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      The revised indictment against Donald Trump is the last thing he needs right now | Lloyd Green

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      On Tuesday, Jack Smith, the special counsel, delivered a revised 36-page indictment, again charging Donald Trump with conspiring to subvert the final outcome of the 2020 election. How the courts treat the latest indictment remains to be seen. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito may again race to Trump’s rescue. But two weeks before the scheduled 10 September presidential debate, the American electorate and Donald Trump are again reminded that the Republican nominee stands in legal jeopardy. Then again, winning on 5 November may be the simplest way for him to avoid jail time.Already trailing in the polls, this is not good news for Trump, a candidate who has twice lost the popular vote. Without Joe Biden as a foil, his decline and age visibly grow. At 59, Kamala Harris is almost 20 years younger. All too often, Trump, 78, slurs his words and rambles. His dance moves remind folks of their elderly uncle.Trump already labors under a state court felony conviction in New York and a nine-figure pile of civil judgments. His personal liquidity and the future of his family business are in doubt. He must again deflect renewed allegations that he sought to thwart the will of the people and obstruct the outcome of a valid election. That costs more time and money.“Despite having lost, the Defendant – who was also the incumbent President – was determined to remain in power,” the indictment reads.“For more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.”For a guy who yammers about law and order, it’s a lousy look – as is his campaign’s physical altercation at Arlington national cemetery over its use as a prop in which Trump flashes a thumbs-up.Since Harris emerged as the Democrats’ standard-bearer, Trump is on the short end of a nine-point shift in the polls. This latest legal development will likely hinder his attempt to make up lost ground. If history matters, indictments have a way of doing just that.A veteran of George HW Bush’s losing re-election campaign, I remember Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary, being re-indicted just days before the 3 November 1992 election. In the run-up to that fateful Friday, the campaign had battled back into a statistical tie with Bill Clinton. The one-count re-indictment, however, derailed the campaign’s final gasp for momentum.Before the latest indictment, Harris already held an 11-point lead over Trump on the question of who is the more honest and trustworthy candidate. Expect Tuesday’s indictment to expand the gap, a development that he can ill afford.The map tells the story. According to Nate Silver, the polling guru, Harris has recaptured a lead in the electoral battlegrounds of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The website he founded, ABC’s 538, gives her nearly a three-in-five shot of winning. PredictIt, an online betting site, puts her chance at 55%.Nationally, House Democrats have improved their chances of retaking the chamber. Over in Texas, the senator Ted Cruz holds a mere two-point advantage over the representative Colin Allred, his Democratic opponent. The loathed incumbent senator is in trouble.This is not the future Trump and the Republicans envisioned after he walloped Biden in the debate. Even worse, this is not the endgame the Trump campaign anticipated. Rather, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles expected Sleepy Joe to hang on until the bitter end. Of all his unforced errors, Trump agreeing to an early debate may have been his most consequential. Lack of imagination can be fatal in politics and war.Adding insult to injury, the Harris campaign announced on Tuesday that Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, will sit for a joint interview to be aired this Thursday night on CNN. For days, the punditocracy repeatedly announced that without a media sit-down she would be unable to maintain her momentum.That box is about to be checked. Team Trump is on verge of losing another talking point.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBeyond that, the Harris-Walz interview falls on the eve of the upcoming Labor Day weekend, when most of the US is on the road, as opposed to being glued to their televisions. If the interview goes poorly for Harris, it is less likely to develop into a real-time disaster.The Trump re-indictment also serves to highlight Harris’s career as a local prosecutor and state attorney general. In this vein, a speech she delivered in late June in Atlanta sets the table for the final weeks of the campaign.“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women; fraudsters who ripped off consumers; cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she advised the crowd.“So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type. I know the type. And I have been dealing with people like him my entire career.”Meanwhile, her campaign coffers brim. Voter registration among Black women explodes. And Trump is left to hawk another round of digital trading cards.He is not enjoying a “brat summer”.

      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 More

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      Special counsel files new indictment against Trump over 2020 election

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      The justice department filed a new indictment against Donald Trump on Tuesday over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The maneuver does not substantially change the criminal case against him but protects it in the wake of a July supreme court decision ruling saying that Trump and other presidents have immunity for official acts, but not unofficial ones.“Today, a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned a superseding indictment, charging the defendant with the same criminal offenses that were charged in the original indictment,” lawyers for Jack Smith, the special counsel handling the case, said in a filing that accompanied what is known as a superseding indictment.“The superseding indictment, which was presented to a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in this case, reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions in Trump v United States.”The document retains the same four criminal charges against Trump that were originally filed last summer. But portions of the new indictment are rewritten to emphasize that Trump was not acting in his official capacity during his efforts to try to overturn the election.The new document, for example, removes mention of Jeffrey Clark, a former justice department official who aided Trump’s attempt to try to overturn the election. Clark was the only government official who was listed as an unnamed co-conspirator in the original indictment.“Trump is therefore absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials,” the supreme court wrote in its ruling in July.The supreme court also suggested that a president could be criminally immune in connection to acts between him and the vice-president. The superseding indictment reframes Trump’s interactions with Mike Pence, emphasizing that he was Trump’s running mate.At other points in the document, prosecutors emphasize that Trump was acting outside the scope of his official duties.“The defendant had no official responsibilities related to any state’s certification of the election results,” the document says.Prosecutors also highlighted that Trump used his Twitter/X account both for official and personal acts. They noted that the rally he attended on the Ellipse, near the White House, on 6 January 2021 was a “campaign speech”.Even if the case is still unlikely to go to trial before the 2024 election in November, and even if the Trump lawyers file motions seeking to excise more parts of the indictment, the decision to pursue a superseding indictment may have been to avoid more delay.Trump has been enormously successful in delaying his criminal cases, which came as part of a broader strategy to push his legal troubles past November, in the hopes that he wins and can appoint a loyalist as the attorney general who would then drop the cases entirely.In July, the supreme court’s conservative majority ruled that former presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for official actions that extended to the “outer perimeter” of their office, most notably any interactions with the justice department and executive branch officials.The framework of criminal accountability for presidents, as laid out by the ruling, has three categories: core presidential functions that carry absolute immunity, official acts of the presidency that carry presumptive immunity, and unofficial acts that carry no immunity.The court also ruled that the special counsel, Jack Smith, could not introduce as evidence at trial any acts deemed to be official, even as contextual information for jurors to show Trump’s intent. More

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      Georgia approves election rule that could delay vote certification

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      The Georgia state election board approved a new rule on Monday that gives local officials more power to investigate votes after election day, increasing concerns the Republican-controlled body is steamrolling a series of consequential changes that could pave the way for chaos this fall.The rule approved Monday authorizes any member on a county board of election “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results”. Even though Georgia law still requires certification of the vote by 5pm the Monday after election day, experts are concerned that these maneuvers give election deniers significant leeway to slow down the certification process and create uncertainty.“It provides no safeguards against requests unscrupulously designed to delay or obstruct the lawful certification process,” lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, the watchdog groups Citizens for Responsibilities and Ethics in Washington (Crew) and the Public Rights Project wrote in a letter to the board. “It would empower individual county board members to make unreasonable and vexatious demands for any election-related documents – even ones that have no bearing on certification – without providing any basis for their requests.”The board has moved aggressively to implement new procedures ahead of the election and three Republicans on it have earned public praise from Donald Trump. Earlier this month, it adopted a new rule that gives local boards the power to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into elections before certifying. It does not define what constitutes a “reasonable inquiry.”The new power to request all election-related documents comes as Julie Adams, a Republican on the Fulton county election board, has refused to certify elections in the state’s largest county and has claimed she has been denied access to adequate information. Adams is also suing the county board of the elections and its election director with the backing of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute to require more access to election documents.Adams is connected to a network for election deniers led by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his attempt to try and overturn the election. Several activists in that network helped shape the rule the board adopted on Monday, ProPublica reported.“Trump and his Maga allies have taken over the Georgia state election board to try and give a veneer of legality to their illegal scheme to disrupt the certification of Georgia’s 2024 election results,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, the chief executive of the voter rights organization Fair Fight. “Many of Trump’s key election denier allies are behind these illegal, anti-freedom changes to Georgia election rules, and it’s all with the goal of helping Trump win the ‘Peach State’, even if he doesn’t earn a majority of Georgians’ votes.”The new rule also requires the board of elections in each county to meet no later than 3pm on the Friday after the election to compare the total number of unique voter ID numbers in each precinct with the total number of ballots cast in that precinct. The votes in each precinct can’t be counted until the investigation is resolved. If the results can’t be reconciled, the board is authorized to “determine a method to compute the votes justly”.Several Republicans on the board framed the new rule, which it adopted with a 3-2 vote, as an effort to ensure that only valid votes were cast. “If the board found votes that were made illegally, they should not be counted,” said Janice Johnston, a Republican on the board.But others on the board said it was acting beyond its powers and said the proposal was opening the door to delay certification.“This board is once again exceeding our authority,” said John Fervier, the board’s Republican chairman, who joined the lone Democrat on the board to vote against the rule. “We are not elected officials. And we should not try to create law.”It’s not unusual for there to be small discrepancies between the total numbers of votes cast and the total number of voters. These differences are usually not large enough to affect an election outcome.“The most common cause for a discrepancy is usually if someone leaves with their ballot before casting it,” said Tate Fall, the director of elections in Cobb county in suburban Atlanta. “This would cause there to be one more check-in on the poll pads then there are ballots in the scanner. Typically poll workers catch these discrepancies early as they check the machine counts hourly.” She added that any discrepancies are always explained in a reconciliation report submitted to the Georgia secretary of state’s office after an election.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSara Tindall Ghazal, a Democrat on the board, said during Monday’s meeting that voters sometimes will cast a ballot in person after voting by mail because they’re worried their vote won’t count. In those cases, election workers will typically cancel the mail-in vote before tabulation, she said.The board is still considering a proposal to have election workers hand count every ballot cast on election day. The original proposal, submitted by Sharlene Alexander, a Republican election board member in Fayette county, would have required three workers at the precinct to separate ballots into stacks of 50 and count them by hand on election night. After receiving feedback from election officials, Janelle King, a Republican member on the board, amended the proposal to allow counties to begin counting the next day. They would still be required to complete the count by Georgia’s certification deadline.King’s amendment meant that the board had to put off a final vote on the rule until its next meeting in September.Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, has heavily criticized the proposed rule changes, saying they would lead to delays in election results and decrease trust in results.“Georgia voters reject this 11th hour chaos, and so should the unelected members of the State Election Board,” he said in a statement last week. “These misguided, last-minute changes from unelected bureaucrats who have never run an election and seem to reject the advice of anyone who ever has could cause serious problems in an election that otherwise will be secure and accurate.” More

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      George Santos’s weirdest lies revisited as he pleads guilty to fraud

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      George Santos’s plea deal invites a review of the former Republican representative’s most enduring, sometimes fabulous – but reliably pointless – false statements that destroyed the career of someone briefly seen as a potential young star of the Republican parties.Here are some of the main ones.1. The Brazilian drag performerThe former New York congressman was identified as the Brazilian drag performer Kitara from a photo but said the claim was “categorically false”. Santos later said that he had at least dressed in drag. “I was young and I had fun at a festival. Sue me for having a life.”2. Broadway musical producerSantos told potential donors that he had produced Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the biggest Broadway flop of the modern era, infamous for losing $50m, delays and injured Spider-Man actors.3. Sports starSantos boasted that he had been a star volleyball player at a New York college he never attended. And he did not attend New York University, where he said he’d received an MBA, or indeed the exclusive Horace Mann prep school in the Bronx until the 2008 financial crisis forced his family to pull him out.4. Wall Street king pinSantos said he was a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor”. But the two firms he claimed to have worked for – Citigroup and Goldman Sachs – said they had no record of ever employing him. Santos later said he’d used a “poor choice of words”.5. Jewish?Santos claimed Jewish maternal grandparents who’d fled persecution in Europe. But it turned out they’d been born in Brazil. He later said he never claimed to be Jewish. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”Nor had his mother been working in her office in the World Trade Center on the morning of 11 September 2001, as he said. His mother, Fatima Devolder, was not in the US in 2001.6. Victims of a mass shootingSantos said he had four employees at the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida that claimed 49 victims. He later said he planned to build a business they were going to work at.7. The puppy conPets, too, were drawn into Santos’s imaginative web. And there was a scheme in Pennsylvania involving rescue puppies and bad checks. He said he ran a pet charity called Friends of Pets United. He did not. But he raised $3,000 for a surgery on a service dog belonging to a disabled Navy veteran. However, the dog wasn’t sick. Santos took the money anyway. More

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      George Santos expected to plead guilty in fraud case on Monday – reports

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      The disgraced former New York Republican congressman George Santos is expected to plead guilty on Monday in a deal with prosecutors on charges that he defrauded his campaign during his 2022 midterm elections, according to multiple reports.Hints of a plea agreement came on Friday ahead of Santos’s federal criminal trial, which was set to start early next month. Prosecutors and defense attorneys suddenly scheduled a hearing without explicitly saying why.Multiple donors to Santos’s previous election campaign told Talking Points Memo that they had been informed that a plea deal would be announced on Monday. TPM was the first outlet to report on alleged fraud by Santos involving the diversion of campaign funds for personal spending.Santos’s attorney, Joe Murray, and the US attorney for the eastern district of New York, the federal prosecuting body with jurisdiction over the case, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday.The former Republican congressman, a political unknown who flipped a key New York Democratic district stronghold in 2022, drew headlines after it was revealed that much of his résumé had been elaborately fabricated.Despite this, Republican leadership in the House spent months standing by him. He was finally expelled in December 2023, less than a year after being sworn in to Congress. The Democrat Tom Suozzi won the special election to fill the vacated seat.Santos, 36, a first-generation Brazilian American, had run as a member of a “new generation of Republican leadership” and as the “full embodiment of the American dream”.He falsely claimed to have graduated from a New York college, worked at a major New York bank and run a pet rescue charity, and that his family owned a portfolio of 13 properties and that his mother had been at the World Trade Center when it was attacked by hijackers on 11 September 2001.The holes in Santos’s story soon came to wide attention and he was ultimately indicted on 23 charges that included allegations of lying to Congress and spending campaign funds on luxuries including trips to casinos, Ferragamo shoes, Botox treatments and OnlyFans payments. He had pleaded not guilty and seemed to revel in proclaiming his innocence to a scrum of reporters outside court.A scathing House ethics committee report on Santos’s conduct said he “was frequently in debt, had an abysmal credit score, and relied on an ever-growing wallet of high-interest credit cards to fund his luxury spending habits” and had “made over $240,000 cash withdrawals for unknown purposes”.After leaving Congress, Santos began a sideline career as a Cameo performer, posting greetings to paying customers. It was success, at least briefly, with Santos earning more than he had as a US congressman.He also attempted a congressional comeback, this time as an independent candidate, but that effort quickly fizzled.If a plea deal emerges next week, it will follow a similar agreement with Santos’s campaign fundraiser, Sam Miele, who pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges last year, and that of his former campaign treasurer Nancy Marks. More

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      Trump loses third bid for judge to step aside in hush-money case

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      A New York judge declined for a third time to step aside from the case in which Donald Trump was convicted of charges involving hush money paid to an adult film star, dismissing the former US president’s claim of conflict of interest related to political consultancy work by the judge’s daughter.As he did last April and in August 2023, Juan Merchan in a decision released on Wednesday denied a request by Trump’s lawyers that the acting justice of the New York supreme court recuse himself from the first case involving criminal charges against a former US president. Merchan is scheduled to sentence Trump on 18 September.“Defendant has provided nothing new for this Court to consider. Counsel has merely repeated arguments that have already been denied by this and higher courts” and were “rife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims”, Merchan wrote in the ruling dated 13 August.Trump was found guilty by a jury on 30 May on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for having covered up his former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels to avert a sex scandal before the 2016 US election.Two months later, his lawyers made their third request that Merchan step aside, arguing that his daughter’s work for a political consultancy that has counted Democratic campaigns among its clients – including the unsuccessful bid by Kamala Harris for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination – posed a conflict of interest.Harris, now vice-president, is the Democratic presidential candidate facing the Republican nominee Trump in the 5 November US election.Falsifying business records is a crime punishable by up to four years in prison, though sentences such as fines or probation have been more common for others convicted of that crime.Prosecutors with Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which brought the charges, had called Trump’s recusal request a “frivolous” attempt to relitigate an issue that was resolved twice before.“No amount of overheated, hyperbolic rhetoric can cure the fatal defects in defendant’s ongoing effort to impugn the fairness of these proceedings,” prosecutors wrote in an 1 August court filing.The payment to Daniels was made in exchange for her silence before the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she has said she had with Trump a decade earlier, which the former president denied. Trump went on to win the presidency by defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMerchan rejected a recusal request in April before jury selection in the trial and last year after an ethics panel found that his daughter’s work did not pose reasonable questions about the judge’s impartiality.During the trial, Trump took to his social media platform to deride Merchan as a “highly conflicted” overseer of a “kangaroo court”. Ahead of the trial, Trump wrote on social media that Merchan’s daughter “makes money by working to ‘Get Trump,’” comments that in part contributed to Merchan’s decision to expand a gag order to bar the former president from commenting publicly about family members of court staff or prosecutors.Trump’s lawyers separately have asked the judge to throw out his conviction in light of the US supreme court’s July ruling giving former presidents broad immunity from prosecution for official acts taken in office. Merchan has said he will decide on Trump’s arguments by 16 September. More

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      US Capitol rioter sentenced to 20 years – one of the longest punishments yet

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      A California man with a history of political violence was sentenced on Friday to 20 years in prison for repeatedly attacking police with flagpoles and other makeshift weapons during the US Capitol riot on 6 January 2021.David Nicholas Dempsey’s sentence is among the longest among hundreds of Capitol riot prosecutions. Prosecutors described him as one of the most violent members of the mob of Donald Trump supporters that attacked the Capitol as lawmakers met to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory.Dempsey, who is from Van Nuys, stomped on police officers’ heads. He swung poles at officers defending a tunnel, struck an officer in the head with a metal crutch and attacked police with pepper spray and broken pieces of furniture, prosecutors said.He climbed atop other rioters, using them like “human scaffolding” to reach officers guarding a tunnel entrance. He injured at least two police officers, prosecutors said.“Your conduct on January 6 was exceptionally egregious,” the US district judge Royce Lamberth told Dempsey. “You did not get carried away in the moment.”Dempsey pleaded guilty in January to two counts of assaulting police officers with a dangerous weapon.Only the former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio has received a longer sentence in the January 6 attack. Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years for orchestrating a plot to stop the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to Biden after the 2020 election.Dempsey called his conduct “reprehensible” and apologized to the police officers whom he assaulted.“You were performing your duties, and I responded with hostility and violence,” he said before learning his sentence.Justice department prosecutors recommended a prison sentence of 21 years and 10 months for Dempsey, a former construction worker and fast food restaurant employee. Dempsey’s violence was so extreme that he attacked a fellow rioter who was trying to disarm him, prosecutors wrote.“David Dempsey is political violence personified,” assistant US attorney Douglas Brasher told the judge.The defense attorney Amy Collins, who sought a sentence of six years and six months, described the government’s sentencing recommendation as “ridiculous”.“It makes him a statistic,” she said. “It doesn’t consider the person he is, how much he has grown.”Dempsey was wearing a tactical vest, a helmet and an American flag gaiter covering his face when he attacked police at a tunnel leading to the lower west terrace doors. He shot pepper spray at the Metropolitan police department detective Phuson Nguyen just as another rioter yanked at the officer’s gas mask.“The searing spray burned Detective Nguyen’s lungs, throat, eyes and face and left him gasping for breath, fearing he might lose consciousness and be overwhelmed by the mob,” prosecutors wrote.Dempsey then struck the Metropolitan police sergeant Jason Mastony in the head with a metal crutch, cracking the shield on his gas mask and cutting his head.“I collapsed and caught myself against the wall as my ears rang. I was able to stand again and hold the line for a few more minutes until another assault by rioters pushed the police line back away from the threshold of the tunnel,” Mastony said in a statement submitted to the court.Dempsey has been jailed since his arrest in August 2021.His criminal record in California includes convictions for burglary, theft and assault. The assault conviction stemmed from an October 2019 gathering near the Santa Monica pier, where Dempsey attacked people peacefully demonstrating against then president Trump, prosecutors said.“The peaceful protest turned violent as Dempsey took a canister of bear spray from his pants and dispersed it at close range against several protesters,” they wrote, noting that Dempsey was sentenced to 200 days of jail time.Dempsey engaged in at least three other acts of “vicious political violence” that didn’t lead to criminal charges “for various reasons”, according to prosecutors. They said Dempsey struck a counter-protester over the head with a skateboard at a June 2019 rally in Los Angeles; used the same skateboard to assault someone at an August 2020 protest in Tujunga, California; and attacked a protester with pepper spray and a metal bat during a August 2020 protest in Beverly Hills, California.More than 1,400 people have been charged with January 6-related federal crimes. More than 900 of them have been convicted and sentenced, with roughly two-thirds receiving terms of imprisonment ranging from a few days to the 22 years that Tarrio received. More

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      Supreme court immunity ruling to cause new delay in Trump 2020 election case

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      Donald Trump’s criminal prosecution over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election is expected to be delayed by another month after special counsel prosecutors said they had not finished assessing how the US supreme court’s immunity decision would narrow their case.On Thursday, the prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team told Tanya Chutkan, the US district judge presiding over the case, that they needed her to delay until 30 August a deadline to submit a possible schedule for how to proceed with a complicated fact-finding mission ordered by the court.“The Government continues to assess the new precedent set forth last month in the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v United States, including through consultation with other Department of Justice components,” prosecutors wrote in a two-page court filing.“The Government has not finalized its position on the most appropriate schedule for the parties to brief issues related to the decision. The Government therefore respectfully requests additional time to provide the Court with an informed proposal.”The supreme court ruled last month that former presidents are entitled to some degree of immunity from criminal prosecution, marking a victory for Trump.Precisely what prosecutors are now stuck on remains unclear, although the ruling struck some of the charges against Trump and is expected to see Chutkan needing to pare back the indictment further.Trump is accused of overseeing a sprawling effort to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election, including two counts of conspiring to obstruct the certification of the election results, conspiring to defraud the government, and conspiring to disenfranchise voters.The alleged illegal conduct includes Trump pressing justice department officials to open sham investigations, Trump obstructing Congress from certifying the election, including by trying to co-opt his vice-president, Trump helping prompt the Capitol attack, and Trump’s plot to recruit fake electors.View image in fullscreenThe supreme court decided that criminal accountability for presidents has three categories: core presidential functions that carry absolute immunity, official acts of the presidency that carry presumptive immunity, and unofficial acts that carry no immunity.The ruling meant that the charges related to core executive functions will be thrown out, and for Chutkan to determine through a fact-finding exercise if any other charges that might come under official acts must be expunged.Whether Chutkan will do the fact-finding on legal arguments or legal briefs, or will consider evidence perhaps given by witnesses, was supposed to become clearer after Trump and the special counsel jointly submitted the now-delayed scheduling brief.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s lawyers are expected to ask for few or no witnesses, the Guardian has previously reported. And in a statement on Truth Social, Trump called anew for the case to be tossed: “It is clear that the supreme court’s historic decision on immunity demands and requires a complete and total dismissal.”The deadline for the scheduling brief was the first activity in the case since December, when it was frozen after Trump asked the US court of appeals for the DC circuit and then the supreme court to consider his argument that he had absolute immunity from criminal prosecution.The supreme court issued its immunity ruling on 1 July, but the case only returned to Chutkan’s jurisdiction last week because of the court’s 25-day waiting period for any rehearing requests, and an additional week for the judgment to be formally sent down to the trial judge.Trump has already been enormously successful in delaying his criminal cases, a strategy he adopted in the hope that winning the 2024 election would enable him to appoint a loyalist as attorney general who he could direct to drop the charges.It is all but impossible now for the special counsel to bring the case to trial before election day, given Trump can make interim appeals for any decisions that Chutkan makes about the impact of the immunity decision. More