Government

Trump Lawyers Flip Shit Over Page Limits In Election Interference Case

Motion to exceed page limit? THE DEVIL, YOU SAY!

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(Photo by David Becker/Getty Images)

Yesterday, Donald Trump’s lawyers once again lost their ever-loving minds on the public docket. It’s kind of their signature move, but this time the occasion was a motion by the special counsel to exceed the page limit in its Brief on Presidential Immunity. The horror!

When the election interference case finally returned to Judge Tanya Chutkan last month, the parties had competing proposals on how to deal with the Supreme Court’s fakakta immunity ruling. Trump’s plan was to do essentially nothing for the rest of 2024 and hope he wins in November. The government countered with an aggressive schedule and promised that it was prepared to file a brief defending its superseding indictment within three weeks. The court declined Trump’s generous offer to kick the can down the road for several more months and ordered the prosecution to file its brief by September 26.

On Friday, the government acquiesced to an extension after Trump’s lawyers blew a deadline. But on Monday, the defendant failed to extend the same courtesy when the special counsel petitioned to file 180 pages to aid the court in the intensive, fact-bound inquiry demanded by the Supreme Court’s six conservatives. Trump’s lawyers requested until the 24th to respond, and the court told them to get their homework in by the 23rd.

But instead of explaining why the special counsel should have to stick to 45 pages, as per the local rule, they instead filed a motion relitigating their already-rejected claim that the prosecutor shouldn’t be able to file the document at all.

“The proposed approach is fundamentally unfair, as the Office would attempt to set a closed record for addressing unfiled defense motions by crediting their own untested assessments of purported evidence, denying President Trump an opportunity to confront their witnesses, and preventing the defense from obtaining discovery,” Trump’s lawyers whined. “The hypocrisy of this proposed approach is demonstrated by the Office’s earlier arguments—in this case and in Florida—that using discovery materials in public filings could taint the jury pool and bias potential witnesses.”

That last bit is particularly disingenuous, since the special counsel requested to file the document under seal, with a redacted version to appear on the public docket later. But Trump’s howler monkeys were just getting started.

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“The ‘opening immunity brief,’ as described in the Motion, would be an improper Special Counsel report masked as a superfluous filing seeking advisory opinions in a criminal case,” they fulminated. “The document would violate the Presidential immunity doctrine, taint the integrity of these proceedings, increase the First Amendment harms resulting from the Gag Order, and violate the Justice Manual.”

The scare quotes are a nice touch. Here on Planet Earth, Judge Chutkan herself called it an “Opening Brief on Presidential Immunity” in the same order where she instructed the special counsel to file it. The only issue is how long it’s going to be, and grandstanding about “a premature and improper Special Counsel report” is wholly beside the point.

But performative outrage is more or less their entire legal strategy, so instead they screamed out this incoherent demand that the court “deny the Motion and reconsider the September 5, 2024 scheduling order, by rejecting the Office’s lawless request to file a 180-page public defense of their defective Superseding Indictment before they are in compliance with their discovery obligations.”

Lotsa luck!

US v. Trump [Docket via Court Listener]

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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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