Donald Trump Is Back In Court With His Least Favorite Judge

And she's not worried about disrupting his campaign plans.

Image by DonkeyHotey, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Aaaaaand we’re back. The Trump election interference case has returned to Judge Tanya Chutkan’s courtroom after the Supreme Court’s batshit immunity decision a month ago. And thanks to six conservative justices’ willingness to sacrifice the legitimacy of their institution to bail out a depraved criminal gameshow host, the election interference case may not survive at all.

But on the plus side, Trump is likely to spend the next three months in a mini-trial that will put his attempt to overturn the last election front and center as Americans go to the polls. So while Trump may well have won the war, but he’s got some very unpleasant battles left in front of him yet.

Break Time Is Over!

As a parting gift, the Supreme Court’s six conservatives held the immunity decision to the very last day of the term and didn’t send the Court of Appeals the official copy of the decision (which functions as a mandate) for another 30 days. That meant that the case didn’t land back at the DC Circuit until Friday, August 2.

Within hours, the appellate panel remanded the case to the District Court, where Judge Chutkan promptly got back to work. The very next day, she issued an order scheduling a status conference for August 16 and ordering the parties to confer and brief her immediately on how they wish to proceed.

“By August 9, 2024, the parties shall confer and file a status report that proposes, jointly to the extent possible, a schedule for pretrial proceedings moving forward,” she wrote. “If necessary, the parties may explain any disagreements in separate sections of the report.”

It’s a safe bet that the parties will have some disagreements.