The former president’s legal team asked Georgia courts this week to block evidence uncovered during a special grand jury and bar the prosecutor from pursuing the probe as charges loom.
Lawyers for former President Donald Trump are asking Georgia’s top court to throw out an investigation by a special grand jury into whether Trump and his allies attempted to overturn the 2020 election results in the state, seeking a court order that would quash evidence uncovered by the panel and bar the district attorney leading the probe from pursuing it further.
The request comes as the prosecutor – Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis – is expected to pursue indictments against the former president and possibly others in the coming weeks, making the Trump legal team’s bid appear as a last-ditch effort to avoid charges as the GOP presidential primary heats up.
Trump’s legal team filed separate petitions in Fulton County Superior Court and the Supreme Court of Georgia on Thursday. They seek to bar any regularly convened grand jury from seeing evidence uncovered during the eight-month special grand jury investigation, including the panel’s final report. The petitions also seek to throw Willis off the probe entirely.
Continuing the investigation, the filing argues, would cause “reputational harm” to Trump “as he seeks his Party’s nomination for the Presidency of the United States via a flagrant disregard for and violation of his fundamental constitutional rights.”
Arguments in the filings echo a petition filed earlier this year with the Fulton County Superior Court and to which the judge in the case – whom Trump’s legal team has also attempted to get thrown off the case – has not yet responded. Trump’s lawyers cite the lack of response as the reason for their appeal straight to the top court.
“While an original petition in this Court is disfavored, the extraordinary circumstances here justify it – particularly since Petitioner’s every attempt to seek redress in the normal course have been ignored, and the District Attorney has given every indication that the injury is imminent,” the filing says.
Trump’s legal team in the state – which includes Drew Findling, Marissa Goldberg and Jennifer Little – laid out several arguments in the filings.
The legal team argued that the special grand jury itself was unconstitutional, poisoning any evidence uncovered during the process, including the special grand jury’s final report. The special grand jury heard from 75 witnesses, including people extremely close to the former president.
“A regular Fulton County grand jury could return an indictment any day that will have been based on a report and predicate investigative process that were wholly without authority,” the filing argues.
“The District Attorney has signaled that she will use the report – itself the fruit of a contorted and co-opted process – to secure an indictment within weeks, if not days,” the legal team argued in another place in the filing, underscoring their awareness of Willis’ expected timeline.
As part of the county’s regular proceedings, two Fulton County grand juries were sworn in earlier this week. They will hear a number of criminal investigations in the next couple months.
Willis has indicated that she will announce her charging decisions in the probe during the grand juries’ term and appeared to whittle that window down further in communications with county officials, informing them that her staff would be working remotely from July 31 to Aug. 18 and asking the officials not to schedule in-person hearings – something many took as an indication that Willis is expecting potential unrest due to her charging decisions.
Trump’s legal team specifically raised the issue of the special grand jury’s final report, making the case that access to the final report would lead a regular grand jury to uncritically accept its findings without rigorous review of the evidence – and could give Willis an easier path to an indictment.
“It is one thing to indict a ham sandwich,” the filing says. “To indict the mustard-stained napkin that it once sat on is quite another.”
Source: US News
