Special counsel Jack Smith urged a federal judge on Thursday to reject the latest effort by former President Donald Trump to have his Jan. 6 case dismissed, arguing that the Republican presidential nominee’s attempt is both “untimely and without merit.”
In a filing with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Smith told U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan—who is overseeing Trump’s Jan. 6 case—that Trump failed to file the challenge in a timely manner, despite having filed a similar challenge in a separate case in the Southern District of Florida.
Trump is charged with allegedly mishandling classified documents at his residence at Mar-a-Lago in the Department of Justice’s case in Florida.
In the Florida case, Trump “timely filed the very challenge that he belatedly advances here, a year after the deadline for such a motion in this case,” Smith wrote.
“And in this case, although the defendant timely filed more than one hundred pages urging dismissal of the indictment, he chose not to raise the issues he now tries to put before the Court.”
Because Trump is unable to demonstrate “good cause” for his failure to file the claim in a timely manner, the court should not consider it, Smith said.
Lawyers for Trump last week asked Chutkan to throw out the superseding indictment against their client, arguing that Smith was unconstitutionally appointed.
Attorneys for Trump argued that Attorney General Merrick Garland lacked a “statutory basis” to appoint Smith as special counsel overseeing the Trump prosecution.
They further argued that Smith lacks the constitutional and statutory authority to prosecute the case because he was not nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
“Everything that Smith did since Attorney General Garland’s appointment, as President Trump continued his leading campaign against President Biden and then Vice President Harris, was unlawful and unconstitutional,” Trump’s attorneys wrote in a filing with the court.
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