Fulton County is pushing forward with its criminal probe of Donald Trump and his allies despite more than three dozen new criminal counts being brought this week against the former president by the U.S. Department of Justice.
“The federal indictments will not have any impact on the Fulton County election investigation,” the district attorney’s office said in a statement Wednesday.
The status of the long-running Georgia probe came under scrutiny after New York Attorney General Letitia James said in an interview on Monday that state-led cases against Trump would have to be put on hold until the DOJ’s classified documents case plays out.
James, whose office is conducting a civil investigation of Trump’s alleged financial fraud, said not only her case could be delayed. She also specifically mentioned the indictment brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg against Trump for allegedly falsifying business records as well as the expected indictment to be obtained by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
“So, in all likelihood, I believe that my case, as well as DA Bragg and the Georgia case, will unfortunately have to be adjourned pending the outcome of the federal case,” James said during a live taping of the Pod Save America podcast. “So it all depends on the scheduling of this particular case.”
Willis is expected to announce indictments in August in her criminal inquiry of alleged meddling in Georgia’s 2020 election. She has strongly suggested that she will charge Trump.
Trump was arraigned Tuesday in federal court in Miami on 37 criminal counts alleging he took classified papers with him from the White House when he left the presidency and then tried to block authorities when they attempted to reclaim them. Among the charges against Trump are violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice. The Republican, who is running for a second term, pleaded not guilty.
Pete Skandalakis, director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, said when the federal indicment was announced he had asked his staff to research the issue.
“They know of no law that gives the federal government the ability to go first,” Skandalakis said. “They would both go forward.”
Credit: Natrice Miller / Natrice.Miller@
Credit: Natrice Miller / Natrice.Miller@
One exception would be if the federal government had a defendant in custody and refused to release that person for a state prosecution, Skandalakis said. But that does not apply here, because Trump was released Tuesday on a personal recognizance bond.
Another exception would be for an agreement to be reached by federal and state prosecutors to allow one case to go forward and the other to wait, he said. But that apparently has not happened either.
The clash of federal and state prosecutions isn’t new in Georgia. It happened during the prosecution of Fredric Tokars, who was indicted in both federal and state courts on charges relating to the November 1992 shotgun slaying of his wife. Tokars, an Atlanta lawyer, was charged with racketeering and money laundering in U.S. District Court in Atlanta and charged with murder in Cobb County, where prosecutors sought the death penalty.
Both cases had to be tried in different venues – the federal case in Birmingham, the Cobb case in Walker County – because of sensational pretrial publicity.
Initially, there were heated discussions between the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Cobb DA’s office over which case would go first, said Buddy Parker, the former federal prosecutor who obtained Tokars’ conviction and life sentence in 1994. But ultimately the DA’s office allowed the federal case to go first, he said. Tokars was later tried and convicted of murder on state charges, but a jury declined to sentence him to death. He died in a prison hospital three years ago. He was 67.
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