(AFP) – The federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s election subversion case released a heavily redacted trove of evidence on Friday used by Special Counsel Jack Smith to bring charges against the former US president. Hundreds of the 1,889 pages were blank, marked “sealed,” and the bulk of the visible material — social media posts by Trump, transcripts, and memos — had already been publicly disclosed previously.
District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected a request by Trump’s lawyers to keep the documents under wraps until November 14 — nine days after the US presidential election in which Trump is once again the Republican candidate. In arguing against the release of the material, Trump’s lawyers said it could present a “concerning appearance of election interference” and taint the jury pool.
Chutkan said that while there is “undoubtedly a public interest in courts not inserting themselves into elections,” withholding the documents could also be construed as election interference. “If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute — or appear to be — election interference,” she said. “The court will therefore continue to keep political considerations out of its decision-making, rather than incorporating them as Defendant requests,” she said.
The documents in question are a redacted appendix to a court filing by Smith earlier this month in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling that a former president has broad immunity from prosecution for official acts conducted while in office. In the filing, Smith said Trump launched a “private criminal effort” to subvert the 2020 election and should not be shielded by presidential immunity.
Trump, 78, had been scheduled to go on trial in March but the case was frozen while his lawyers argued that an ex-president should be immune from criminal prosecution. Chutkan has not set a new date for a trial, but it will not be held before the November 5 election between Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. If Trump wins the White House race, he is expected to have the charges against him dismissed.
The former president is accused of conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding — the session of Congress that was violently attacked by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. The former president is also accused of seeking to disenfranchise US voters with his false claims that he won the 2020 election. The case in Washington is just one of Trump’s various legal problems as he seeks to regain the presidency.
In May, he was convicted in New York of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels. He also faces charges in Georgia related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election won by Democrat Joe Biden.
© 2024 AFP
