The criminal case charging former President Donald Trump with plotting to overturn the 2020 presidential election was returned Friday to the trial judge in Washington after a Supreme Court opinion last month that narrowed the scope of the prosecution.
The case was formally sent back to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan for further proceedings aimed at sorting out which acts in the landmark indictment constitute official acts and which do not.
The procedural move is expected to restart the case with a flurry of motions and potential hearings, but the sheer amount of work ahead for the judge and lawyers ensures that there’s no way a trial can take place before the November presidential election in which Trump is the Republican nominee. If Trump is elected president, he can appoint an attorney general who would presumably order the case dismissed.
The four-count indictment, one of four criminal cases brought against Trump last year, accuses him of illegally conspiring to cling to the presidency by working with aides to try to undo the results of the election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
But the Supreme Court on July 1 dealt prosecutors a major blow, ruling in a 6-3 opinion that presidents enjoy absolute immunity for core constitutional duties and are presumptively immune from prosecution for all other official acts.
The justices left it to Chutkan, who is presiding over the case, to decide how to apply their opinion to the remainder of the case.
That means she’ll be deciding in the weeks ahead whether key allegations in the case — including that Trump badgered his vice president, Mike Pence, to reject the official counting of electoral votes showing that he had lost the election — can remain part of the prosecution or must be discarded.
The case brought by special counsel Jack Smith had been effectively frozen since last December amid Trump’s appeal, which was argued in April before the Supreme Court, that he was immune from prosecution for the acts charged in the indictment.
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