Donald Trump's legal team recently offered a "remarkable" suggestion as to why the federal 2020 election interference case should be dismissed, a legal expert has said.
On her Civil Discourse blog, Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor, reacted to the joint status report submitted on August 30 by special counsel Jack Smith and Trump's lawyers. It detailed their clashing proposals for how the case should continue.
Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the proceedings, requested a proposed plan in the wake of the landmark Supreme Court decision that granted Trump some presidential immunity for officials acts performed while in office.
Vance said that in their attempts to have the case thrown out entirely, Trump's lawyers would focus on presidential immunity, including in the "context of the Special Counsel's allegations about the pressure campaign on Mike Pence."
On January 6, 2021, Trump allegedly pressured his vice president to not certify the 2020 election results while Pence performed his purely ceremonial role as presiding officer of the Senate.
"In the view of Trump's lawyers, their client is immune from any prosecution regarding the pressure Trump put on Pence to refuse to certify Joe Biden's election," Vance wrote.
She continued: "In a rather remarkable section of the report, Trump's lawyers don't argue that their client didn't pressure Pence to help Trump steal the election. Instead, Trump's lawyers just say he's immune from prosecution for doing it. That could even end up, at least to some extent, once the Supreme Court gets its hands on it, being a winning argument in a court of law.
"But in the court of public opinion, and particularly for voters, the argument that, 'sure, I pressured Mike Pence to refuse to certify the election for Joe Biden after we lost so we could take over the government anyway' isn't exactly a compelling one. And yet, that's the essence of the position Trump's lawyers take." .....