The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal case over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election agreed to pause all proceedings in the prosecution on Friday, as special counsel prosecutors prepared to shut down the case following Trump’s election victory.
In a brief, one-page filing, prosecutors asked the presiding US district judge, Tanya Chutkan, to “vacate the remaining deadlines in the pretrial schedule to afford the government time to assess this unprecedented circumstance and determine the appropriate course going forward”.
Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, also told the judge that they would publicly announce how they would wind down the case by 2 December 2024, in what is understood to be an effort to withdraw the charges before Trump takes office in January.
The filing marks the start of the process to shut down the two criminal cases that federal prosecutors brought against Trump, over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club after he left the White House.
Once Trump returns to the presidency, prosecutors would be barred from continuing any criminal actions against him because of internal justice department policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president, making any further attempts to bring the case meaningless.
But the Guardian has reported it is also understood to be a pre-emptive measure to ensure that Trump would not be able to order Smith’s dismissal, an ouster Trump repeatedly vowed to carry out during the presidential campaign and had been relished by Trump’s team.
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
The justice department is still examining how to wind down the cases, which are in different stages and are complicated. In particular, the department does not want the classified documents case, which was dismissed and currently under appeal, to go unchallenged.
Failure to pursue an appeal over the dismissal of the classified documents case on grounds that the special counsel himself was illegally appointed could set a problematic precedent and hamper the department’s ability to use special counsels in the future.
Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2022 under the cloud of an impending special counsel investigation. That investigation examined Trump’s retention of national security materials at his Mar-a-Lago club after he lost the 2020 presidential election.
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He repeatedly told supporters at rallies and in public statements that he was running for his literal freedom, urging voters to return him to the presidency in part because the charges would only disappear if he were re-elected.
For the best part of two years, Trump’s overarching legal strategy was to delay the criminal cases until after Tuesday’s election. His hope was that if he won, he could appoint a loyalist attorney general who would simply drop the prosecutions.
He was unsuccessful in delaying his New York criminal case tied to his efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election through an unlawful hush-money scheme, which resulted in his conviction on 34 felony counts. But his conviction barely moved the political needle. Trump is scheduled to be sentenced in that case on 26 November.
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage