On Friday, the judge presiding over the time-capsulated hush-money case against President-elect Donald Trump granted prosecutors all they sought while granting the defense only a portion of their demands.
Alvin Bragg, the district attorney for Manhattan, received a favorable penultimate hand. Additionally, special counsel Jack Smith, a well-known non-player, has one pocket ace in the soon-to-be-shelved case.
For the case against Trump in New York City, two previously distinct prosecutions may now interact in ways that are pertinent to the law.
As previously reported by Law&Crime, Smith is resigning from the Jan. 6 case headquartered in Washington, D.C., according to DOJ regulations.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan swiftly formalized the special counsel’s self-imposed deadline of December 2 for a final status, which he set days after Trump’s election victory.
The request to vacate states that the Government would provide the Court with a status report or other information by December 2, 2024, reflecting the outcome of its discussions. Defense attorneys have been consulted by the government and have not raised any objections to this request.
Naturally, the public is not yet aware of the exact procedural stance Smith will adopt on December 2. However, the practical result is inevitable: the federal lawsuit is coming to an end.
The state and Trump agreed that the corporate records falsification lawsuit against the 45th and 47th presidents would remain in effect for the foreseeable future.
Additional Law&Crime coverage: According to Ken Paxton, a paper shredder truck outside the DOJ indicates that a court must order Jack Smith to preserve documents from the Trump probe.
Trump’s lawyers in the Big Apple are anxious to hear Smith’s justification for closing the case he spent years and millions of dollars prosecuting, as Law&Crime revealed earlier this week.
Attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove stated in a letter motion that they would like to examine the stances adopted by DOJ in the federal cases that are most likely to be dismissed or otherwise dissolved.
To that aim, Trump’s team requested that their fresh motion to dismiss the hush-money case be filed by December 20.
That is to say, when Blanche and Bove submitted their last dismissal motion, they were determined to use Smith’s own arguments. And they wanted a few weeks to weigh their options and arguments.
New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan,in an ordergranting relief and setting deadlines, eschewed that defense request. Rather, the court allowed Trump to submit the request to dismiss until December 2.
Defendant s motion is due by the close of business Monday, December 2, 2024, Merchan s terse Friday order reads. The People s response is due by the close of business Monday, December 9, 2024. Rebuttal briefs will not be accepted by the Court.
That date, of course, is the exact date Smith s status report on the Jan. 6 case is due in the federal district. This timeline will likely provide Trump s New York attorneys with significantly less than 24 hours to pore over Smith s arguments and include them in their final interests of justice motion to dismiss the hush-money case.
Perhaps coincidentally, the timeline is precisely in line withBragg s temporal requestin the matter by way ofa motion filed hours before. The district attorney s office expressed no opinion on when Trump should have to file his final motion. But the prosecution did ask Merchan to set a Dec. 9 deadline for the government to respond.
Aside from tight scheduling conflicts, the Manhattan judge also granted various forms of relief requested by both parties.
In the end, Bragg and Trump agreed the court should stay all the remaining deadlines in the case, hold off on ruling on a previous motion to dismiss, and indefinitely pause sentencing.
The judge was more than happy to oblige.
Now, only two more motions remain in the case until sometime in 2029 at the earliest. Bragg s motion is, perforce, contingent on the arguments made in Trump s; while the defense suggested their motion would be contingent on how Smith fords the river.
The upshot: two before-unrelated prosecutors could make life significantly easier, or slightly more difficult, for the next president s attorneys as all the lawyers involved go their separate ways.
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