The judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s election case in Washington issued a number of orders this week.
The U.S. Supreme Court formally sent the case back to Judge Tanya Chutkan last month, and she now has to determine how to proceed. There was a roughly seven-month pause in the case as the former president appealed the matter, arguing that he should be declared immune from prosecution.
On Aug. 6, Chutkan issued eight orders denying several third-party submissions from anonymous parties who sought the ability to file under the Crime Victims Relief Act (CVRA), according to the court docket.
“They do not establish that they qualify as ‘victim’ under the CVRA’s statutory definition,” Chutkan wrote in one of her orders.
“Consequently, the victim’s rights enumerated [in the act] do not attach, [and] the court is not persuaded that it is appropriate to depart from the ordinary course and permit this filing,” she wrote.
Days before that, the judge struck down a request from Trump’s attorneys to dismiss the case. At the same time, she also summoned both parties to a court hearing in Washington on Aug. 16.
In her order, Chutkan rejected Trump’s arguments that he was being selectively prosecuted by Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought the charges.
“Finding no evidence of discriminatory purpose in the sources Defendant cites, the court is left only with his unsupported assertions that this prosecution must be politically motivated because it coexists with his campaign for the Presidency,” Chutkan wrote in her Aug. 3 ruling.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision that found that presidents enjoy immunity from prosecution for their official acts, Chutkan will have to determine what conduct by Trump in the wake of the 2020 election isn’t immune from prosecution and what is.
A former U.S. attorney, Joyce Vance, suggested that prosecutors in the election case have not “made much progress” and are “back at square one” following the Supreme Court decision. The reason is that Smith will now be forced to “reconsider the charges and allegations in his indictment and the evidence he can use to support them,” she wrote for the left-leaning Brennan Center nonprofit.
