WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump’s lawyers plan to urge a judge to dismiss the federal election interference case against the former president after the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling narrowing the scope of the charges, according to court documents.
The defense team late Friday presented conflicting proposals with prosecutors for next steps, signaling a series of challenges expected to stretch deep into next year in the criminal case alleging that Trump conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Those claims include the assertion that the new, limited indictment prosecutors filed last week still contains allegations that Trump could be immune from prosecution as a former president, including conversations with then-Vice President Mike Pence.
The attorneys also intend to seek a “threshold” dismissal of the case on the same grounds cited by a federal judge in Florida last month when he dismissed a separate indictment alleging that Trump illegally hoarded classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago property. The judge in that case, Aileen Cannon, ruled that Jack Smith, the special counsel on the team that brought the case, was illegally appointed and that his office was improperly funded.
The papers, filed in federal court in Washington, offer conflicting visions of how the case should proceed, and were filed ahead of a status conference scheduled for next week, the first court appearance in the case in months.
The Supreme Court’s ruling effectively guarantees that no trial can take place before the election, and it will now be up to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to decide which of the indictment’s alleged conduct can be included in the case and which should be struck out.
The Trump team’s proposed timetable would see the case entangled in pretrial arguments until the fall of 2025, or even after the election this November. Smith’s team did not propose a specific date, but said it stands ready to file its opening legal brief on the central issue of Trump’s immunity “as soon as the court deems appropriate.”
The filing acknowledges the fundamental changes in the legal environment since Smith filed his indictment in June 2023, and the challenges prosecutors have faced this year as they try to hold Trump accountable.
Prosecutors initially charged that Trump clung to power and engaged in a wide-ranging scheme to prevent a peaceful transfer of power, but now they must deal with the fallout from a Supreme Court ruling that found former presidents enjoy absolute immunity when exercising core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for other official acts as president.
Smith’s team responded to the ruling last week by filing a new indictment that removed allegations related to Trump’s dealings with the Justice Department and included areas of conduct where the court ruled Trump was immune from prosecution. It also made other changes.
But Trump’s attorneys say in a filing Friday that they believe prosecutors didn’t go far enough and “strongly argue that many of the types of conduct alleged in the superseding indictment are exculpatory, including but not limited to allegations of tweets and public statements regarding the 2020 federal election, communications with state officials regarding federal elections, and allegations related to the superseding electoral college.”
They said they particularly objected to the continued inclusion of the charge that Trump bullied Pence into refusing to certify the Electoral College vote count. The Supreme Court said Trump was “presumptively immune” from that action, Trump’s lawyers noted.
“If the court finds that the special counsel cannot rebut the presumption that these actions were immune, then the entire indictment should be dismissed because the grand jury considered evidence that was immune under binding law,” Trump’s lawyers wrote Friday.
