WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump’s legal team on Friday proposed a court schedule in his federal election interference case that would delay a court fight over whether his charges are covered by immunity until after the election — and push the start of a potential trial until well after the next inauguration.

Special counsel Jack Smith argued for a vastly different approach to the trial’s scheduling, saying the court should begin considering arguments immediately as to whether Trump’s actions are covered by presidential immunity, a process his office said will include revealing new evidence.

“The Government is prepared to file its opening immunity brief promptly at any time the Court deems appropriate,” senior assistant special counsel Molly Gaston writes for the government.

But Trump’s legal team wants to hash out other points before getting into the question of whether the Supreme Court’s decision earlier this year makes moot some of the charges that have been brought against him.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has set a hearing for Thursday to discuss the future schedule of the case, which was originally supposed to go to trial in March 2024.

While Trump’s lawyers never explicitly invoked the pending election, the schedule outlined in the new filing would allow for no new substantive arguments from the special counsel until after voting is complete. Trump is accused of trying to defraud the American public and disenfranchise voters across several states, in charges that are related to his multi-pronged effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election by falsely claiming it had been stolen, which culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Trump has pleaded not guilty and denied all wrongdoing. He has continued to falsely insist the election was stolen and begun to suggest that the coming election could also be subject to fraud that would deny him the presidency.

If Trump wins the November election, he would likely be able to end the case against him before a trial could be held once his appointees took over the Justice Department in January.

Trump’s lawyers indicated they were “considering several challenges” to the superseding indictment returned by a federal grand jury earlier this week, arguing that their challenges “should be resolved in his favor as a matter of law and would obviate the need for further proceedings.” One of their challenges will be questioning the legality of the appointment of Smith, repeating an argument that helped them successfully get separate charges in a Florida federal court tossed out — but a point his lawyers opted not to previously make in the election interference case.

Attorney General Merrick Garland told NBC News last month that he disagreed with a decision made by Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida in July that Smith’s appointment was unlawful.

“Do I look like somebody who would make that basic mistake about the law?” asked Garland, who former president Barack Obama had nominated to the Supreme Court towards the end of Obama’s second term. “I don’t think so.”

Trump’s team also said they strongly maintained that the Supreme Court’s decision means the new indictment should be dismissed entirely because some of the actions described in it, “including, but not limited to, Tweets and public statements about the federal 2020 Presidential election, communications with state officials about the federal election, and allegations relating to alternate slates of electors,” should be shielded from prosecution. Trump’s lawyers said they may also file a motion seeking to have the indictment dismissed because former Vice President Mike Pence was mentioned to the grand jury.

Trump’s team proposed a trial schedule that would have the first hearing on their motions held the week of Jan. 27, which would be one week after the next president is sworn into office. The spring and fall of 2025 would be time for “Additional proceedings, if necessary,” Trump’s lawyers proposed.

The positions of both the government and Trump’s defense team are laid out in a joint motion filed late Friday evening.

Trump was first indicted on the charges in August 2023 and was originally scheduled to go to trial in March 2024, meaning that there likely would have been a verdict in the case before Election Day and, if convicted, Trump would have already been sentenced or had a sentencing date on the books. But the strategy adopted by his legal team paid off, with their appeal significantly delaying the case.

The Supreme Court’s immunity decision, which gave wide protection to the former president to prevent him from being prosecuted for official actions he took as president, weakened the special counsel’s case. In an effort to simplify the issues raised by the Supreme Court’s ruling, the new indictment — returned by an entirely different federal grand jury earlier this week — does not include any of the allegations about Trump’s attempts to weaponize the Justice Department by installing Jeffrey Clark — an environmental lawyer with no criminal prosecutorial experience who believed the election may have been stolen via smart thermostat — as the acting attorney general of the United States just hours before the Jan. 6 attack.

While many Jan. 6 defendants have now conceded that they were tricked by Trump’s 2020 election lies and told judges they regret that they were gullible enough to fall for them in the first place, Trump’s team has attempted to give an intellectual spit-shine to his election conspiracy theories. In court, they’ve claimed that those election conspiracy theories — aired by the same man who rose to political prominence by falsely claiming that America’s first Black president had a fake birth certificate and was actually born in Kenya — “were plausible and maintained in good faith.”

Jack Smith’s team has said explicitly that they believe that Trump didn’t actually believe the lies he was spreading about the election, and that in fact he knew they were false.

“These claims were unsupported, objectively unreasonable, and ever-changing, and the Defendant and his co-conspirators repeated them even after they were publicly disproven,” the new indictment stated.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Sotheby’s has reported an 88 per cent plunge in its core earnings and a 25 per cent decline in auction sales, as a chill in the art market hits one of the industry’s most famous brokers.

The first-half figures at Sotheby’s main auction business reveal the extent of the financial pressure the group came under before it struck an investment deal with Abu Dhabi earlier this month.

Weaker luxury spending in China is among the factors weighing on demand for fine art and affecting both Sotheby’s and historic rival Christie’s.

One of Sotheby’s marquee auctions fell short of expectations in May, when the winning bid for a Francis Bacon portrait of his lover George Dyer missed the low end of its $30mn-$50mn estimate.

Abu Dhabi-based sovereign wealth fund ADQ agreed to take a minority stake in the auction house earlier this month, through a $1bn capital raise funded with its present owner Franco-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, who has been looking to cut debt across his business empire.

Ahead of the deal, Sotheby’s told lenders that its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) plunged 88 per cent to just $18.1mn in the first half of 2024. Even after it stripped out further costs — such as severance pay and legal settlements — from this earnings measure, Sotheby’s adjusted Ebitda fell 60 per cent to $67.4mn.

It also booked $558.5mn of revenue in the first six months of 2024, a 22 per cent fall on the $712.3mn recorded in the same period last year, according to an earnings report shared with its lenders.

The results cover Sotheby’s main auction business and do not include earnings generated under other arms of parent company BidFair, such as its financial services division that makes loans to art collectors.

Sotheby’s declined to comment.

The slowdown at Sotheby’s follows Christie’s last month publicly reporting a similar 22 per cent drop in auction sales over the same period.

Sotheby’s results also reveal that it intends to use $700mn from the planned capital raise to “reduce the company’s leverage”, with the deal with ADQ expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2024.

Founded in 2018, the ADQ sovereign wealth fund is tasked with fuelling development in the oil-rich emirate of Abu Dhabi and is chaired by the UAE’s powerful national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan. An Abu Dhabi branch of the Louvre museum opened in 2017.

Sotheby’s reported more than $1.8bn of net “long-term debt” at the end of June, suggesting that it will still carry over $1bn of such debt even after the capital raise is completed. The company’s total liabilities stand at $4.3bn.

The wider Sotheby’s group has also borrowed money through creative means this year, with its financial services affiliate in April raising $700mn through new bonds backed by loans the auction house provides to art collectors.

Drahi took over Sotheby’s in a leveraged buyout in 2019, returning the centuries-old auction house to private ownership three decades after it listed on the New York stock market and bringing him into direct competition with French billionaire François Pinault, who owns Christie’s.

The deal handed Drahi a trophy asset alongside his Altice business empire, which he transformed from a niche cable company into a global telecoms conglomerate through a decade-long acquisition spree.

Now faced with rising interest rates and market jitters over a criminal probe into one of Altice’s co-founders, Drahi has been increasingly selling off assets in a bid to tackle his group’s over $60bn debt pile.

Earlier this month, Drahi agreed to sell a stake of nearly 25 per cent in BT Group to Indian billionaire Sunil Bharti Mittal’s conglomerate, having borrowed heavily from banks to buy up shares in the British telecoms operator in previous years.

Additional reporting by Josh Spero in London

A historic journey ended in tragedy this week when a Viking replica ship capsized off the coast of Norway, killing an American archaeologist who was part of its international crew.

The six-person team had been piloting the open wooden ship, named Naddodd, on a roughly 1,000-mile trip from the Faroe Islands to Trondheim, Norway.

“This expedition, honoring the Viking navigator Naddodd, aims to preserve Viking culture and navigational skills for future generations,” Sail2North expeditions, which organized the voyage, said in an Instagram post in May.

The team — made up of four Swiss, one Faroese and one American — departed on Saturday from Suðuroy, the southernmost of the 18 Faroe Islands, for what was expected to be a several-day journey.

But on Tuesday evening, met with stronger-than-expected winds and high waves, it capsized off the Norwegian coastal town of Stad.

The Norwegian Joint Rescue Coordination Centre (JRCC) told CNN that the boat sent out a distress signal at around 5:45 p.m. local time, but when rescuers arrived, crew members signaled that they were safe.

They issued another distress call around 8 p.m. local time, at which point local civilian boats got to the scene and saw the ship had capsized. Five members of the crew managed to board an inflatable life raft and were airlifted to safety within an hour, the JRCC said, but one person was trapped beneath the boat.

Emergency responders battled tough conditions, including 40-knot winds and 16-foot waves, according to a video posted to social media by Norway’s Sea Rescue Society.

The following morning, once conditions improved, rescuers found a body beneath the capsized boat.

On Friday, Sail2North identified the victim as 29-year-old Karla Dana, whom it had previously described as “the youngest member of our crew and embodies both the curiosity of a field researcher and the boldness of an adventurer.”

Dana, an archaeologist and field researcher, had worked in a number of countries, from Costa Rica to Germany to Morocco to Taiwan, according to her LinkedIn page. She was a member of the prestigious Explorers Club, and was pursuing a master’s degree in archaeology at the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland.

In a joint statement shared with Sail2North, Dana’s sister and her fiancé said she “tackled every adventure with a smile on her face and a twinkle in her eye.”

“She always made life look easy,” Alejandra Dana and Grant McDaniel wrote. “She created a light that illuminated everyone around her everywhere she went. If you ever had the opportunity to know her, consider yourself one of the luckiest people on this planet.”

Dana had shared on LinkedIn earlier this year that she was looking forward to participating in the Viking expedition.

“Thrilled to be a part of this crew, fearlessly embarking on this Nordic voyage on a Viking ship replica across the North Sea, pushing through physical and mental limits to sail into history,” Dana wrote.

Dana also authored several posts for the expedition’s blog, which is now password-protected.

“It’s hard to keep excitement from turning into fear when you see those waves casually tossing around huge modern boats like toys,” she wrote in a post published Wednesday, according to the BBC. “But there’s a wild beauty in the North Sea, a reminder of nature’s raw power, and I feel incredibly lucky to be part of this adventure.”

Authorities believe a strong wave was likely responsible for the capsizing, which they are viewing as a “tragic accident” rather than a criminal matter, according to the Associated Press.

Sail2North said on Friday that its crew was made up of “highly experienced explorers who undertook extensive training” and “took every precaution to ensure their safety.”

The other crew members include the 56-year-old captain and expedition leader, a 54-year-old artist and seaman who holds a Guinness World Record for rowing across two oceans in the same year, a 37-year-old extreme sports aficionado, a 41-year-old photographer and a 50-year-old engineer.

“Despite their diligent efforts and adherence to these measures, the outcome was unforeseen and deeply upsetting,” it said, adding it is committed to supporting Dana’s family and honoring her legacy.

A spokesperson with a public relations firm representing the organization told NPR over email that the rest of the crew is traveling home to be with their families and “continues to receive support from a dedicated care team.” It anticipates providing further updates next week.