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Trump's lawyers seek post-Election Day delay for court fight over immunity decision fallout in interference case

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Trump's lawyers seek post-Election Day delay for court fight over immunity decision fallout in interference case

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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaks at the Reagan Library on Sept. 9, 2025, in Simi Valley, Calif. Barrett discussed and signed copies of her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.

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Even as the Supreme Court was handing down one legal thunderbolt after another last week, the justices were quietly releasing their annual financial reports. Justice Samuel Alito was the only sitting justice to request an extension, which he has done for 15 years. The disclosures do not give a complete account of the justices’ total income and wealth, but they give insights into their concertgoing, guest professorships and even their involvement in youth sports.

In addition to their salaries, much of the justices’ reported income came from their book deals. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson led the pack earning more than $1.1 million last year for a total of roughly $4 million since her memoir, Lovely One, was published in 2024.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and retired Justice Anthony Kennedy also reported income from published books. Earnings from their books ranged from $849,000 for Barrett, to $300,000 for Gorsuch and $88,000 for Sotomayor, whose books include her 2013 autobiography and five children’s books. Justice Clarence Thomas, who previously earned $1.5 million for his 2007 memoir, listed no publisher payments last year, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of 13 co-authors of a 2016 legal treatise, also received no payments last year. Kavanaugh is said to be working on a memoir but he listed no payments for the anticipated book. Alito does have a book coming out in the fall, but with his financial report still outstanding, there is no data on how much he was paid for the work in 2025.

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The only two sitting justices who have not written books are Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan.

Many justices also earned income from teaching at law schools. Roberts reported income from New England Law, located in Boston, and Gorsuch reported teaching income from George Mason University in Virginia. Thomas taught classes at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and Barrett and Kavanaugh taught at Notre Dame Law School. Barrett graduated from the school and began teaching there 23 years ago; Kavanaugh has family connections to Notre Dame.

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

At least two structural columns buckled and failed in a 37-story office tower in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, prompting evacuations of nearby streets and buildings. While city officials asserted that the tower was in no danger of collapsing completely, outside engineers said further failures in the structure could not be ruled out.

A pair of columns that failed completely were part of the tower’s existing structure. A New York Times review of images and videos from inside the building has found that several floors were added atop these columns.

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City officials said in a news conference on Tuesday that the building was continuing to move, while they simultaneously assured the city that the building would not suffer “total collapse.” “The way this building is constructed, it’s a steel-frame building,” John Esposito, a chief in the Fire Department in New York, said at the afternoon news conference. “So, it would not be a total collapse. It would be more of a localized collapse.” Still, he said, “that remains our concern, that it’s moved.”

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Engineers said that the movement itself was cause for concern. In a properly designed steel building, they said, loads should redistribute quickly to surviving structural supports if columns failed.

Joe DiPompeo, a former president of the Structural Engineering Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that if the structure had been overloaded, he would expect any movement “to happen very quickly,” rather than gradually.

“Generally when a column buckles, it’s a sudden failure,” Mr. DiPompeo said. He said that a full collapse remained unlikely given the redundancies built into the building codes.

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Engineers often refer to the most dangerous possibility as a progressive collapse, a process in which structures near the initial failure become overstressed and also fail, potentially bringing down the building if the sequence continues. While unlikely, it cannot be ruled out, Mr. DiPompeo said.

Footage recorded from inside the building shows at least two structural columns appear to have failed completely, Mr. DiPompeo said. Other nonstructural, interior walls — or at least the metal “studs” that were in place to hold them up — also appear to have deformed.

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“The only way that really happens is if the floor above them dropped. It looks like the floor above could have dropped a foot or two, which is obviously not a good situation,” Mr. DiPompeo said.

@fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @Bogs4NY via X

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The 37-story building is in the process of being converted from office space into residential units. Four new floors and a large vertical portion were added onto the existing building in recent months. The vertical portion consists of a stack of over a dozen new floors cantilevered out over the existing building below.

Engineers said that there was nothing inherently wrong with adding residential floors or the cantilevered section above the columns that failed, as long as the original structure and the modifications had properly accounted for the added weight and wind loads.

“The cantilever alone doesn’t change anything,” Mr. DiPompeo said, but it does put additional load on the columns underneath — a factor that should have been reflected in the design.

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Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, the developer overseeing the conversion, said on Tuesday that “this incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap.”

He said two columns near the northwest corner of the tower had bent under the weight of additions to the building above, most likely because those columns had not been properly reinforced, though he said an investigation would determine the cause. The rest of the columns, he said, “picked up the weight.” He estimated the affected floors above the failed columns had sagged by a maximum of four inches.

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Mr. Berman said that he expected the problems to be fixed and the project to be completed with, at most, a slight delay.

On Tuesday evening, installation of temporary shoring was set to begin shortly, in order to help stabilize the 20th and 21st floors of the building.

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DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

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DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

The Justice Department sent letters warning election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia that they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting, a spokesperson for the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday.

The letters, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads up the department’s Civil Rights Division, give states five days to explain how they will comply with federal voter eligibility laws and how they will maintain “clean voter lists.”

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“The Department sent these letters to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, asking for voluntary compliance in a timely manner with their obligations under federal law to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is extremely rare, but Trump and his administration have falsely portrayed it as a widespread issue.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson are among those who said they received the letters from the Justice Department.

The letters say state election officers “could be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting” noncitizen voting. They further specify that any election officer who knowingly retains noncitizens on a statewide voting registration list or who facilitates noncitizens’ receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability.

“An intentional act that is aimed at diluting the votes of citizens could also constitute a violation” of federal law, the letters said.

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Henderson wrote on social media that the threats constitute “truly bizarre behavior.”

“Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution,” she wrote. “I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts.”

The letters are the latest move in the Justice Department’s campaign to assert more federal control over state elections.

While some states have complied with the administration’s demands that they hand over voter roll data, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for resisting. So far, 11 different federal courts have dismissed the Justice Department’s efforts to seize voter rolls.

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