Federal prosecutors can come ahead with a lengthy filing containing evidence backing their argument that the indictment of the former president can survive the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.
A federal judge on Tuesday rejected an effort by former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers to push off until after November an assessment of whether the indictment accusing Mr. Trump of plotting to overturn the 2020 election can survive the Supreme Court’s ruling granting him broad immunity from prosecution.
In a brief order, the judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, said that by Thursday evening, the special counsel, Jack Smith, should file his written presentation about why the Supreme Court’s immunity decision should not lead to the dismissal of the charges he brought against Mr. Trump in a revised indictment last month.
Moreover, the judge granted Mr. Smith’s request to have that presentation, which will be filed under seal and therefore not publicly accessible, run as long as 180 pages.
Nearly half of those pages, Mr. Smith’s deputies have said in court papers, would contain detailed evidence — from things like grand jury testimony and F.B.I. interviews — about how Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election are fair game despite the Supreme Court ruling, which granted him significant protections for official acts he took as president. Mr. Smith’s team is arguing that Mr. Trump’s efforts were undertaken in his private role as a candidate seeking office, not in his protected role as a president performing official duties.
The election interference case — one of four prosecutions Mr. Trump has faced in the past two years — has been bogged down in the debate about presidential immunity for nearly a year. But the current ordeal of sorting out which parts of the indictment can survive and which will have to be tossed out began only after the Supreme Court issued its opinion in July granting Mr. Trump significant protections for official acts he undertook as president.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers had initially tried to delay the process of applying the immunity ruling to his case at a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington this month. At the hearing, they suggested that surfacing evidence behind the charges would be unfair to the former president with the election looming.
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