On Thursday night, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected Donald Trump’s last-minute request to block the release of a new dossier in his election subversion case Thursday night, Courthouse News reports. Four exhibits, along with special counsel Jack Smith’s substantial immunity brief, had been scheduled for release last week, but Chutkan had delayed the release, at Trump’s request. Then, on Thursday morning, Trump filed a 7-page motion requesting that Chutkan again push back the release date to Nov. 14 – one week after Election Day -- but she declined, noting she had delayed making the exhibits public for a week already to give Trump time to “evaluate litigation options.” He had contended that allowing the public release of such evidence was “election interference.” But Chutkan ruled that the public has a right to view the evidence in this case – and that granting Trump’s request would either look like, or be, election interference itself.
With the election less than three weeks away, the immunity brief and its exhibits have become the focus of Trump’s much-delayed Washington criminal trial and the only chance for the public to see the reams of evidence Smith has compiled against the former president and current candidate. It is unclear how much of Smith’s dossier will be public, but the immunity brief laid out an expansive factual record that detailed much of Trump’s actions after his 2020 electoral defeat and in the lead up to Jan. 6, 2021. In her opinion rejecting Trump’s request, Chutkan indicated that the exhibits would be unsealed on Friday. “Both sides’ filing will be publicly available (other than the necessary redactions), and whether potential jurors will be exposed to either of them, and in what order, is unknown,” Chutkan wrote, adding that the voir dire, jury-selection process, would address any such biases. The immunity debate will continue at least until Dec. 5, when Chutkan has scheduled for Trump’s final reply. That leaves her a little over a month before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.