Trump lawyers want election indictment to be thrown out
Lawyers for former president Donald Trump asked a judge Thursday to throw out a federal indictment accusing him of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election and claimed that because the charges relate to actions he took as president, he should be “absolutely immune from prosecution.”
The request to dismiss the election interference indictment came in a 52-page briefing filed in US District Court in Washington. It argued that Trump could not be held accountable in court for any actions he took as president, even after a grand jury had returned criminal charges against him.
His motion to dismiss was certain to result in a pitched legal battle with prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, if only because the idea that a president cannot be prosecuted for actions undertaken in his official capacity as commander in chief has never before been tested.
The motion, which will be considered by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, was also the first attempt by Trump’s lawyers to attack the charges in the election interference case directly.
In his filing, John F. Lauro, a lawyer for Trump, argued that the former president’s repeated assertion that widespread fraud had marred the vote count and other steps he took to subvert the normal course of the democratic process were, in fact, “efforts to ensure election integrity.”
Those efforts, Lauro argued, were “at the heart of ” Trump’s “official responsibilities as president,” so should not be subject to criminal charges.
Only a handful of precedents exist that could help guide Chutkan in making a decision about such broad claims of immunity, and none are perfectly on point.
In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-4 margin that former President Richard Nixon was absolutely immune from a civil suit arising from his official actions. But while Lauro cited that case, Nixon v. Fitzgerald, extensively in his filing, the reasoning in its majority opinion did not address whether presidential actions could be prosecuted as crimes.