Judge pauses Trump case after election win
A federal judge in Washington DC has canceled any remaining deadlines in the government’s election interference case against President-elect Donald Trump, paving the way for the case to be dropped in light of Trump’s election victory.
In a court filing on Friday, Special Counsel Jack Smith requested that “the Court vacate the remaining deadlines in the pretrial schedule to afford the Government time to assess this unprecedented circumstance” of Trump’s win, and to “determine the appropriate course going forward.”
District Judge Tanya Chutkan granted the request, and ordered Smith’s team to present their “proposed course for this case” by December 2.
Smith charged Trump last year with plotting to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 election win, arguing that the outgoing president pressured election officials to invalidate the results of the election, and encouraged his supporters to riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in a bid to block the certification of Biden’s victory.
However, Justice Department policy shields sitting presidents from prosecution, and Smith is expected to wind down his case – and a separate federal case against Trump – and be dismissed before the president-elect is inaugurated in January.
Trump has maintained from the outset that the case was a “pathetic attempt” by the Biden administration to “interfere with the 2024 Presidential Election.” Describing Smith as a “crooked person,” Trump said last week that he would fire the special counsel “within two seconds” of taking office.
Smith is also prosecuting Trump over the latter’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. However, that case, which centers on papers Trump brought to his Mar-a-Lago estate after his first term in office, has hung in legal limbo since it was tossed out by a federal judge in Florida in July. Smith appealed the dismissal in August.
In addition to Smith’s two federal cases, Trump was charged in New York with misreporting “hush money” payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, and in Georgia with conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state. He was found guilty on all counts in New York in May, after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg successfully elevated one misdemeanor offense into 34 felonies, one for each installment paid to Daniels.
Trump is due to be sentenced in New York later this month. However, his lawyers have already argued that the charges should be overturned due to a Supreme Court ruling in July that stated that presidents are immune from prosecution over actions taken while they were in office, as some of the alleged crimes were in Trump’s case.
