In a court filing on Wednesday, special counsel Jack Smith asked the D.C. federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s 2020 election subversion case to prevent the former president from spreading disinformation and claiming President Joe Biden has ordered his prosecution for political reasons as part of his defense at trial.
Smith’s concern is those claims will sway the jury to ignore the facts and evidence of the case and find him not guilty because of their opinion of the prosecution, not the merits of the criminal charges and the arguments made in court.
“The defense has attempted to inject into this case partisan political attacks and irrelevant and prejudicial issues that have no place in a jury trial. Although the Court can recognize these efforts for what they are and disregard them, the jury—if subjected to them—may not,” reads the filing signed by Smith and Molly Gatson, one of his team’s prosecutors. “The Court should not permit the defendant to turn the courtroom into a forum in which he propagates irrelevant disinformation, and should reject his attempt to inject politics into this proceeding.”
Trump and his attorneys have repeatedly reiterated his false claims about the 2020 presidential election being stolen and rife with fraud, while insisting the prosecution is political persecution intended to derail his effort to return to the White House. It’s behavior the first former president to ever be indicted has engaged in across his numerous criminal and civil court cases, attacking prosecutors, judges and court employees.
The only case to go to trial so far, a civil business fraud trial in New York, has frequently featured Trump campaigning and opining in the halls of the Manhattan courthouse before, after and during breaks in the proceedings. His attacks on the judge and a court clerk brought about a gag order, for which he was fined $10,000 in October for violating.
In the D.C. prosecution, Trump faces four felony charges for his attempts at overturning the 2020 election in a bid to stay in the White House despite losing to now-President Joe Biden: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights. He pleaded not guilty in August.
“They cheated on the Election in so many ways,” Trump wrote on his social media platform on Wednesday morning, repeating baseless conspiracy theories he’s brought up for years despite no evidence of any widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. In another post, he described Department of Justice prosecutors as “Biden’s weaponized monsters.”
Smith, whose role as special counsel is intended to allow him to operate independently of Department of Justice leadership and the White House, urged U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to “shield the jury from improper evidence and argument.”. Those claims are “permissible in the political arena regardless of their accuracy,” but don’t belong in a courtroom, prosecutors argued.
“Trump has made a baseless claim of selective and vindictive prosecution… and has repeatedly levied the false accusation that the indictment—returned by a grand jury of citizens of this District on a finding of probable cause—was directed by the current president as a form of election interference,” Smith and Gatson wrote. “In addition to being wrong, these allegations are irrelevant to the jury’s determination of the defendant’s guilt or innocence, would be prejudicial if presented to the jury, and must be excluded.”
Meanwhile, the case has been delayed as Trump’s legal team has argued he should be immune from prosecution because he was acting as president when he investigated unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud and irregularities that have been shot down by udges, legislatures, election officials of both parties and Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr.
Smith and his team have pushed back, asking the Supreme Court to rule on “a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: whether a former president is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted before the criminal proceedings begin."
The high court declined to take the case up earlier this month, leaving the decision with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Chutkan, the judge presiding over the case, previously ruled in favor of Smith’s team, writing the presidency "does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass.” Arguments are scheduled for Jan. 9.
In total, the 2024 GOP frontrunner faces 91 felony charges in four criminal cases across four jurisdictions, including a racketeering prosecution in Georgia focused on an alleged criminal conspiracy by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election there.
And in states across the country, courts are ruling on suits attempting to disqualify Trump from the ballot for violating the 14th Amendment by engaging in an insurrection. So far, only Colorado’s highest court has ruled in favor of that argument, with Michigan’s Supreme Court rejecting it on Wednesday.