On the docket: Georgia on our minds
The judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s Georgia election interference case dismissed some of the charges against Trump and his co-defendants on Wednesday. But his biggest decision of the week may be yet to come.
The Fulton county superior court Judge Scott McAfee dismissed six of the 41 charges of the indictment against Trump and his co-defendants, including three of the 13 felony charges against Trump himself, writing that prosecutors didn’t provide enough detail in the charging documents to let Trump and his co-defendants offer a valid defense.
“As written, these six counts contain all the essential elements of the crimes but fail to allege sufficient detail regarding the nature of their commission, ie, the underlying felony solicited,” he wrote in the nine-page order.
The charges McAfee dismissed, the first criminal charges that any judge has dismissed in Trump’s pending cases, included one that Trump had solicited the Georgia Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to violate his oath of office when he told Raffensperger on a now-infamous phone call “I just want to find 11,780 votes” to flip the state’s results in his favor.
This ruling doesn’t appear likely to unravel the case. McAfee let most of the charges stand, and wrote that the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis can seek reindictment on these specific charges from the grand jury while extending the statute of limitations on the charges for six months. As Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, told Guardian US reporter Sam Levine: “I think it is a minor hiccup for the DA and less so signs of a fatal flaw.”
But we’re still awaiting McAfee’s biggest decision: whether or not to remove Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade from the case over alleged misconduct related to their romantic relationship.
McAfee said during a hearing on 1 March that he hoped to issue a decision on the matter within two weeks – a soft deadline that would be this Friday, 15 March. In a local radio interview over the weekend, he said he believed that he was “on track to having that done by the deadline that I put on myself”.
If McAfee rules that Willis and Wade should be removed, it would completely derail the case.
But even if McAfee decides that Willis and Wade can remain, this has been a successful attack for Trump and his allies – and they’ll continue to make hay out of it going forward. They’ve managed to tar both prosecutors by mixing in the actual facts of their relationship with salacious rumors, gossip, innuendo and claims of corruption, some of which they managed to highlight in actual court testimony.
Willis caught a break last week when the Fulton county board of ethics determined it doesn’t have jurisdiction to hear complaints against her, undermining complaints from attorneys for Trump’s co-defendants that she’d violated county ethics rules. But she’s still facing an ethics investigation in the Republican-controlled state senate.
During a Saturday campaign rally in rural Georgia, Trump hammered Willis and Wade. “Corrupt Fani Willis hired her lover Nathan Wade so they could fraudulently make money together,” Trump said. “‘Let’s see, darling, who can we go after?’”
And the hearings have eaten up two months of the calendar, making it even less likely that this case will take place before the November presidential election. Willis has previously suggested an August trial date, but McAfee has yet to determine when this trial will start.
Sidebar: Legal politics
When McAfee said in a radio interview last weekend that he was aiming to keep his self-imposed deadline to rule on Willis’s fate, it’s notable who he was talking to – and why.
The radio interview, one of McAfee’s only public appearances since he began presiding over the hot-button Trump case, was with conservative host Shelley Wynter, a Black Republican and Donald Trump fan.
The judge was there to sell his re-election campaign, just one day after two candidates filed to run against the rookie judge, who is facing his first election after being appointed to the Georgia bench by the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and sworn in early last year.
McAfee, a former member of the conservative Federalist Society who was an active Republican in law school, will face the voters in overwhelmingly Democratic Fulton county this fall.
As Guardian US reporter George Chidi unpacked, McAfee faces two opponents from the left in the officially nonpartisan race: Robert Patillo, a progressive attorney and Atlanta talkshow host, and Tiffani Johnson, a former senior staff attorney for the Fulton county judge Melynee Leftridge.
McAfee insisted during that interview that his political opponents won’t sway his decision-making process at all in the Trump case: “It is absolutely not going to play into my decision in any way – no job is worth my integrity.” But if he tosses Willis or takes other steps that seem aimed at protecting Trump or undercutting the case, it could hurt his election chances in the overwhelmingly Democratic county.
And he’s not the only one involved with the case with some newfound political opposition. As George writes, Willis drew two last-minute challengers as well: Christian Wise Smith, a former prosecutor who came in third in the 2020 primary that Willis won, is challenging her again in the Democratic primary (the DA race is partisan with primaries, while McAfee’s judicial race is not), while the attorney Courtney Kramer, who assisted Trump’s legal team in Georgia, filed to run as a Republican and will face her in the general election.
Will this matter?
Guardian US reporter Hugo Lowell explains how Trump’s attorneys are attempting to use the timing of his criminal classified documents trial in Florida to derail his criminal prosecution for attempting to overturn his 2020 election loss in Washington, DC – and suggests that Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who is overseeing his Florida case, might go along.
He writes: “Trump’s gambit of suggesting an August trial date to the federal judge overseeing his criminal case on retaining classified documents could mean the federal election interference case could be boxed out of Trump’s legal calendar and not proceed to trial before the 2024 presidential election.”
“Should Cannon accept the August trial date proposed by the Trump legal team for the classified documents trial – a trial that could take between two to three months to complete – it could have the catastrophic effect of boxing Trump’s legal calendar ahead of the 2024 election.”
Briefs
• Trump’s attorneys filed a last-minute plea to delay his fast-approaching hush money criminal trial in New York, which is scheduled for 25 March, until the US supreme court finishes reviewing his claim of presidential immunity in his DC criminal case. Judge Juan Merchan, however, criticized the timing of their filing, and told them not to submit any other motions without first getting his permission.
• Trump has secured a $92m bond to cover the massive judgments he owes to New York writer E Jean Carroll for her defamation verdict against him while he appeals the civil case’s verdict, his lawyers said in court papers on Friday.
• After losing two separate civil defamation cases to Carroll, Trump went back on the attack once again with similar rhetoric over the weekend. Carroll’s attorney told NBC News that they’re closely monitoring his ongoing rhetoric, a sign that she may sue him a third time.
• A former Mar-a-Lago employee who is listed as “Trump Employee 5” in the classified documents indictment told CNN in his first interview that he’s spoken repeatedly with investigators, testifying that he unwittingly delivered boxes of classified information from Mar-a-Lago to Trump’s plane on the same day in June 2022 that Trump met with the justice department at Mar-a-Lago about the classified documents.
Cronies & casualties
The former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro has been ordered to report to prison on 19 March to begin a four-month sentence for defying a subpoena from the House January 6 committee. A judge had previously rejected his request to be able to stay out of jail while he appealed his case.
What’s next
On Thursday, Judge Aileen Cannon will hold a hearing in Trump’s Florida documents case to hear arguments on two motions from Trump’s attorneys seeking to dismiss the charges. She could also declare when the trial will be scheduled at any time.
By Friday, Judge Scott McAfee has said, he hopes to decide whether Fani Willis and Nathan Wade will remain on Trump’s Georgia case.
On 25 March, the criminal trial over Trump’s alleged hush money payments is set to begin in New York court.
