Federal Judge Issues Multiple Orders in Trump Election Case

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, in a file photo. Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts via AP

The judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s election case in Washington issued a number of orders this week.

The U.S. Supreme Court formally sent the case back to Judge Tanya Chutkan last month, and she now has to determine how to proceed. There was a roughly seven-month pause in the case as the former president appealed the matter, arguing that he should be declared immune from prosecution.

On Aug. 6, Chutkan issued eight orders denying several third-party submissions from anonymous parties who sought the ability to file under the Crime Victims Relief Act (CVRA), according to the court docket.

“They do not establish that they qualify as ‘victim’ under the CVRA’s statutory definition,” Chutkan wrote in one of her orders.

“Consequently, the victim’s rights enumerated [in the act] do not attach, [and] the court is not persuaded that it is appropriate to depart from the ordinary course and permit this filing,” she wrote.

Days before that, the judge struck down a request from Trump’s attorneys to dismiss the case. At the same time, she also summoned both parties to a court hearing in Washington on Aug. 16.

In her order, Chutkan rejected Trump’s arguments that he was being selectively prosecuted by Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought the charges.

“Finding no evidence of discriminatory purpose in the sources Defendant cites, the court is left only with his unsupported assertions that this prosecution must be politically motivated because it coexists with his campaign for the Presidency,” Chutkan wrote in her Aug. 3 ruling.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision that found that presidents enjoy immunity from prosecution for their official acts, Chutkan will have to determine what conduct by Trump in the wake of the 2020 election isn’t immune from prosecution and what is.

A former U.S. attorney, Joyce Vance, suggested that prosecutors in the election case have not “made much progress” and are “back at square one” following the Supreme Court decision. The reason is that Smith will now be forced to “reconsider the charges and allegations in his indictment and the evidence he can use to support them,” she wrote for the left-leaning Brennan Center nonprofit.

Smith’s team may have to “alter or delete some of the four crimes” that they charged Trump with, along with accompanying evidence and allegations to support their charges, she said.

Last month, Trump attorney Todd Blanche told radio host Hugh Hewitt that he believes that the judge should postpone the case until after the November election, in an interview just days after the former president survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania.

“[There are] a lot of others out there that want, still want, nothing more than to see President Trump go down before the election,“ Blanche said. ”And that’s not who we are as a country. That’s not the way the justice system is supposed to work. That’s not the way it’s ever worked before. And we can still right this ship.”

He said that those who want to defeat Trump should take their message “to the voters and tell them to vote.”

“You should not use the court system,” Blanche said.

If Trump gets elected in November, he has several options in dealing with his federal election case, including pardoning himself or appointing an attorney general who would scrap the special counsel’s case.

Early on, Trump’s attorneys had sought to have the judge recuse herself because of public comments she had made during cases involving defendants charged in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol. She rejected their motion in September and said their arguments lacked merit.

The former president has faced charges in four separate cases brought in four separate jurisdictions, which have so far resulted in one conviction in Manhattan. He has pleaded not guilty to all the charges.

But the futures of the two other cases remain murky. His classified documents case, also brought by Smith, in Florida was dismissed by a federal judge last month, and an election case brought in Fulton County, Georgia, is currently on hiatus amid a push by Trump and several co-defendants to get the prosecutor, Fani Willis, removed because of her romantic relationship with her former special prosecutor.