Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis can’t revive part of her racketeering case against incoming President Donald Trump and more than a dozen others, an appeals court ruled Friday.
In a unanimous decision, a three-judge panel on the Georgia Court of Appeals agreed with a lower court judge who killed six counts in the election interference indictment Willis had secured in August 2023.
The “indictment fails to include enough detail to sufficiently apprise the defendants of what they must be prepared to meet so that they can intelligently prepare their defenses,” wrote Judge Trenton Brown. His colleagues Todd Markle and Benjamin Land concurred.
The appeals court panel is the same one that in a bombshell December ruling opted to remove Willis and her office from the case due to her former romantic relationship with an outside attorney she’d hired to oversee the prosecution. The Democrat has appealed the decision to the state Supreme Court.
Friday’s ruling is important because the underlying racketeering case is still alive — though it is currently on life support. In the same ruling that stripped Willis of the case, the appeals court rejected a separate request from several defendants to dismiss the indictment entirely.
A Willis spokesman declined to comment on Friday’s development. Prosecutors could try and appeal the ruling or reindict the case with another grand jury to correct the flaws in the six struck counts, though the latter would allow defense attorneys to file additional motions attacking the new criminal counts.
Friday’s decision was in response to an appeal from Willis and her team dating back to last spring. Prosecutors had challenged a March order from the case’s trial judge, Fulton Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, that had dismissed the felony charges due to insufficient detail.
The six dropped charges all relate to allegations that case defendants had illegally urged Georgia elected officials — including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, then-House Speaker David Ralston and members of the General Assembly — to violate their oaths of office by convening a special session of the Legislature to appoint pro-Trump electors.
The solicitation charges had been lodged against Trump, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, lawyer John Eastman, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and attorneys Ray Smith and Bob Cheeley.
If the Georgia Supreme Court declines to take up Willis’ appeal or upholds the lower court’s ruling, another prosecutors’ office could be assigned to take over the racketeering case, though many allies of the DA fear the case would effectively die if that were to occur. Trump is also likely shielded from legal action in Georgia while he’s in office, many constitutional law experts believe, though prosecutors could bring the other defendants to trial.
Also on Friday, Trump’s Atlanta legal team urged the state Supreme Court to affirm the appeals court’s ruling keeping Willis off the case.
Steve Sadow, Jennifer Little and Matthew Winchester argued the appeals court correctly interpreted the law and that the high court did not need to wade into the matter since such circumstances are unlikely to occur again.
“This ‘rare’ conduct and ‘significant’ appearance of impropriety is not likely to recur because no Georgia District Attorney has engaged in this level of unprofessional conduct before,” they argued. “It is highly unlikely that any DA will ever do so in the future, and no Georgia court has ever been faced with such actual impropriety by a Georgia DA.”
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