If you’ve been following the Georgia election interference case, you may know that it’s tied to a preliminary investigation in which Donald Trump and several co-defendants are trying to kick Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis off the case. While that side case is pending, Willis has just filed an appeal against the judge’s dismissal of a number of charges in the case, including charges related to Trump’s alleged pressure on Georgian Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
While each step in this criminal case has potential significance, the ultimate outcome may not depend on whether these individual charges are revived. That’s partly because the main racketeering charge remains intact. So, for example, prosecutors would still have to be able to provide evidence of Trump’s alleged pressure on Raffensperger, because that is also alleged in the racketeering count. (Trump has pleaded not guilty.)
In one of the more memorable aspects of the alleged Trump-backed plan to undermine the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden, the former president told Raffensperger in a January 2, 2021, phone call: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, that’s one more than we have. Because we won state.” He didn’t win the state; Biden did that.
Of course, every prosecutor would prefer not to lose the charges he has filed in any case. And in this unusual situation, with the appeal still pending, prosecutors from Willis’ office might have figured they might as well try to revive the charges while the case was already on appeal.
What holds the matter up is the appeal against disqualification. The judge, Scott McAfee, ruled in March that Willis could remain on the case if special prosecutor Nathan Wade, with whom she was in a romantic relationship, resigned. Wade did so, but Trump and co-defendants are still seeking the disqualification of Willis and her office and the outright dismissal of the state election interference case. The state appeals court has already said it will hear oral arguments on the disqualification bid in December.
It is unclear how both appeals – the dismissal cases and the disqualification efforts – will be resolved. That’s because the law in Georgia is uncertain on both matters. “The only case in Georgia involving this issue does not provide a clear analogy to this case,” prosecutors from Willis’ office wrote in a filing to the appeals court on Tuesday.
Still, they argued that McAfee was wrong when he dismissed six charges of a crime called solicitation of violation of oath by a public official. The judge ruled that the allegations related to these counts were not sufficiently detailed.
“Considering cases from other jurisdictions, which is appropriate given the lack of precedent in Georgia… makes it clear that the details of a target crime do not need to be argued with specifics, as long as a suspect is informed of what his own conduct was at issue and constituted an invitation,” prosecutors wrote to the appeals court.
They added that “facts and context from other counts of the indictment” provide the defendants with sufficient detail. For example, they pointed to the racketeering charge in the indictment, which ties in with the rest of the case regarding the overarching purpose of the alleged conspiracy: “to unlawfully alter[ing] the outcome of the [2020 presidential election in Georgia] in favor of Trump.”
In a separate appeal pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, one of Trump’s co-defendants, Mark Meadows, is seeking to have his indictment in the Georgia state case moved to federal court. The justices have not yet decided whether to hear the appeal from Trump’s former White House chief of staff, but if they do it would add yet another wrinkle to the already floundering case.
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This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
