Prosecutors ask judge to stop Trump from making ‘baseless political claims’ during trial

Federal prosecutors asked a judge on Wednesday to block former President Donald J. Trump and his lawyers from claiming to the jury in his upcoming election interference trial that the case against him was brought as a partisan attack by the Biden administration.

The prosecutors’ move was intended to prevent Trump from overtly politicizing his trial and distracting the jury with baseless political arguments that he has often made on both the campaign trail and in lawsuits related to the case.

Since Mr. Trump was accused this summer of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, he and his lawyers have tried to frame the charges as President Biden’s retaliation against him. Mr. Trump has also made such claims central to his presidential campaign, even though the charges were initially brought by a federal grand jury and are being overseen by an independent special prosecutor, Jack Smith.

Molly Gaston, one of Mr. Smith’s senior aides, asked Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is hearing the election case in Federal District Court in Washington, to keep Mr. Trump’s political attacks as far away from the jury as possible.

“The court should not allow the defendant to turn the courtroom into a forum in which he promotes irrelevant disinformation,” Ms. Gaston wrote, “and should reject his attempt to inject politics into these proceedings.”

The 20-page motion was filed two weeks after Judge Chutkan essentially frozen the case as an appeals court considers Mr. Trump’s broad claims that he is immune from prosecution. Last week, the Supreme Court declined to immediately hear the immunity issue, although the justices are likely to take up the issue after the appeals court completes its highly expedited review.

In her request to Judge Chutkan, Ms. Gaston acknowledged that deadlines in the case are currently suspended due to the appeal. But she said the special counsel’s office had nevertheless decided to comply “to facilitate the prompt resumption of the pretrial” after the immunity issue was decided.

It wasn’t the first time Mr. Smith’s team tried to move the case forward during the break, moves that have sparked outrage from Mr. Trump’s lawyers. The former president’s legal team has often worked in the opposite direction, using every means possible to delay the case.

Trump’s lawyers hope to delay the case until after the 2024 election. If that were to happen and Mr. Trump won the race, he would have the power to simply order the charges against him to be dropped.

Ms Gaston’s application to Judge Chutkan was intended to shape the contours of the evidence the jury will hear during the trial, which is set to begin on March 4. Trump’s long history of false claims of election fraud and a detailed account of the role he played in inspiring the violence that erupted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Keeping “unfounded political claims” out of the process was clearly one of Ms. Gaston’s priorities. Trump has relentlessly tried to portray the Washington case – in which he is accused of plotting to overturn his defeat in the last election – as a form of election interference itself.

His lawyers, often using exaggerated language, have used court papers to make similar claims, arguing that the charges against Mr. Trump were filed on Mr. Biden’s orders as a means to knock him out of the next presidential race.

“None of these issues relate to the guilt or innocence of the defendant,” Ms. Gaston wrote. “They should all be excluded.”

In her filing, Ms. Gaston also asked Judge Chutkan to prevent Trump from introducing other types of evidence that his lawyers have said they plan to use at trial.

For example, the lawyers have suggested that they plan to challenge the U.S. national security community’s findings that the 2020 election was fair. They have also indicated that they want to tell the jury that foreign governments have interfered in the race.

Ms Gaston was against all this evidence being used at trial, calling it “an irrelevant and confusing afterthought.”

She also asked Judge Chutkan to restrain Trump and his lawyers from blaming the violence at the Capitol on the failure of the Capitol Police and National Guard, or claiming that the riot was incited by undercover officers or informants in the crowd.

Republican lawmakers and right-wing politicians have long tried to argue that people working for the government itself provoked the Capitol mob to attack the building as a way to discredit Mr. Trump and his followers.

But Ms Gaston said such stories should be left out of the process as a waste of time and resources.

“Allowing the defendant to introduce evidence about undercover actors would inevitably lead to confusing mini-trials on additional issues, such as the identity and intentions of the alleged undercover actors,” she wrote. “For example, it could require the government to present evidence to show that people the suspect claims were undercover actors were in fact his fervent supporters.”