Left: Violent insurrectionists loyal to President Donald Trump breach the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File). Top right: U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan (Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts via AP, File). Bottom right: Former President of the United States Donald J. Trump delivers remarks at the Republican Party of Florida’s Freedom Summit in Kissimmee on Nov. 4, 2023. (Kyle Mazza / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)
A federal judge on Friday denied Donald Trump‘s request to strike so-called “inflammatory allegations” about the events at the Capitol on Jan. 6 from his criminal indictment in Washington, D.C., saying he failed to prove his claim while “making several accusatory and unsupported comments” on his own.
The bar to strike language deemed inflammatory “surplusage” by a criminal defendant is high, presiding U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan explained in the brief 3-page order.
To reach it, there must be ample evidence provided. In Trump’s bid to dilute the language of his indictment for allegedly criminally conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election, he failed to reach that bar.
Nevertheless, Chutkan wrote, whether Trump’s allegations were relevant, “consistent with its past practice, this court will not provide a copy of the indictment to jurors, eliminating that potential source of prejudice,” anyway.
Though the order and opinion were short, Chutkan also appeared to highlight the irony in Trump’s motion to remove allegedly “inflammatory” accusations. Trump’s motion asked her to strike more than a dozen paragraphs from the indictment, starting with a section outlined by prosecutors as “The Defendant’s Exploitation of the Violence and Chaos at the Capitol.”
“Defendant’s sixteen-page reply in support of the motion despite making numerous inflammatory and unsupported accusations on its own devotes only a single paragraph to the prejudice requirement,” she wrote, noting a line in Trump’s filing where he asserted, baselessly, that President Joe Biden had “directed the Department of Justice to prosecute his leading opponent for the presidency through a calculated leak to the New York Times.”
“His sole argument is that even if the jury does not receive a copy of the indictment, ‘voluminous evidence exists here that the jury pool has been, and continues to be, exposed to the indictment and its inflammatory and prejudicial allegations through media coverage related to the case,” Chutkan wrote. “But defendant fails to cite even one example of that evidence.”
The Barack Obama-appointed judge offered reassurance as well: Once the trial begins, there will be a comprehensive jury selection process and jurors will be “instructed on the actual charges and the evidence they may consider in their deliberation.”
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