WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. criminal case accusing Donald Trump of illegally trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat resumed after a nearly eight-month pause on Friday, with the judge left to decide how to proceed after the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington is expected to decide in the coming weeks which aspects of the indictment obtained by Special Counsel Jack Smith must be tossed out after the Supreme Court ruled that former presidents are entitled to broad immunity for official actions taken as president.
The high court’s decision to take up the case, which it heard on its last day of arguments in April and ruled on July 1, made it all but impossible for the case to go to trial before Republican presidential candidate Trump faces Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov. 5 election.
The Supreme Court, whose 6-3 conservative majority includes three Trump appointees, formally returned the case to Chutkan’s courtroom, allowing prosecutors and Trump’s lawyers to begin the next legal battle over how to apply the court’s ruling.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to four criminal counts accusing him of a multi-part conspiracy to subvert his 2020 election loss.
The case had been paused since December while Trump pressed his immunity claim.
The Supreme Court tasked Chutkan with deciding whether certain actions by Trump — including plans to organize slates of pro-Trump presidential electors in battleground states he lost and his communications to supporters ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — were private actions taken as a political candidate or official acts that are covered by presidential immunity.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Daniel Wallis)
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