On Thursday, United States District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected a request from former President Donald Trump’s legal team to delay special counsel Jack Smith’s public release of additional documents pertaining to a federal case against the Republican presidential nominee, claiming he attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
In the defense’s request to delay, Trump’s lawyers stated that releasing the prosecution’s alleged evidence just weeks before the presidential election and amid “early voting creates a concerning appearance of election interference.”
‘Radical Democrats are hell-bent on interfering in the presidential election on behalf of Lyin’ Kamala Harris.’
However, according to Chutkan, withholding the release of documents to the public would have amounted to “election interference.”
“There is undoubtedly a public interest in courts not inserting themselves into elections, or appearing to do so,” Chutkan stated. “But litigation’s incidental effects on politics are not the same as a court’s intentional interference with them. As a result, it is in fact Defendant’s requested relief that risks undermining that public interest: If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute — or appear to be — election interference.”
Hundreds of pages of documents from Smith’s investigation were released on Friday.
A second federal case lodged against Trump was tossed in July by Judge Aileen Cannon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Southern Florida after she concluded with the defense that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was “unlawful” because it circumvented Congress.
Cannon’s decision came just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court found that Trump does have some presidential immunity for actions taken in his official capacity.
Since then, Smith has been desperately grasping at straws to keep the federal election case alive and revive the classified documents case dismissed by Cannon.
Trump’s team has repeatedly called all the cases filed against him — including Smith’s federal prosecutions, the New York criminal case, and the Georgia case — a sham and a witch hunt.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told Fox News Digital on Friday, “Radical Democrats are hell-bent on interfering in the presidential election on behalf of Lyin’ Kamala Harris.”
“With just over two weeks until Election Day, President Trump is dominating this race, and crazed liberals throughout the Deep State are freaking out,” Cheung continued. “As mandated by the Supreme Court’s historic decision on presidential Immunity and other vital jurisprudence, this entire case is a sham and a partisan, unconstitutional witch hunt that should be dismissed entirely — as should all of the remaining Democrat hoaxes.”
Much of the material unsealed to the public on Friday was previously released in other forms or already publicly available information, Fox News Digital reported. Most of the alleged evidence compiled by the special counsel remains sealed.
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