s claim of “presidential immunity”
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Washington, D.C. — Special Counsel Jack Smith pressed his case that former President Donald Trump does not enjoy the protections of “presidential immunity” in the 2020 election conspiracy criminal case in an 82-page court document filed Saturday afternoon in D.C.’s federal court of appeals.
Smith’s filing comes one day after an appeals court allowed a lawsuit brought by a group of U.S. Capitol Police officers against Trump to move forward, ruling Trump is not entitled to absolute immunity from civil lawsuits. The suit focuses on Trump’s alleged conduct surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Smith’s latest filing comes ahead of scheduled oral arguments on the matter at the Appeals Court for the D.C. Circuit on Jan. 9, 2024. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over the case, ruled Trump cannot be shielded from federal prosecution for crimes allegedly committed while he was in the White House.
Smith asked the Supreme Court to bypass the appellate court hearing the case– but his request was denied last week — a blow to the special counsel and his team of prosecutors.
Trump’s attorneys argued that in asking the Supreme Court to fast-track the case and leap-frog the appeals court, the special counsel was urging the justices to “rush to decide the issues with reckless abandon.”
Trump has pleaded not guilty to four charges related to an alleged scheme to thwart the peaceful transfer of presidential power after the 2020 presidential election.
In his Saturday filing, Smith said, “Immunity from criminal prosecution would be particularly dangerous where, as here, the former President is alleged to have engaged in criminal conduct aimed at overturning the results of a presidential election.”
He also warned that “presidential immunity” could shield a President who takes bribes or “a President who instructs the FBI Director to plant incriminating evidence on a political enemy; a President who orders the National Guard to murder his most prominent critics.”
Smith’s filing also argued, “The Nation would have no recourse to deter a President from inciting his supporters during a State of the Union address to kill opposing lawmakers—thereby hamstringing any impeachment proceeding—to ensure that he remains in office unlawfully.”
That’s part of an extended argument in Smith’s filing which said the Senate’s failure to convict Trump at the 2021 impeachment trial does not immunize the former president from prosecution.
— Melissa Quinn and Robert Legare contributed to this report.
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“They go directly to the intent”: Experts say new tapes give Jack Smith “powerful” Trump evidence
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Two days before the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, the Trump campaign’s fake electors plot to block then-President-elect Joe Biden’s ascent to the Oval Office faced an almost insurmountable hurdle: The fake elector certificates from two key battleground states were held up in the mail.
Trump campaign operatives scrambled for a solution. They settled on flying copies of the false certificates from Michigan and Wisconsin to Washington, D.C., a move that depended on a chain of couriers and help from two Republicans in Congress to get the files to then-Vice President Mike Pence as he presided over the Electoral College certification.
Those operatives even floated the idea of chartering a jet to ensure the documents reached D.C. in time for the proceeding, according to emails and recordings first obtained by CNN.
“The new details provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the chaotic last-minute effort to keep Donald Trump in office,” the outlet reports.
The fake elector scheme is a prominent feature of special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal case against the former president. Some of the officials involved have spoken to Smith’s investigators.
The recordings and emails also indicate that a top Trump campaign lawyer took part in last-minute discussions about delivering the fake elector certificates to Pence, potentially undermining his testimony to the House Jan. 6 Committee that he had passed off responsibility and didn’t want to put the ex-vice president in a difficult position.
The details largely come from Trump-aligned lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of the fake elector plan who is now a key cooperator in several state probes of the plot. Chesebro pleaded guilty in October to a felony conspiracy charge in Georgia in connection with the elector’s scheme and has convened with prosecutors in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, who are investigating the false electors in their respective states.
Chesebro is also an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal election interference case against Trump.
CNN obtained audio of Chesebro’s recent interview with Michigan investigators. Reports from earlier this month said that he also told state investigators about a December 2020 Oval Office meeting where he briefed Trump about the fake elector plot and its ties to the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Emails the outlet obtained corroborate Chesebro’s statement to Michigan investigators that he communicated with top Trump campaign lawyer Matt Morgan and another campaign official, Mike Roman, to ship the documents to D.C. on January 5.
From there, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., along with a Pennsylvania congressman, assisted in the effort to transport the documents to Pence.
“This is a high-level decision to get the Michigan and Wisconsin votes there,” Chesebro told Michigan prosecutors. “And they had to enlist, you know, a US senator to try to expedite it, to get it to Pence in time.”
Chesebro also explained the episode with Wisconsin prosecutors when he sat for an interview with the attorney general’s office last week as part of a separate state investigation into the fake elector scheme, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.
Wisconsin prosecutors asked about the episode “extensively” the source said, pointing out that Chesebro talked about how a Wisconsin GOP staffer flew the certificate from Milwaukee to Washington and then gave it to Chesebro.
The firsthand account from Chesebro’s perspective clarifies the narrative underlying the effort to hand-deliver elector slates to Pence, which is vaguely referenced in Smith’s federal indictment.
Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges, which include conspiring with Chesebro and others to obstruct the certification process on Jan. 6. Before Chesebro’s guilty plea in Georgia, his attorneys contacted Smith’s team. As of this week, he has not heard back from federal prosecutors, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.
Federal investigators have interviewed several people involved in the scramble with the false elector certificates, another source told the outlet. That includes sit-downs with Trump staffers who were tapped to fly the papers to D.C. and some fake electors who knew of the planning.
Asked about the episode, a spokesperson for Johnson pointed CNN to his previous comments, where he said, “my involvement in that attempt to deliver spanned the course of a couple seconds,” and that, “in the end, those electors were not delivered.”
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
The recordings CNN obtained could strengthen Smith’s body of evidence against Trump in his federal election subversion case, according to former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams.
“It’s one thing for a jury to read a transcript or even hear someone talk about things they heard somebody else say, it is another thing to hear voices to have sort of an evocative effect, that is more valuable and powerful,” Williams said during a Thursday afternoon appearance on the network.
He explained that the attempts to transport these ballots across state lines and to D.C. “could be introduced as evidence showing the state mind of not just of the former president, or people around him who knew what they were doing and attempting to take all efforts to get these fake or alternate — their argument is — ballots to Washington, D.C.., it can speak to intent.”
Former impeachment lawyer and CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen echoed those sentiments in an appearance on “The Situation Room” Thursday evening, arguing that the new details will likely be “very important” for Jack Smith’s effort to prove his case as well as for prosecutors charging the conduct at the state level, like Fulton County, Ga. District Attorney Fani Willis.
“And the reason those details about the elaborate plan to get all the materials to Washington for Jan. 6 matters so much is they go directly to the intent here,” Eisen said.
Chesebro’s account, he added, paints a clear picture of the widespread, last-ditch efforts to prevent the transfer of presidential power to Biden.
“This wasn’t just, as it started out, a preventive measure in case Trump won court cases,” Eisen said. “This was an active alleged conspiracy to have Mike Pence and Congress block the rightful winner of the election from taking office, and Jack Smith has said that that is a criminal conspiracy. And it’s hard to understand how lawyers and other professionals couldn’t see why that was wrong.”
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Trump: ‘I Was Doing my Duty as President’ by Claiming the Election Was Rigged
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Donald Trump claimed that he was merely doing his “duty” as president by alleging that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen,” therefore believes he deserves “immunity” from prosecution.
“I wasn’t campaigning, the Election was over. I was doing my duty as President to expose and further investigate a Rigged and Stolen Election. It was my obligation to do so, and the proof found is voluminous and irrefutable,” the former president wrote in a Truth Social post Sunday morning. “Therefore, among other reasons, of course I am entitled to IMMUNITY. ADDITIONALLY, I DID NOTHING WRONG. Stop the Witch Hunt NOW!”
Trump’s comments echo assertions his lawyers made in a late-night filing on Saturday when asking a federal appeals court to toss out the indictment accusing him of trying to overturn the election. Trump’s attorneys’ argument essentially boils down to one Richard Nixon made to David Frost: If the president does it, it isn’t illegal.
“President Trump has absolute immunity from prosecution for his official acts as President,” the lawyers wrote. “The indictment alleges only official acts, so it must be dismissed.”
Trump has been indicted for his actions following the 2020 election, which his own officials at the time claimed was the most secure in U.S. history. Trump pressured local election officials to overturn results in their states, urged Vice President Mike Pence to stop the certification of electoral votes, and publicly pushed false claims of tampered votes, culminating in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6.
In a late-night filing Saturday to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Trump’s lawyers asked the judges to overturn a lower-court’s ruling that Trump can be prosecuted for the actions he took while in office. Being president, District Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote in the ruling earlier this month, “does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass.”
Trump’s lawyers claim that his actions “all reflect President Trump’s efforts and duties, squarely as Chief Executive of the United States, to advocate for and defend the integrity of the federal election, in accord with his view that it was tainted by fraud and irregularity.”
Last week, special prosecutor Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court to make an expedited ruling before the D.C. Circuit could chime in, but the court denied his request on Friday. Smith has argued that it would be in the public interest to complete the case ahead of the 2024 election.
The D.C. Circuit Court of three judges — one George H.W. Bush appointee and two Biden appointees — is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the case on Jan. 9.
By insisting on appeals, Trump accomplishes two goals: He defends his own actions while also slow-walking the legal process, potentially pushing back his upcoming March 4 trial date.
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