*UPDATE* Judge Grants Smith’s Request to Drop Charges Against Trump in J6 Case
The DOJ cannot indict a sitting president.
*UPDATE* Judge Chutkan granted Smith’s request.
D.C. Judge Tanya Chutkan has granted Jack Smith's request to dismiss his indictment in his election interference case against Trump.
"…the Superseding Indictment … is hereby DISMISSED without prejudice." pic.twitter.com/XLhBEeKH5F
— Sam Dorman (@EpochofDorman) November 25, 2024
***Previous Reporting…
Special Counsel Jack Smith has asked Judge Tanya Chutkan to drop all charges against President-elect Donald Trump in the alleged election interference case.
After careful consideration, the Department has determined that OLC’s [Office of Legal Counsel] prior opinions concerning the Constitution’s prohibition on federal indictment and prosecution of a sitting President apply to this situation and that as a result this prosecution must be dismissed before the defendant is inaugurated. That prohibition is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Government stands fully behind. Based on the Department’s interpretation of the Constitution, the Government moves for dismissal without prejudice of the superseding indictment under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 48(a). The Government has conferred with defense counsel, who does not object to this motion.
We all figured this would happen since Smith hinted he would wind down the case against Trump after he won on November 5.
The DOJ cannot indict a sitting president:
While the 1973 OLC Opinion did not reach any conclusion on this question, in 2000, after balancing the competing interests that would arise from a federal indictment brought against a sitting President, OLC concluded that “a sitting President is immune from indictment as well as from further criminal process” and that the Constitution would thus prohibit an indictment “even if all subsequent proceedings were postponed until after the President left office.” 2000 OLC Opinion at 259. But OLC recognized that the interest in avoiding a statute of limitations bar by securing an indictment during the presidency “is a legitimate one,” and it noted the possibility that a court might equitably toll the statute of limitations to permit proceeding against the President once out of office.
“The American People re-elected President Trump with an overwhelming mandate to Make America Great Again. Today’s decision by the DOJ ends the unconstitutional federal cases against President Trump, and is a major victory for the rule of law,” stated Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director. “The American People and President Trump want an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and we look forward to uniting our country.”
BREAKING: Special Counsel Jack Smith is asking a judge to drop all charges against President-elect Donald Trump stemming from Smith's investigation into the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol breach. pic.twitter.com/g62iqpAV76
— Fox News (@FoxNews) November 25, 2024
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Comments
So it was a political farce all along then?
But, but, but we were told that Trunk is a criminal, an existential threat to democracy, and needed to be removed.
What happened?
The 2024 election happened, and the persecutors need to be prosecuted. No mercy.
No, not according to Smith. He still insists that the case is solid, and were Trump not about to be president he would proceed with it. But since he is going to be president it’s simply impossible to prosecute him no matter how strong the case is.
That’s his story and he’s sticking to it.
He also suggested that the judge should toll the statute, so that a future prosecutor can bring the charges again in four years.
Not prosecuting a sitting president is only a DOJ policy, not a legally binding prohibition
Dershowitz on his latest Dershow Blog begs to differ.
In his opinion, the separation of powers disallows prosecution of a sitting president, which is the whole reason impeachment and conviction by congress is required instead.
And… he believes the same holds true for any attempt to put a prosecution on hold pending leaving office. That threat would be a blackmail threat to bend a president from pursuing his legal duties unhindered.
The question of the actual validity of the J6 Trump prosecution is a separate issue. An armed insurrection which is actually unarmed and accusations of incitement to violent insurrection which specifically said to refrain from violence seems to many a stretch to a legal Bridge Too Far, however. If contesting an election result sans violence is a crime, Hillary, Pelosi, and a host of other names are also indictable.
Not true. The DOJ’s legal opinion is that it’s legally prohibited from prosecuting a sitting president.
OK, gives the statute or article of the Constitution,….SCOTUS obliterated Article1 section 3, clause 7 with its “official acts”
The citation is given in the post: 2000 OLC Opinion at 259. That is the DOJ’s official legal opinion.
DOJ’s opinion is nice but it is not a binding prohibition in the legal sense. DOJ could just change it’s opinion and go forward if it thought it would make political sense. There were many during Watergate that urged this to happen if Nixon didn’t step down.
DOJ considers it to be the law. Therefore it considers it binding.
Smith is a lying asshat and everyone knows it
With a rather infamous record of judicial failures….
Stop pretending. The Democrat’s DOJ lawfare failed. Weismann failed.
The case was never about the merits of unlawful conduct by President Donald Trump. The case was always about Main Justice, Lisa Monaco and her outside crew of lawfare ideologues, trying to influence the 2025 election outcome.
*2024*
Proof that it is a farce can be found in the choice of Jack Smith and Chutkin to release the evidence behind the indictment on Oct 11th, one month before the election. Even Chutkin stated that the release was unusual, then allowed it anyway. This was clearly an attempt at election interference and the Trump DOJ should indict them both, preferably in Florida somehow, so there is at least a chance of a guilty verdict.
It was certainly political but not a farce. They would have definitely convicted him if able to get to trial and most likely he would have faced some type of incarceration. Had he lost the election the persecution of Trump allies would have continued with many facing prosecution and even if they escaped conviction, they would face financial ruin and/or destruction of their careers. The impact on their marriages and their children (if any) would be devastating by design. The message sent to the Dems political opponents would be clear. Attempt to block our agenda and we will crush you, your business, and your family.
“The message sent to the Dems political opponents would be clear. Attempt to block our agenda and we will crush you, your business, and your family.”
Absolutely true. But the message sent by the voters of this great country was even louder. A giant F U to these Soviet-style totalitarian wannabes.
All involved need to be disbarred and jailed. Malicious prosecution. Smith first. Then they will get the message.
Suburban, absolutely correct. These gangsters with law degrees need to face a full court press of federal and state prosecutions. That should be followed up with civil actions. If these malicious scum skate, then the dems and deep state actores will be emboldened to be even more ruthless with future lawfare.
Of course it was. I don’t want it dropped, however. I want SCOTUS to rule on the special counsel appointment first. It’s time to stop these unaccountable hitmen from using an unlimited budget to ruin political opponents.
Not just stop them, to completely destroy them. There have severe consequences to deter such conduct.
Lawfare Jack Smith! Let the private actions and bar complaints fly. He deserves everything he gets.
How does Trump recover his legal fees?
Text messages and emails, in my experience.
How do J^ and other victims be maded whole?
Yes, as if we needed more proof that all of it was politically motivated garbage.
Sorry, it is politically motivated garbage, but this doesn’t prove it. Smith insists the case is real and solid, and the only reason to dismiss it is that a sitting president is immune until his term is over.
off course he’s gonna say his case is solid, Big Fani, Bragg and Letitia are saying the same
Smith the lying asshat can say whatever he wants, but he ought to be in prison for impersonating a US attorney
You have missed the point. We are discussing Ironclaw’s claim that Smith’s motion to dismiss proves that the prosecution was politically motivated garbage. It’s true that it was indeed politically motivated garbage, but this motion doesn’t prove it. The motion is completely consistent with the prosecution being valid and honest, as Smith continues to claim is the case.
You are a tiresome doryphore.
You mean I care about the truth and you don’t. That’s what it comes down to. Ironclaw made a claim that just does not add up, and when I point it out I am attacked.
Except that’s not what Ironclaw said.
Ironclaw said “as if we needed MORE proof”–not that this WAS proof.
And, Milhouse, while this isn’t proof to you and your fellow Democrats, it IS proof to the people who won the election, and those that voted for them.
It is so strange to see that, even now, you can’t seem to see that the towering mountain of lies, intimidation, obfuscation and demoralization that the entirety of the left is based on has collapsed.
Your endless petty demoralizing word games didn’t work.
You weren’t defeated, you were crushed, like a roach scurrying from the light back into the sewer.
Go back to Hell, you filthy lying demonspawn. You keep lying and lying and lying about me. You brazenly defame me. What good have you ever done in the world? What have you ever contributed to this forum? All you do is spill hatred and lies.
I am not defaming you.
YOU said that you’re a registered Democrat.
You rationalized it by saying that it was the only way to have a voice in your heavily blue area.
Calling a Democrat a Democrat isn’t defamation.
They ask the charges be dismissed WITHOUT prejudice and they stand by all aspects of their case.
Sounds like a case of the sword of Damocles to me.
Trump need only pardon himself immediately after being sworn in, a gigantic middle finger to Smith, Chutkan, and the rest for even making this attempt to intimidate him. Same for the “classified documents” case. Maybe this is the plan, hence no objection to the conditions from Trump’s defense.
No pardon at this stage. Best approach I’ve seen so far is the incoming DOJ can issue a finding that Jack Smith was illegally appointed and move to have both Federal cases thrown out *with* prejudice. All it takes is a Trump-friendly judge, and sets precedent for following administrations: Presidential nominations and Senate confirmations or they’re frauds and don’t belong in a courtroom. Or at least without being in the defendant’s chair.
^^ This
If there’s nothing legally or procedurally fatal to the case, the fact that Smith wasn’t someone authorized to prosecute it wouldn’t be a great argument for why it should be dismissed with prejudice, only an argument for why if it is pursued when Trump leaves office that it would have to be pursued de novo. Sure, no procedural objection here to try to get it dismissed with prejudice, and to then pardon himself when that doesn’t happen. But this whole charade is consuming court time and taxpayer dollars. The sooner, and more effectively, it is tanked, the better. The direct course is to pardon himself. Done.
That doesn’t make sense to me. If, as I suspect from strong arguments I’ve read, Smith was not appointed correctly within the Constitution then those would be strong grounds to dismiss the entire thing as the entire case Smith built would be thrown out and everything started from scratch which it wouldn’t.
Defense counsel should be asking for dismissal WITH prejudice.
Yup.
You want a banana republic?
Protecting a president from prosecution for things he did as president but only while he’s in office is providing a perverse incentive to never leave office. We’ve been warned for years that Trump would never leave the WH without declaring himself President For Life. It didn’t happen 4 years ago, so you want to threaten him four years from now with Life in Prison unless he declares it then? Brilliant 1-D chess Sherlock.
Unless… of course your prediction was a total BS lie all along, which you yourselves didn’t believe then and don’t believe now.
It’s like in a TV drama, if you actually believe someone is a serial killer you don’t meet them in a cabin in the woods, hand them an axe to chop firewood with, and only then accuse them of being a serial killer.
If you really really believe Trump intends to never leave office, you don’t incentivize him to never leave office.
“Ha ha! I removed the firing pin from that axe!”
“Hit the road Jack and don’tcha come back no”…well, you know..
speaking of which, Robert Barnes, a former and possibly current Trump lawyer, said in his Sunday podcast that if Smith has an ounce of common sense he will have vacated the country prior to inauguration day
I am sure Maduro in Venezuela is looking for a few “good” prosecutors….
‘Today’s decision by the DOJ ends the unconstitutional federal cases against President Trump,…’
Good, but Jack Smith should be in prison for maliscious prosecution, defrauding the American people, and embezzlement of tax dollars maquerading as a quasi-legit prosecution.
Bring the pain and punishment, or it’s still just *clown world* where these corrupt-o-crats will do it again and again.
Don’t forget impersonating a US attorney
Absolutely correct. Halting lawfare now is only a partial, and temporary, solution. Punishment is necessary as a deterrent to future bad actors. Isn’t this one of the legitimate purposes of law enforcement?
This is crazy. Either DJT did what he is charged with doing and should go to trial — or he did not do what he is charged with and it was a spurious prosecution.
The fact that DJT was just elected president should not enter into deciding the legality or illegality of the crimes with which he was charged. Either he did it or he didn’t do it.
Since Smith doesn’t have the cojones to stick to his guns, this old country boys infers that Smith had a crap case to begin with. If that is true, then Smith should be indicted for election interference or treason or something. His request to drop the charges is ipso facto proof that the charges were politically motivated harassment.
Hey Smith, you can’t have it both ways!
What a reprehensible rodent!
You have conflated two different things: What Trump has done, and what laws these actions supposedly violate. Most of the media and Left jump immediately to “He broke the law and should be punished” without using that important link between the action and *if* that violated the law. Example: Trump took his personal papers to Mar a Lago after his term. That’s legal. Some stuff was mixed in with the papers that were requested to be returned by the current admin. That’s normal. Trump was working with the DOJ to return that which he really didn’t need or want. That’s normal and legal. He was retaining some declassified (by him) items as they were found that he considered personal, not Presidential. That’s normal and legal. The FBI then organized an armed raid on his home on the orders of the current administration. That’s where things promptly went off the rails. Every previous President in my lifetime had worked with the DOJ to return Presidential records that got caught up in the moving process. Every previous President had things they said “No, you can’t have these back. They’re my personal papers.” (See Clinton Sock Drawer case) His actions as a former President are known, legal, and commonplace. The current administration tried to call them criminal and forced the case.
Smith is a weasel of the first order. He created as much paranoia as possible over the two Fed cases, declaring them to be the most important cases ever and slam-dunk guilty we should throw Trump in jail right now and save the trial. Now he’s doubling back while buying that one-way airplane ticket to the Hauge, with a tissue-thin excuse for closing the cases and getting out of the country before his own arrest. Preserve your records, Jack.
Trump was initially working with NARA to return certain documents. NARA referred the situation to the DOJ when the negotiations went nowhere. This is important, because NARA has no authority to demand the return of any documents kept by an outgoing POTUS. This is why it was negotiating with Trump, rather than demanding the documents’ return. This, in turn, is evidence the government knew Trump was legally in possession of the docs, otherwise the DOJ would have initiated an investigation on its own, NARA having no law-enforcement function would never have been involved. What it had been doing was not law enforcement, it effectively leveraged the DOJ to demand return of documents NARA knew were legally possessed by Trump. NARA knew the docs were “presumptively declassified” and that it had no authority to demand their return (due to the Clinton “sock drawer tapes” case in which a judge ruled the court could not order NARA to make a demand of a FPOTUS it was not authorized by law to make).
Also, the return of documents that are held by persons not authorized to possess them is usually demanded by the agencies that “own” the documents. NARA doesn’t “own” a FPOTUS’s personal documents. No agency does, because once a POTUS classifies (using this term in its broadest sense) documents as “personal” (by merely removing them from government to private storage), they pass beyond the authority of government to demand their return. (This applies to all types of documents, including “national security” docs. When an outgoing POTUS takes docs, he’s reclassifying them from “government docs” to “personal papers”) NARA is the designated agency to negotiate the return of documents government would like to retrieve.
Agree with you 95% here, except for the NARA discussions “going nowhere.” NARA/FBI had not even finished going through all of the papers yet, and had multiple trips to Mar-a-Lago over the previous months with more scheduled, plus GSA was still sending boxes of documents there. Trump had welcomed their visits every time and worked with them. The only thing they had not been able to access was the safe, which I’m supposing they thought had the Crossfire Hurricane documents in it. Personally, I think that was the real reason for the raid, and everything else was just a smokescreen.
Not true. The DOJ’s position is that no matter what Trump may or may not have done, no matter what laws he may or may not have broken, it has no legal authority to prosecute him while he is president. If he shoots someone in public, the DOJ says it can only prosecute him after he leaves office.
Therefore Smith is saying we are confident that we have a solid case against him, but it has to be dismissed because it’s illegal for us to prosecute him.
Smith and the entire DOJ are corrupt liars. The DOJ would continue contra their own policy were there any hope of stopping Trump. There not stopping because it is illegal – it’s illegal to prosecute someone that didn’t commit a crime to start with.
The only election interference happening here is on the part of Jack Smith and anyone associated with him in this bogus prosecution.
I hope that the new AG looks into whether criminal charges are appropriate for what has happened and if convictions are the end result that the sentences are at the maximum allowable.
Anyone of either party who uses our justice system to thwart a candidate is denying citizens of their right to vote for whom they choose. As far as I am concerned, you’d need a mechanic’s feeler gauge to measure the distance between this and treason.
Jack Smith belongs in prison. Let’s make sure that happens.
Jack be nimble
Jack be a dick
Jack drop charges
Real quick
If there aren’t consequences for this lawfare the Democrats will just do it again, but harder, the next time they are in power. Every potential GOP candidate will be persecuted and corrupt courts such as NY will try to imprison any and all contenders.
This. Unless there are real personal legal consequences, they will just do it again.
Absolutely.
And they aren’t done here. They were dismissed without prejudice.
So not only will they do it again to others, they absolutely plan on coming back for him again on these same chargers.
Commies are like zombies, they refuse to simply just die.
Save your records nad pack. This was without doubt always a witch hunt.
The plan to keep Trump from office by non-political means failed and is not beneficial to continue.
Pardon me, but the female dog dismissed it without prejudice……which means that it could be revived on another date.
I think Jack needs to lawyer up…..let’s see how he likes being on the receiving end of lawfare.
No doubt the Communists could easily prosecute Trump after he leaves office, but why? The Communists got a considerable political black eye the first time they tried it, and it won’t keep Trump from serving his second term.
Are the Communists willing to take another massive PR hit going after someone retiring from public office for good? Especially since the GOP will have a new presidential nominee in 2028, and the temptation to jail him/her will be irresistible?
As a warning to others “Even if you win the presidency we will get you eventually. You will never be safe.”