policy
The two federal criminal proceedings against former President Donald Trump were resumed this week after lengthy delays and significant legal setbacks.
With ten weeks to go before Election Day, prosecutors in Special Counsel Jack Smith's office on Monday filed an appeal of Judge Aileen Cannon's ruling last month that dismissed charges against Trump that he mishandled classified documents after leaving office and obstructed the federal government's repeated efforts to recuperate those documents.
Then on Tuesday, Smith took motion in a second case accusing Trump of attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Prosecutors filed a pared-down version of their original indictment that sought to take care of a lot of the election charges against Trump while bringing them into line with the Supreme Court's recent ruling granting former presidents broad immunity for official acts.
None of the cases the special counsel is overseeing will go to trial before Election Day, and if Trump returns to the White House in November, he may have the facility to fireside Smith and drop each cases entirely. Still, Smith seems determined to aggressively pursue the cases at the same time as the campaign enters the house stretch, and has indicated that if Trump wins the election, he’ll proceed to push them even through Inauguration Day.
And so it got here to be that the 2 accusers are still alive, but still stuck in legal and political uncertainty.
Case of election interference
Until just a few weeks ago, Trump's election lawsuits had been on hold for nearly eight months, with all proceedings dismissed because various federal courts, including the Supreme Court, deemed his claims immune from any charges arising from his official actions as president.
After the Supreme Court ruled in Trump's favor in July, granting him – and all other future former presidents – comprehensive protection from criminal prosecution, the case was sent back to trial judge Tanya Chutkan.
As a part of their decision, the judges gave Chutkan a frightening and complex task: to undergo Trump's indictment line by line and judge which of the various charges must be dropped due to the immunity ruling and which could stand and be tried in court.
Chutkan wasted no time in drawing up a timetable for deciding on the following steps and at last agreed on a deadline of Friday by which Trump's lawyers and Smith's prosecutors were to send her proposals for further motion.
Smith beat that schedule by filing his revised indictment in U.S. District Court in Washington on Tuesday afternoon.
The latest indictment retained the fundamental structure of the old one, keeping all 4 original counts against Trump. Prosecutors proceed to accuse him of overlapping conspiracies to defraud the United States, obstruct the certification of the election on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and deprive thousands and thousands of Americans of their right to have their votes counted.
Perhaps essentially the most significant change in the brand new indictment is that Smith has removed all charges related to Trump's attempts to force the Justice Department to support his false claims that the election was rigged against him.
In its immunity ruling, the Supreme Court had struck those charges from the case and located that Trump couldn’t be prosecuted for his interactions with Justice Department officials. The court ruled that a president's contacts with the department were amongst a very powerful official duties of his office and due to this fact shielded from prosecution.
Smith's surrogates also made many other subtle changes, rewording the articles of impeachment to portray them as actions taken by Trump in his private role as a candidate for public office, fairly than in his official capability as president.
The tone of the brand new indictment was clear from the primary paragraph, which described Trump as a “candidate for President of the United States in 2020.” The original indictment had referred to him because the “45th President of the United States and candidate for re-election in 2020.”
Chutkan, who was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama, still has the authority to find out how much of the brand new charges can stand under the immunity order. With that in mind, Smith laid out his starting position for the upcoming court battle.
Whatever Chutkan decides, Trump's lawyers – or Smith – can appeal any decision she makes to higher courts, including the Supreme Court. She is prone to present her side of the case at a hearing scheduled for Sept. 5 in Washington.
Case of confidential documents
In a surprise decision last month, Cannon dismissed the classified documents case in its entirety, finding that Smith had been illegally appointed to the post of special counsel.
The ruling shocked many legal experts since it overturned a quarter-century of Justice Department practices and contradicted previous court decisions on the appointment of special prosecutors dating back to the Watergate era.
The ruling got here on the primary day of the Republican National Convention and gave Trump a very important legal victory at a politically opportune moment.
Cannon based her dismissal of the lawsuit on the Constitution's Appointments Clause, which requires the president to nominate and the Senate to substantiate all key government officials, but allows “inferior officials” to be appointed by heads of federal departments, including the attorney general, under the authority of certain laws.
In her ruling, Cannon found that there have been no specific laws authorizing Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint Smith as special counsel in November 2022. She also found that Smith's appointment was illegal because he had neither been nominated by the president nor confirmed by the Senate.
But of their lawsuit before the eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Smith's representatives pointed to 4 existing laws that they are saying give the attorney general the authority to appoint special prosecutors.
They also argued that independent prosecutors have long been used to conduct sensitive political investigations, reminding the appeals court that the practice dates back to when Confederate leader Jefferson Davis was charged with seditious conspiracy after the Civil War.
The same appeals court that may now determine whether to uphold or overturn Cannon's conviction overturned it in an analogous case last 12 months.
In that case, Cannon had intervened in a civil case related to the document investigation, barring the Justice Department from using documents seized by FBI agents during a search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump's Florida club and residence, until an independent arbitrator reviewed them for confidential records.
But that call was quickly overturned by a scathing ruling from the Court of Appeal, which said it never had the legal standing to intervene anyway.
There can be no quick resolution to the continuing appeals process. Smith's appeal temporary on Monday was merely the start of a legal battle that would ultimately find yourself within the Supreme Court and can likely drag on well after the November election.
Trump's lawyers are expected to file their very own briefs with a three-judge panel of the eleventh Circuit in late September, after which the court is predicted to schedule a hearing for oral arguments.
image credit : www.boston.com