Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers have made their strategy plain in the Jan. 6 case overseen by special counsel Jack Smith.
In a joint filing between Trump and Smith’s teams on Friday, attorneys for Trump laid out a schedule of filings and pre-trial hearings that would delay the election interference case beyond Inauguration Day in 2025. Should Trump win the election in November, he would be able to instruct the Department of Justice to dismiss the case once he took office.
With this in mind, Smith urged Judge Tanya Chutkan to rule on the questions around the case quickly through a series of parallel hearings that would avoid stretching out the trial’s start date into next year. While the government did not provide a timeline for these hearings, they wrote they do “not see a reason to delay.”
“The Government is prepared to file its opening immunity brief promptly at any time the Court deems appropriate,” assistant special counsel Molly Gaston wrote in the filing.
In a 6-3 decision in July, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court ruled that Trump had absolute immunity in his actions undertaken as president. Smith re-indicted Trump after the ruling, with a separate grand jury finding enough evidence to proceed with the case that Trump attempted to interfere with the 2020 election.
That new indictment removed all of Trump’s actions through the Department of Justice, including the allegations that he conspired to install election denier Jeff Clark as acting attorney general. It also removed all references to his communications with White House staff.
Trump called the new indictment an “act of desperation to resurrect a dead Witch Hunt” in a post to Truth Social.
“This ridiculous political HOAX, which most thought was already won by me, comes right out of the White House and DOJ, and is being pushed by Kamala Harris and Crooked Joe Biden,” he wrote.