Trump lawyers invoke Bidens lock him up remark in motion to dismiss 2020 election interference case

Donald Trump’s legal team on Thursday cited President Biden’s call for the former president to be locked up in a motion demanding the dismissal of the federal 2020 election interference case. “The proposed motion establishes that this unjust case was dead on arrival — unconstitutional even before its inception,” Trump attorneys wrote in the filing submitted in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. The lawyers argued to Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over the case, that Attorney General Merrick Garland violated the Constitution when he appointed special counsel Jack Smith to oversee multiple federal investigations into Trump. The former president’s attorneys also claim that Garland tapped Smith at President Biden’s request “to target” Trump – citing the 81-year-old president’s stunning remark earlier this week in New Hampshire. “In November 2022, the Attorney General violated the Appointments Clause by naming private-citizen Smith to target President Trump, while President Trump was campaigning to take back the Oval Office from the Attorney General’s boss, without a statutory basis for doing so,” the filing states. “Garland did so following improper public urging from President Biden to target President Trump, as reported at the time in 2022, and repeated recently by President Biden through his inappropriate instruction to ‘lock him up’ while Smith presses forward with the case unlawfully as the Presidential election rapidly approaches,” it continues. On Tuesday, Biden declared, “We gotta lock him up,” in an apparent reference to Trump’s legal woes. After a four-second pause, Biden attempted to walk back the remark. “Politically, lock him up — lock him out, that’s what we’ve got to do,” he said. Trump, 78, was convicted in May by a Manhattan jury of 34 criminal counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the final weeks of th...