Live Updates: Trump’s 2020 Election Case Will Be Back in Court
Lawyers for the special counsel and the former president will offer their views on how Judge Tanya Chutkan should determine which accusations in the indictment stay and which fall to the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.
Federal prosecutors and lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump will meet in court on Thursday to discuss how to move forward with the case accusing Mr. Trump of trying to overturn the 2020 election after the Supreme Court’s ruling granting him a broad form of criminal immunity.
At a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington, Mr. Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, will offer the presiding judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, their competing views on how best to approach the complex task of determining which parts of the indictment need to be tossed out under the immunity decision and which can survive and go to trial.
Judge Chutkan is expected to at least signal how she intends to proceed with the case by the end of the proceeding, which is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. Eastern time.
Here’s what else to know:
Mr. Smith’s deputies have told Judge Chutkan that they are ready to send her a written explanation of why their revised indictment can survive the Supreme Court’s ruling that Mr. Trump enjoys wide protection from any charges emerging from his official acts as president.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers have said they want to push off any detailed discussion of the immunity issue until mid-December, well after the election. They have said they want to file separate motions to dismiss the case before delving into the immunity question.
Mr. Trump is not expected to attend, and will leave it to his lawyers to formally enter a plea of not guilty to the revised version of the indictment that Mr. Smith filed last week to address the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.
Former President Donald J. Trump will not attend Thursday’s hearing in his federal election case in Washington. Instead, with exactly two months to Election Day, he will give two speeches on the campaign trail meant to address key issues.
Mr. Trump will speak at noon to the Economic Club of New York, a nonpartisan organization of business leaders. His speech has been billed as a “major economic address.”
He is also scheduled to address an annual meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a prominent group of Jewish Republican political donors. Mr. Trump, who presents himself as staunchly pro-Israel, has been courting Jewish American voters, many of whom traditionally align with Democrats, as he tries to return to the White House this year.
Mr. Trump has intermittently attended hearings in the four criminal cases and various civil cases he has faced over the past several years. His presence was required when court was in session for his criminal trial in Manhattan, in which he was ultimately convicted of 34 felony charges of falsifying business records, all tied to the reimbursement of hush money paid to a porn actress to cover up a sex scandal.
Mr. Trump has denounced the four criminal cases against him, calling them witch hunts and portraying himself as a martyr. He frequently attacks judges as partisan, has called the special prosecutor overseeing his federal case “deranged,” and has claimed that all of his indictments were orchestrated by President Biden, particularly the two federal cases that are overseen by a special counsel.
There is no evidence that Mr. Biden is personally directing the cases against his political opponent, and Mr. Biden has publicly emphasized the independence of the Justice Department.
In an interview on Fox News that aired Saturday, Mr. Trump criticized the federal election case against him as bogus. “Whoever heard, you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election where you have every right to do it,” he said on “Life, Liberty & Levin.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe hearing Thursday in the case accusing former President Donald J. Trump of seeking to overturn the 2020 election is largely being held to answer a single question: How should the presiding judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, move the matter forward in light of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling granting Mr. Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution?
That is, the hearing will focus on the legal steps that will be used in the later and more substantive undertaking of sorting out which parts of Mr. Trump’s indictment need to be tossed out under the court’s immunity decision and which can survive and go to trial.
To that end, Judge Chutkan will consider proposals from Mr. Trump’s lawyers and from prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith. By the end of the proceeding, in Federal District Court in Washington, she will most likely at least signal how she intends to move forward and how much time it may take to complete the task.
When justices handed down their immunity ruling in July, they granted Mr. Trump — and all other future former presidents — wide-ranging protections against charges arising from actions they took in their official capacity. And as part of the ruling, they sent the case back to Judge Chutkan and ordered her to do the complex work of determining which of the indictment’s many allegations stemmed from Mr. Trump’s official acts as president and which arose from unofficial acts — say, from his private role as a candidate running for office.
There are different ways that Judge Chutkan could conduct that sorting process.
She could order the two sides to submit filings to her laying out their separate positions, perhaps supported by facts drawn from interviews with — or sworn statements from — some of the many witnesses who gave information to Mr. Smith’s team during their investigation.
In theory, Judge Chutkan could also schedule another hearing and make some of those witnesses testify in public, though that seems unlikely in the near term given that neither Mr. Trump’s lawyers nor Mr. Smith’s deputies have requested such a proceeding.
Instead, Mr. Smith’s team said last week that it would prefer to begin the process by filing written submissions alone and suggested that the papers could be ready as soon as Judge Chutkan wanted to read them. The prosecutors also told the judge that they planned to include some new evidence against Mr. Trump that was not in their recently revised indictment but could ultimately be used to prove their case. Still, it remains unclear whether that evidence will be filed publicly or submitted under seal.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers laid out a much broader vision of how they would like to proceed, saying that they want to push back any discussion of immunity until after the election in November. That move, if successful, could avoid any potentially damaging new evidence about Mr. Trump coming out before voters go to the polls.
The lawyers have told Judge Chutkan that they would like to challenge the new indictment on entirely separate legal grounds before considering the question of immunity.
They intend, for instance, to file a motion claiming that the election interference charges need to be tossed altogether because Mr. Smith was improperly appointed to his job as special counsel. In July, a federal judge in Florida used that same rationale to dismiss the other case Mr. Smith brought against Mr. Trump — the one accusing him of illegally holding onto dozens of classified documents after he left office.
Reporting from Washington
When Judge Tanya S. Chutkan was first assigned former President Donald J. Trump’s case accusing him of interfering in the 2020 election, she worked to set up an efficiently paced trial.
But more than a year after the case landed in her courtroom, it is still in the pretrial stage. The hearing on Thursday has been a long time coming for a judge known for her expeditious manner.
The 62-year-old federal district judge has overseen several trials related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. In some cases, she delivered harsher sentences than the government requested.
But overseeing Mr. Trump’s federal elections case has brought her the most attention.
Since Judge Chutkan was randomly assigned the case brought by the special counsel, Jack Smith, she has weathered public criticism from Mr. Trump, who has called her a “biased Trump-hating judge,” and “a radical Obama hack.”
She was nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama in 2014 and has a history of politically supporting Democrats. In 1984, she volunteered for former Vice President Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign. She donated to Mr. Obama’s campaigns in 2008 and 2012. And she also donated to the 2008 campaign of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York.
She rebuffed Mr. Trump’s request that she recuse herself from the case.
Last year, the Justice Department charged a Texas woman for making a death threat against her in a voice mail message. That case is ongoing.
Judge Chutkan was also subjected to a “swatting” episode at the beginning of the year when law enforcement responded to a false report of a shooting at her home.
During her Senate confirmation process, she stressed the importance of a judge’s impartiality.
“My duty is to be impartial, to follow binding precedent, and to maintain the rule of law,” she wrote in response to a senator’s question in 2014 about how she would pivot from the advocacy of her job as a public defender.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Judge Chutkan came to the United States to go to college. She attended George Washington University and earned her law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Before she became a judge, much of her career was spent as a public defender in Washington, D.C., and as a white-collar criminal defense lawyer at a private law firm.
Judge Chutkan married a fellow public defender and has two adult sons. During her Senate confirmation hearing in 2014, she joked about what it was like for her children to have trial lawyers or judges for parents. “They have become very effective advocates for themselves,” she said at the time. She is now divorced.
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