The Trump legal team is fed up with the Biden Department of Justice.
Now, they are letting it rip in a number of legal motions.
On Nov. 22, President Donald Trump’s legal team filed several responses, urging U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan to dismiss the Justice Department’s (DOJ) prosecution because, they argued, the Biden administration targeted him selectively and vindictively while abusing its statutory authority and attempting to violate multiple constitutional protections.
The three filings are the most recent in a long line of pre-trial submissions advanced by President Trump’s legal team to dismiss the lawsuit.
In addition to charges of constitutional, statutory, and selective prosecution, the former president has contended that the case should be dismissed because of the protection he enjoyed under presidential immunity.
The Nov. 22 filings focus on constitutional provisions relating to double jeopardy, free speech, and due process, as well as purported evidence of selective prosecution directed by President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee and President Trump’s main rival for the White House in 2024.
“The prosecution seeks to install itself as America’s censor, with roving authority to criminally prosecute all who speak out against its approved narratives,” reads a filing from President Trump’s legal team.
“The prosecution has no such mandate. Accordingly, the indictment is unconstitutional on its face and must be dismissed.
“Additionally, even if the First Amendment permitted charges on this basis—which it emphatically does not—President Trump’s acquittal before the United States Senate forecloses retrial before this Court, as do the Constitution’s guarantees of due process and fair notice.”
Competing interpretations of the First Amendment have been essential to the requests to dismiss the DOJ’s case, as President Trump’s attorneys claim that different sections of the indictment conflict with political speech allowed under the US Constitution.
On November 6, the DOJ defended its indictment, claiming that President Trump’s legal team misunderstood their charge, which targeted allegedly false and misleading speech not protected by the First Amendment.
“The allegations that the defendant sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election by resorting to fraud, deceit, and corruption place his conduct well outside the protections afforded by the First Amendment and likewise put him fully on notice that his conduct was criminal and thus subject to prosecution,” the DOJ wrote in a combined opposition to President Trump’s motions to dismiss on statutory and constitutional grounds.
“Finally, the defendant’s prior acquittal in a Senate trial following his impeachment in the House does not foreclose this criminal prosecution, and his particular reliance on the Double Jeopardy Clause is frivolous.”
President Trump’s petition to dismiss for selective and vindictive prosecution takes advantage of media coverage of the Biden administration’s interest in the prosecution of Trump and claims that Special Counsel Jack Smith has operated as a “stalking horse” for President Biden.
“Despite all of the Special Counsel’s self-aggrandizing comments about the supposedly unprecedented nature of his manufactured allegations against President Trump, the truly unprecedented aspect of this case is that a sitting president successfully urged the Department of Justice … to try to take down his chief political rival and, now, the leading candidate to be the next president,” President Trump’s legal team wrote in a Nov. 22 filing.
“President Biden was so successful, in fact, that the Special Counsel brought two deeply flawed cases against President Trump and has engaged in a reckless effort to proceed to trial in both as soon as possible—even while President Biden anxiously waits to learn whether he will be charged with crimes by a different Special Counsel.”
Special Counsel Robert Hur is investigating President Biden for mishandling secret data when he was vice president.
According to CNN and The Wall Street Journal, charges are improbable. Another special counsel, US Attorney David Weiss, is presently investigating President Biden’s son, Hunter, whose business activities have aroused concerns about his father’s role and relationship with foreign powers.
In a Nov. 6 filing, the DOJ alleged that President Trump’s legal team engaged in conjecture while presenting “nothing more than conspiratorial narratives of prosecutorial bias and abuse.”
“This rumor and innuendo is not a substitute for proof, and it falls far short of the sort of clear, objective evidence that is required to support a selective or vindictive prosecution claim,” it added.
“The defendant fails to satisfy the standard to support a request for discovery, much less the extraordinary step of dismissing the indictment.”
The Department of Justice also claimed that “there is no evidence that the indictment in this case was returned based upon anything other than the facts and the law.”
However, it is now up to an extremely biased judge to take the competing arguments under consideration.
Any ruling that is not based on the facts and the law will rightfully be considered by millions of Americans to be nothing short of “election interference.”
