Federal judge rejects Trump’s immunity claims in election case
A federal judge on Friday rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s claims that he enjoyed absolute immunity from criminal charges accusing him of trying to overturn the 2020 election. took while he was in office.
Judge Tanya S. Chutkan’s ruling marked the first time she has denied one of Trump’s many requests to dismiss the election interference case, which will go before Federal District Court in Washington in about three months.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers had expected the immunity motion to fail. They have been planning for weeks to use the defeat to launch a long-term strategy to delay the impending trial. They plan to appeal Judge Chutkan’s ruling, if they can, all the way to the Supreme Court, hoping that even if they ultimately lose, their challenges will eat up time and keep the case from being heard until after the election will come before a jury in 2024.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers filed their immunity claims in October a series of breathtaking court papers who insisted that he could not be held responsible for any official action he took as president, even after a grand jury brought criminal charges against him.
Although the Justice Department has long had a policy that sitting presidents cannot be indicted, the move to claim full immunity from prosecution was a notable effort to expand the protections afforded to the presidency in his favor.
Just as brazen was the way the immunity motion sought to flip the script on the conspiracy case brought against Mr. Trump in August by the special counsel, Jack Smith. The former president’s lawyers essentially argued that any steps he took to undermine the election he lost to President Biden were not crimes, but rather examples of him carrying out his presidential duties to ensure the integrity of a race which he believed had been stolen from him.
Judge Chutkan had little patience for such arguments, saying that neither the Constitution nor American history supported the claim that a former president enjoyed total immunity from prosecution.
“Whatever immunity a sitting president enjoys, the United States has only one president at a time, and that position does not confer a lifetime ‘get out of jail’ pass,” Judge Chutkan wrote. “Former presidents enjoy no special conditions regarding their federal criminal liability. The defendant may be subject to federal investigation, indictment, prosecution, conviction, and punishment for any criminal acts committed while in office.”
Judge Chutkan’s decision came on the same day that a federal appeals court in Washington rejected Mr. Trump’s attempts to use a similar argument about presidential immunity to dismiss a group of civil lawsuits that hold him responsible wanted to hold for the violence that broke out at the Capitol. January 6, 2021.