The Daily Fuckup

Donald Trump’s legal team filed new motions on Sept. 12, 2023, seeking to dismiss parts of the Fulton County election-interference indictment that charged him and 18 other defendants with trying to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. The filing was a procedural challenge inside the case already returned by a grand jury on Aug. 14, 2023, not a new charging event or a fresh case against Trump that day.

The defense motion was one of several early efforts to narrow the sprawling racketeering case before trial. Trump’s lawyers have argued that some counts should not stand and that the indictment sweeps too broadly across conduct tied to the post-election period. The filing itself did not resolve the underlying allegations, and it did not alter the basic posture of the case: Trump remained one of 19 people charged in a prosecution built around Georgia’s racketeering statute.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, were pressing a different point. They asked the court to keep the case together and try Trump with the other defendants in a single proceeding, arguing that the evidence and witnesses overlap and that separate trials would be inefficient. That was a request, not a ruling. As of Sept. 12, the court had not decided whether the defendants would be tried together.

The result was a familiar split-screen: Trump’s lawyers trying to pare back the case count by count, and prosecutors trying to keep the indictment intact as one coordinated alleged scheme. The immediate effect was limited, but the filing marked another step in a case that was already moving forward in Fulton County and remained anchored to the Aug. 14 indictment.