In Jan. 6 Case Filing, Trump Lawyers Again Demand Dismissal

Testing procedure, and perhaps the judge’s patience, the former president’s team sought to short-circuit a process to consider how much of the indictment can survive the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.

For more than a year, lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump have employed aggressive tactics in defending him against two federal indictments.

But late Thursday night, the lawyers tested the boundaries of normal legal process — and perhaps the patience of the federal judge overseeing the case in which the former president stands accused of plotting to overturn his 2020 election defeat.

They used what was supposed to have been a procedural request for more information from prosecutors to demand that the judge strike the charges altogether — or at least remake the carefully considered schedule she set this month for pursuing next steps in the proceeding.

“This case should be dismissed,” the lawyers wrote in the first sentence of their 30-page motion to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan. “Promptly.”

While that sort of blunt assertion might not have been surprising in a filing that was actually meant to seek dismissal, Judge Chutkan had requested only that the lawyers weigh in on a procedural question. They were supposed to provide her with their arguments as to why she should force federal prosecutors led by the special counsel, Jack Smith, to give them more discovery information about the charges their client is facing.

And yet, as they have done in other cases Mr. Trump is facing, the lawyers sought to repurpose the filing to their client’s own ends, employing the same type of combativeness expressed by Mr. Trump in discussing the charges against him.

They used it to both challenge the merits of the underlying indictment and to ask Judge Chutkan to revisit the schedule she had set forth for determining the impact on the case of the Supreme Court’s ruling granting Mr. Trump some immunity from prosecution for official acts he took in office.

Many of the requests the lawyers made in their papers had already been rejected by Judge Chutkan in an order she filed two weeks ago after a contentious hearing in Federal District Court in Washington.

At the hearing, for example, Mr. Trump’s lawyers had asked the judge to push back any assessment of the immunity ruling on the case until mid-December. The lawyers had suggested it would be unfair to Mr. Trump to have a detailed discussion of the charges accusing him of trying to subvert the last election while voters were about to go to the polls to consider his candidacy in the current one.

But even though Judge Chutkan rejected that argument, telling the lawyers that Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign was simply “not relevant” to the timing of his criminal case, the lawyers repeated that same line of reasoning in their filing on Thursday night.

“Dismissal is required to protect the integrity of the presidency and the upcoming election,” they wrote, “as well as the constitutional rights of President Trump and the American people.”

That was not the only failed argument the lawyers sought to bring up again in their filing to Judge Chutkan.

They also renewed their request to focus the immunity dispute on one small part of the indictment concerning Mr. Trump’s attempts to strong-arm his vice president, Mike Pence, into throwing the election his way at a proceeding at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The lawyers argue that, under the Supreme Court’s ruling, Mr. Trump cannot be prosecuted for any of the conversations he had with Mr. Pence, which the justices have already classified as official acts of his presidency. And at the hearing this month, the lawyers told Judge Chutkan that she could dismiss the entire indictment on those grounds as a purely legal matter without wading into a lengthy factual assessment.

Judge Chutkan vehemently disagreed with that position and said as much in court two weeks ago. But that did not stop Mr. Trump’s lawyers from making the same argument again on Thursday night.

From the start of the case, Judge Chutkan has shown little patience for the defense’s attempts to make questionable arguments or its repeated efforts to delay the case. She seemed particularly annoyed with Mr. Trump’s lawyers at the recent hearing in Washington.

It remains to be seen how she will react to the lawyers using their discovery request to revisit larger issues she had already decided. It may not help the lawyers’ case that they accidentally missed the 5 p.m. filing deadline she had set for the discovery papers and did not submit them to her until just before midnight.