By Dave Goldiner
New York Daily News Jack Smith online news
(New York Daily News) Federal Judge Tanya Chutkan on Friday granted special counsel Jack Smith a three-week delay in former President Trump’s federal Jan. 6 election interference case after the conservative Supreme Court granted him significant immunity for crimes committed while in office.
Chutkan agreed to push back until Aug. 30 a planned hearing to lay out a schedule for proceedings in the case that accuses Trump of seeking to overturn his loss to President Biden in the 2020 election.
The ruling came after Smith’s team said in a surprising filing that it is still pondering how to proceed after the top court’s shocking July 1 ruling upended the case.
“The government continues to assess the new precedent,” a prosecutor wrote in a two-page brief.
The delay marks a dramatic shift for Smith, who has repeatedly urged Chutkan and other judges to move forward as quickly as possible to hold Trump accountable before the November election.
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Trump was indicted last year on charges he tried to overturn the 2020 vote with false claims about election fraud and by obstructing the government’s normal legal processes for counting votes and determining the winner.
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The right-wing court delayed hearing the Trump immunity case for months. It eventually ruled that Trump enjoys broad immunity for official acts during his time in office and even imposed restrictions on evidence prosecutors could potentially use to charge him with crimes related to private acts, like those taken to bolster his reelection campaign.
The court returned the Trump case to Chutkan, a district court judge in the Washington D.C. circuit, with orders to determine whether the charges involve official acts and must therefore must be dismissed under the new ruling or if they are private acts and could potentially still be tried.
No trial could take place before Election Day because Trump could appeal any ruling back to the Supreme Court. If Trump wins the election, he would have the power to order the Department of Justice to kill the case altogether.
Chutkan could order some form of proceedings or “mini-trial” in coming months to hear evidence about Trump’s alleged conduct, which Trump critics hope might expose some of his most egregious conduct to a national audience.
Aside from the federal Jan. 6 case, Trump faces a Georgia state RICO case accusing him of conspiring to steal the election in the Peach State. Federal Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed Smith’s case accusing the former president of taking classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate, but the feds are appealing.
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