Main: Former President Donald Trump motions as he returns to the court in New York (AP Photo/Seth Wenig). Inset left: Special Counsel Jack Smith (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File). Inset right: U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan (Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts via AP, File).
Not at all persuaded by Donald Trump’s request to keep special counsel Jack Smith’s immunity appendix under wraps until after the 2024 election, the former president’s Jan. 6 judge on Thursday scoffed at the “oxymoronic proposition” that hiding information from the public for political reasons will enhance its “understanding of this case.”
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Thursday refused to grant Trump a stay extension until Nov. 14, meaning that on Friday the stay will lift and she will “direct the Clerk of the Court to docket the Appendix, with the Government’s proposed redactions.”
The special counsel has referred to the appendix as “voluminous” and noted that it includes “interview transcripts and reports, [Presidential Daily Diaries] PDDs, emails and text messages, and other relevant records that the defendant has long possessed,” so for that reason it was no surprise the defense wanted to keep it out of public view, just as they opposed (without success) the release of Smith’s immunity brief.
The Thursday ruling from Chutkan boils down to this: the public has a right to access the documents at issue and “none” of the arguments the Trump team made in favor of further sealing were “persuasive.”
“Exercising that judgment, the court cannot conclude that an extended stay is appropriate,” the judge wrote, noting that the defense did “not engage with the six relevant factors for sealing” but instead largely focused on the document dump’s potential impact on the 2024 election.
Chutkan wasn’t swayed by the “too speculative” argument that the fact of the appendix going public would necessarily “poison the jury pool,” but she was even less convinced that keeping documents from the public would somehow be helpful.
“Setting aside the oxymoronic proposition that the public’s understanding of this case will be enhanced by withholding information about it, any public debate about the issues in this case has no bearing on the court’s resolution of those issues,” the judge said.
The judge reiterated that Trump’s presidential candidacy “does not implicate the concerns animating his official immunity,” and she “stressed” that his interests in being elected don’t control the scheduling in the case.
Turning a defense argument on its head, Chutkan wrote that hiding documents the public has a right to see — just because of politics — would be “election interference” in itself.
“There is undoubtedly a public interest in courts not inserting themselves into elections, or appearing to do so. But litigation’s incidental effects on politics are not the same as a court’s intentional interference with them,” she said. “As a result, it is in fact Defendant’s requested relief that risks undermining that public interest: If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute—or appear to be—election interference.”
“The court will therefore continue to keep political considerations out of its decision-making, rather than incorporating them as Defendant requests,” Chutkan concluded.
Read the ruling here.
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