Judge Tanya Chutkan took a jab at Donald Trump on Friday as she denied a key motion his team filed to strike some language from his federal indictment in Washington about his alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election result that culminated in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Trump’s team took issue with portions of the indictment that they argued could pollute a jury pool, specifically portions that asserted that insurrectionists traveled to D.C. to physically stop the certification of the 2020 election at the former president’s behest.
One of the sentences that Trump’s team flagged as prejudicial stated that a “large and angry crowd—including many individuals whom [Trump] had deceived into believing the Vice President could and might change the election results—violently attacked the Capitol and halted the proceeding.”
ADVERTISEMENT
But Chuktan ruled that Trump won’t be permitted to expel what he deems to be inflammatory language from the indictment after he’d repeatedly gone on the record and made scores of “inflammatory and unsupported accusations” of his own.
She then flamed Trump’s lawyers for filing the motion—which claimed potential jurors were being exposed to “prejudicial allegations” from the indictment through media coverage—without providing any proof this was actually true.
“Defendant fails to cite even one example of that evidence,” Chutkan wrote in the filing.
Trump’s D.C. trial is scheduled to begin with jury selection in February, and is being prosecuted by Special Counsel Jack Smith.
Smith has accused Trump of sneakily trying “at any cost” to have the trial pushed back beyond the 2024 election, in which Trump remains the frontrunner for the GOP.
Among these tactics, prosecutors wrote, were claims by Trump’s team that they needed a months-long extension of deadlines for various motions. Trump’s lawyers insisted they didn’t have enough time to review the millions of pages of documents that Smith’s team had produced, partly because Trump faces three other concurrent indictments in different states.
Chutkan agreed to a small extension for Trump’s team earlier this month, granting them an extra few weeks to file motions related to evidence and subpoenas, with the new deadline for the latter being Dec. 13.
Read it at Politico
