Trump lawyers, special counsel fight over election interference case in court

Lawyers for former President Donald Trump and special counsel Jack Smith clashed in a Washington courtroom Thursday over how much of the 2020 election interference case against him should survive — and how quickly they should move as millions of Americans prepare to cast ballots this fall.

The case already had been on pause for more than eight months while the Supreme Court weighed whether Trump and future presidents enjoy immunity from prosecution for their official acts in the White House.

“There needs to be some forward motion in this case,” said U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan.

In July, the high court’s conservative supermajority afforded Trump blanket immunity for his interactions with the Justice Department and concluded he had “presumptive” immunity for other kinds of official acts. Steps a president takes for personal gain, however, deserve no legal shield, the court said.

How to draw those lines will be up to Chutkan, a former public defender who’s sought to move the case past numerous legal and logistical pitfalls. Anything she does will be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court again, so there’s no chance for a trial before November — and maybe not even in 2025.

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Flashes of heat and humor erupted in the D.C. courtroom, in a hearing that lasted about an hour.

Looming over the case is this year’s election calendar. Trump did not appear in at the courthouse in D.C., only steps away from the site of the riot at the U.S. Capitol three years ago. Instead, he delivered a campaign speech to the Economic Club of New York.

His lawyers did the talking for him—and they worried aloud about what kind of evidence prosecutors might make public in the coming weeks, “at a very sensitive time in our