Bad news for Trump in one key sentence of Court ruling: Ex-US Attorney
Former President Donald Trump was handed bad news regarding his trial date in his Washington, D.C., election interference case as one key sentence in his gag order ruling pointed out a buried footnote, according to former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance on Saturday.
Trump is currently in the midst of four criminal cases, the most prominent is considered to be the federal case brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and special counsel Jack Smith, accusing Trump of attempting to carry out a scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election that led to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Trump, the GOP frontrunner for the 2024 presidential nomination, has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges in the case. Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, issued a partial gag order on Trump in October, restricting his ability to publicly target Smith and his staff, as well as court personnel and potential witnesses, with his comments.
Trump appealed the order, and on Friday, a federal appeals court ruled that Trump may make public statements about Smith. However, the former president may not speak about other prosecutors, court staffers or their family members if his comments are designed to interfere with work done by lawyers or court staff in the case.
In an interview with MSNBC on Saturday, Vance, a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama during the Obama administration and legal analyst, pointed to a footnote in the 68-page ruling suggesting that the trial will remain on schedule for March 2024 despite Trump and his lawyers efforts to delay.
“It is a long opinion and we are all reading it late at night and suddenly, I think page 48, the court simply drops one sentence where it says, and it’s having a conversation about Trump’s request that the trial be delayed until after the election,” Vance said. “And the court says, just in a very conclusory sentence, that is not necessary because the trial will be over long before the election takes place. Some people might characterize that as hopeful thinking.”
Vance added that despite the number of appeals that have been filed, the footnote suggests that Chutkan is set on the start date of the trial.
“There’s still a number of appeals that need to be concluded before this case can go to trial. But at least in the mind of these three judges, that trial is on pace for the March date that Judge Chutkan has set,” she said.
Donald Trump legal move spells “danger dead ahead,” former prosecutor warns
This comes after Trump and his legal team recently filed a motion seeking to have the case thrown out altogether, claiming he has complete immunity from the charges due to the fact he was president at the time. Chutkan, rejected the motion last week, explaining that the former president does not have the “divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens.”
In the filing, Trump’s attorneys claimed that this appeal request has put a “mandatory and automatic” pause on all other matters involved in the case, and further made the assertion that Trump will act as if the pause has been granted, even though Chutkan has not yet ruled to grant one, “absent further order of the Court.”
The former president’s motions have also been met with widespread criticism in the legal world as the former president continues to push to delay his trials.
Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner, a staunch Trump critic and legal analyst, warned of “danger dead ahead” on Friday as he stressed the unprecedented nature of the move and how dangerous it could be moving forward, in a video posted to his YouTube page.
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