Trump wants prosecutors held in contempt in federal election case
Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump said Thursday that they want the special counsel, Jack Smith, and two of his top deputies held in contempt of court and sanctioned for violating a court order that halted the criminal case in which Mr. Trump was accused of actually freezing. Trump plans to overturn the 2020 election.
The lawyers, in their request, are seeking to force Mr. Smith and his team to explain why they should not be held in contempt and possibly pay some of Mr. Trump’s legal fees. The request was the latest aggressive move in what has quickly become a legal battle between the defense and the prosecution, and underlines how crucial the issue of timing has become in the election subversion case.
The feud began last month when Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the case in Federal District Court in Washington, put all proceedings on hold until Mr. Trump resolved his efforts to have the underlying charges dismissed with allegations that he has immunity. of prosecution in the case.
These arguments will be heard Tuesday by a federal appeals court in Washington and will likely make their way to the Supreme Court for another level of review.
The trial in the election case will begin in early March. Hoping to keep the case on track, prosecutors working for Mr. Smith have occasionally tried to move the case forward despite Judge Chutkan’s order.
For example, a few days after the order was imposed, they told the judge that they had sent Mr. Trump’s legal team a draft list of evidence they planned to use at trial and thousands of pages of additional discovery materials. They noted that the list and documents had been transferred “to ensure that the process continues expeditiously if and when” the case returns to action.
Then, two days after Christmas, prosecutors filed a memo with Judge Chutkan, asking her to restrain Mr. Trump from making “baseless political claims” or introducing “irrelevant disinformation” at the trial.
After Mr. Smith sent the draft list of exhibits, Mr. Trump’s lawyers sent an angry letter to Judge Chutkan, complaining about how prosecutors had “improperly and unlawfully attempted to advance this case” in violation of her order to interrupt the case.
But lawyers remained silent until Thursday about Mr. Smith’s second such move.
In a 15-page motion, John F. Lauro, writing on behalf of Mr. Trump’s legal team, accused the prosecution of “partisan misconduct” and said they had treated Judge Chutkan’s decision to pause the case as “merely a suggestion that meant less than the paper it was written on.”
Mr. Lauro also asked for a series of potentially serious consequences, starting with an order that would force Mr. Smith and two of his deputies — Thomas P. Windom and Molly Gaston — to come up with answers as to why they were not in detention could be taken. contempt and must pay whatever legal costs Mr Trump may have incurred through the handling of their recent files and productions.
In addition, Mr. Lauro asked the judge to let the plaintiffs tell her why they should not be forced to “immediately withdraw” the last request they filed and “be prohibited from further filing” without express consent .
“These were not accidents,” Mr. Lauro wrote of Mr. Smith’s efforts to move the case forward. “The submissions were fully planned, deliberate violations of the stay order, which prosecutors openly admit they committed in the hope of unlawfully advancing this case.”
The skirmish over the delay reflects how central the issue of timing is to the election interference case. In addition to the back and forth on legal issues big and small, the defense and prosecution are waging a second war over when the case will go to trial — specifically, whether it will be held before or after the 2024 election.
For weeks, Mr. Smith and his team have been trying to keep the trial on track, arguing that the public has a huge interest in the speedy prosecution of Mr. Trump, the Republican Party’s leading candidate for president. In doing so, they have gone to unusual lengths, at one point filing an unsuccessful petition with the Supreme Court to get a jump on the appeals court now hearing Mr. Trump’s immunity claims and make a quick decision.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers have used all available resources to delay the case, hoping to delay a trial until after the election is decided. If that were to happen and Mr. Trump won, he would have the power to have federal charges against him dropped.