President-elect Donald Trump is trying to get the Georgia election interference case against him dismissed, asserting that the state's courts will not have jurisdiction over him once he returns to the White House next month.
The Georgia case against Trump and others is mostly on hold pending a pretrial appeal of an order allowing prosecutor Fani Willis to remain on the case despite what defense attorneys say is a conflict of interest. Trump's attorneys on Wednesday filed a notice with the Georgia Court of Appeals saying a sitting president is “completely immune from indictment or any criminal process, state or federal.”
The filing asks the appeals court to consider before he becomes president next month whether it has jurisdiction to continue to hear the case. It says the court should conclude that it and the trial court lack jurisdiction “as the continued indictment and prosecution of President Trump by the State of Georgia are unconstitutional.”
Trump's lawyers ask that the appeals court dismiss his appeal for lack of jurisdiction and instruct the trial court to immediately dismiss the indictment against him.
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Also Wednesday, former Trump campaign lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, who pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge in the case, asked the trial court judge to invalidate that plea. Chesebro was one of four people to plead guilty in the case in the months following the indictment.
Representatives for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis declined to comment on Trump's and Chesebro's requests.
The Georgia case, which originally included 19 defendants and dozens of charges, was the most sprawling of four criminal cases against the once-and-future president.
U.S. Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith last week told judges he was withdrawing both federal cases against Trump, citing longstanding Justice Department policy that shields a president from indictment while in office. One of those cases charged him with hoarding classified documents at his Florida estate. The other accused him of scheming to overturn the 2020 presidential election he lost.
Trump on Monday asked a Manhattan judge to throw out his conviction in his hush money case, saying that continuing to pursue it would present unconstitutional “disruptions to the institution of the Presidency.“ The New York case was the only one of Trump’s four criminal indictments to go to trial, resulting in a historic verdict that made him the first former president to be convicted of a crime.
In the Georgia case, Trump and some of the other remaining defendants, who have pleaded not guilty, were already seeking to have Willis removed from the prosecution or to have the indictment dismissed. They cited a romantic relationship she had with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor she appointed to lead the case.
Willis and Wade have acknowledged that they had a relationship but have said it began after he was hired and ended before the indictment against Trump was filed.
Trump and other defendants argued that the relationship created a conflict of interest that should disqualify Willis and her office from continuing with her prosecution of the case. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee ruled in March that Willis’ actions showed a “tremendous lapse in judgment,” but he did not find a conflict of interest that would disqualify Willis. He said she could continue her prosecution as long as Wade stepped aside, which he did.
The appeal of that ruling remains pending but must be decided by March.
Chesebro was charged in August 2023, alongside Trump and 17 others, in the sprawling indictment accusing them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to overturn Trump's loss in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. He pleaded guilty to a single conspiracy count a few months later after reaching a deal with prosecutors just before he was to go to trial.
His lawyer on Wednesday asked Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee to invalidate the plea after McAfee in September tossed out the charge to which he had pleaded guilty.
“In Georgia, a defendant cannot plead guilty to a charge that does not constitute a crime,” defense attorney Manny Arora wrote, adding that a failure to invalidate his plea would violate Chesebro's constitutional right to due process.
Prosecutors have said Chesebro was part of a plot to have a group of 16 Georgia Republicans sign a certificate falsely saying that Trump had won Georgia and declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors. He pleaded guilty in October 2023 to one felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents related to the the filing of that document with the federal court in Atlanta.
In a September ruling, McAfee wrote that punishing someone for filing certain documents with a federal court would “enable a state to constrict the scope of materials assessed by a federal court and impair the administration of justice in that tribunal to police its own proceedings.” He concluded that the count must be quashed “as beyond the jurisdiction of this State.”
