Particular counsel Jack Smith on Thursday requested a choose to say no to take up former President Trump’s newest bid to toss his Jan. 6 election interference case by arguing Smith was unlawfully appointed.
It’s the second time Trump’s staff has made such an argument, and it was initially profitable in his Florida labeled paperwork case, although Smith has appealed that ruling.
Trump final week requested Choose Tanya Chutkan to dismiss the Jan. 6 case, mirroring arguments that he utilized in Florida earlier than Choose Aileen Cannon.
However Smith on Thursday requested Chutkan to not take up Trump’s bid, writing that Trump’s staff waited too lengthy to lift the declare “more than a year after the original indictment.”
“The defendant’s failure both to file a timely challenge to the Special Counsel’s authority to prosecute this case and to establish good cause for his tardy filing should foreclose this Court from reviewing that claim,” Smith’s staff wrote.
“Nothing in the superseding indictment provided any basis for his motion that did not exist before.”
Prosecutors on the D.C. case argued as they did in Florida that Smith’s appointment by Legal professional Normal Merrick Garland adopted the lawful course of for tapping a particular prosecutor.
Trump has argued that Smith was not lawfully appointed as a result of he has not been confirmed by the Senate.
However that argument flies within the face of greater than 5 many years of apply relating to particular counsel appointments, together with a Supreme Court docket case relating to the particular counsel investigating former President Nixon.
“Contrary to the defendant’s claims, the Supreme Court’s determination in Nixon that the Attorney General had the statutory authority … to appoint the special prosecutor is binding; statutory analysis confirms that that determination was correct, and the long history of special counsel appointments reflected the Attorney General’s authority to appoint the Special Counsel here,” prosecutors wrote.
Chutkan has expressed skepticism about Cannon’s ruling, one thing prosecutors famous of their Thursday submitting.
“As this Court observed at the status hearing on September 5, 2024, the defendant is relying on ‘dicta in a concurrence written by Justice Thomas’ and ‘an opinion filed by another district judge in another circuit which frankly this Court doesn’t find particularly persuasive’ in the face of ‘binding D.C. Circuit precedent on this issue,’” they wrote.
The eleventh Circuit Court docket of Appeals is at present weighing Smith’s enchantment of Cannon’s order.
That court docket has reversed a few of Cannon’s earlier rulings, together with one appointing a particular grasp to evaluate the proof collected by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago.
