Judge Rejects Trump’s Bid to Strike Jan. 6 References From DC Indictment

The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump's election-subversion case on Friday rejected the former president's bid to remove all references to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that will be shared with the jury set to hear his case.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan's three-page order is a loss for the former president, who'd been arguing he was charged "for crimes the grand jury never charged" and so any mention should be nixed from the indictment of what happened nearly three years ago in Washington, D.C. during the certification of Electoral College votes won by Joe Biden.

Chutkan's opinion criticized Trump's legal team for filing a motion "making numerous inflammatory and unsupported accusations of its own" about Special Counsel Jack Smith's indictment. The judge, an appointee of President Barack Obama, also reasoned that the former president's attorneys had not satisfied a requirement that the January 6 language in the charges was prejudicial.

Following past practices, Chutkan wrote that the Trump jurors won't be given a copy of the criminal indictment. And she pointed to the voir dire process for screening potential jurors, which "will allow the court to examine and address the effects that pretrial publicity, including any generated by Defendant, has had on the impartiality of potential jurors."

Trump's motion to get the January 6 references out of the indictment is one of the lingering pre-trial issues still before Chutkan. The former president is charged with four felonies in Smith's case alleging he obstructed the 2020 presidential election results and has pleaded not guilty to all charges. His trial is scheduled to begin on March 4.

Smith's prosecutors had opposed the former president's move to take the January 6 references out of the charges, which they've repeatedly argued is backed up by the details of the indictment.

"The court should recognize the defendant’s motion for what it is: a meritless effort to evade the indictment’s clear allegations that the defendant is responsible for the events at the Capitol on January 6," Smith's office said last week in arguments to Chutkan.

"Indeed, that day was the culmination of the defendant’s criminal conspiracies to overturn the legitimate results of the presidential election, when the defendant directed a large and angry crowd—one that he had summoned to Washington, D.C., and fueled with knowingly false claims of election fraud—to the Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification proceeding," the special counsel's team added.