Judge grants Jack Smith delay in Trump Jan. 6 case – Washington Examiner

Judge Tanya Chutkan granted special counsel Jack Smith‘s request on Friday to delay proceedings in his election interference case against former President Donald Trump.

Chutkan postponed a hearing, initially scheduled for next week, until Sept. 5, according to a court order. The judge also pushed out the next deadline for court filings from Friday until the end of August, meaning the first substantive activity in the case likely will not occur until that time.

Both delays came in response to a surprise request from government prosecutors on Thursday to slow proceedings following the Supreme Court thrusting the case into a state of uncertainty with its ruling in July on presidential immunity.

Prior to the ruling, Smith had been eager to move the case along, repeatedly moving to expedite proceedings. At one point last year, for example, Smith asked the high court to step in and rule on immunity before the lower court had made a decision on it, anticipating that Trump would eventually take his argument to the Supreme Court anyways. The justices rejected Smith’s request.

Prosecutors for Smith wrote Thursday in their postponement request that they are continuing to “assess the new precedent set forth last month in the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States … including through consultation with other Department of Justice components.”

The prosecutors said those consultations were “well underway” but that the DOJ had not yet finalized its position on how to proceed with Trump’s case.

Chutkan’s order came as expected after Trump’s defense team signed onto Smith’s request, signaling the parties were in agreement on pushing the dates out.

Chutkan, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, has taken a relatively aggressive approach to the case by rejecting many of Trump’s prior requests and maintaining a pace with deadlines and hearing dates that some have described as a “rocket docket.”

Within 48 hours of receiving the order from the Supreme Court, Chutkan issued several decisions on it. The choice of the first week of September was of the earliest possible dates she could have chosen and signals she is aiming to continue to move the case along as rapidly as possible after it sat dormant for months while the immunity argument was pending before the Supreme Court.

During the hearing, Chutkan and both parties are set to hammer out a pre-trial schedule, now that the landscape of the case has changed.

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The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling is expected to weaken Smith’s case drastically. The special counsel must now excise key items from his indictment, such as references to Trump’s interactions with his DOJ, so that it aligns with the high court’s decision that certain presidential activities are immune from criminal prosecution and also cannot be used as evidence against Trump.

Smith was supposed to give his first indication on Friday of how he plans to press forward with his charges in the wake of the new complications, but he now has three extra weeks to do this.