Federal prosecutors and lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump filed dueling proposals on Friday night about how to move forward in the case accusing him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election in light of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on presidential immunity and other legal issues.
The proposals gave starkly different views of the case: Prosecutors suggested they believed their revised charges would allow them to steer clear of the Supreme Court ruling, while Mr. Trump’s lawyers made clear they would continue attacks on the case that could push it far into next year.
In a joint filing to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, said they wanted to begin the process of assessing the impact of the court’s immunity decision on the case simply by filing additional court papers.
The prosecutors told Judge Chutkan that they believe the immunity ruling “does not apply” to the revised charges they have brought against Mr. Trump and were prepared to submit a filing explaining their position “promptly at any time the court deems appropriate.”
Mr. Trump’s lawyers laid out a much broader vision of how they would like to proceed, saying their attacks on the case would go well beyond the issue of immunity.
Laying out a proposed schedule that reached into the fall of next year, the lawyers told Judge Chutkan that they planned to challenge the indictment on the grounds that Mr. Smith was improperly appointed to his job as special counsel. In July, a federal judge in Florida used that same rationale to dismiss the other case Mr. Smith brought against Mr. Trump — the one accusing him of illegally holding onto dozens of classified documents after he left office.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers also said that they might seek to have the election case thrown out by arguing that prosecutors overreached when they used a federal obstruction statute to accuse Mr. Trump of disrupting the certification of the election at a proceeding at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Days before it issued its ruling on immunity, the Supreme Court handed down a separate decision saying that prosecutors had overstepped by using the same obstruction law too broadly against hundreds of pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The filing on Friday was merely the opening salvo in what promises to be a fierce fight over how much of Mr. Trump’s election interference case will survive the Supreme Court’s ruling on immunity. In that decision, which was handed down in July, the justice granted Mr. Trump — and all other future former presidents — significant protections against criminal prosecution for most official acts they took while in office.
As part of their decision, the justices also gave Judge Chutkan a daunting and complicated task. They ordered her to sift through the indictment’s many allegations and toss out any that arose from the core duties of Mr. Trump’s presidency — like his exercise of the pardon or veto powers — while retaining those that emerged from purely unofficial or private acts.
Complicating matters, Judge Chutkan was also asked to pinpoint a third group of allegations — those that arose from official acts that were not specifically part of Mr. Trump’s core duties. For this group of acts, she is required to perform a second test. She has to determine if pursuing charges related to them would intrude on what the Supreme Court has called “the authority and functions of the executive branch” and toss out any that do.
The filing sent to her on Friday amounted to competing theories from the defense and prosecution about what sort of process Judge Chutkan should use in making those decisions and how quickly she should act. She could announce how she intends to proceed at a hearing scheduled for Thursday in Federal District Court in Washington.
Neither side suggested Judge Chutkan should hold an expansive public hearing to determine which parts of the indictment were based on official acts and which were not. Several legal experts and commentators seized on that notion as the prospect of a formal trial on the election charges grew dimmer, suggesting that Mr. Smith might ask for a major hearing so that he could air in a public forum some of the evidence he had collected against Mr. Trump.
In the past week, Mr. Smith and his deputies sought to make their case more resilient against the Supreme Court’s ruling by filing a revised indictment that stripped out some of the original charges against Mr. Trump and tweaked others. The alterations were made in an effort to reframe the allegations as having emerged from Mr. Trump’s private role as a candidate seeking office, not from his official role as president.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers said in the filing on Friday that they believe that even the newly fashioned indictment cannot survive the Supreme Court’s ruling on immunity. And they asked Judge Chutkan for the chance to attack it on legal grounds before having to marshal any factual evidence to make their case.
“We believe, and expect to demonstrate,” they wrote, “that this case must end as a matter of law.”
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