Main image: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks after voting in the Florida primary election in Palm Beach, Fla., Tuesday, March 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee); Inset right: Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis looks on during a hearing on the Georgia election interference case, Friday, March 1, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Alex Slitz, Pool).
Attorneys for former President Donald Trump harshly accused Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her office of making legal arguments in defiance of both Georgia statutes and state court rules.
In a Thursday response opposing the state’s motion to dismiss the appeal, the 45th president takes aim at the DA’s recent effort to put the kibosh on the case currently before the Georgia Court of Appeals.
In that case, the Peach State’s second-highest court is reconsidering a defense effort to have Willis and her entire office removed from the overarching racketeering (RICO) and election subversion prosecution.
“Without citation to any applicable authority, the State filed this ‘Hail Mary’ motion to dismiss these meritorious appeals, accusing this Court of ‘improvidently’ granting interlocutory review,” the defense motion reads. “There is no proper procedural vehicle for the State to relitigate this Court’s sound decision to hear the merits. The State’s attempt to do so conflicts with applicable statutes and this Court’s Rules.”
Formally, Trump and eight co-defendants are seeking a review of the trial court’s recent decision to keep Willis in charge. That effort was only partly successful: Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee ruled either the DA or then-lead prosecutor Nathan Wade had to drop out based on a finding that the prosecutors’ one-time romance resulted in “a significant appearance of impropriety that infects the current structure of the prosecution team.”
In real terms, however, the appellate court’s review could be likened to essentially reviewing the case anew. The judges will have extremely broad latitude to review “all judgments, rulings, or orders rendered in the case” under long-standing statutory authority in Georgia. Essentially, the parties will be able to raise all of the prior issues in the case — even an issue previously considered moot.
As Law&Crime reported on June 5, the Georgia Court of Appeals paused the case against Trump and others over issues related to the ongoing disqualification efforts aimed at Willis and her office.
Earlier this month, one of Willis’ top lieutenants penned a motion arguing the appeal should never have been allowed to proceed “due to the lack of sufficient evidence, based upon the explicit factual findings of the trial court.”
Trump’s motion rubbishes that effort.
“In its desperate bid to avoid disqualification of a deeply conflicted District Attorney who has engaged in — and continues to unapologetically engage in — extrajudicial forensic misconduct, the State argues that the trial court’s factual findings were not clearly erroneous,” the defense motion goes on. “According to the State, then, this Court is powerless to overturn the trial court’s order denying the dismissal of the case and the disqualification of District Attorney Willis and her office. Of course, as this Court well knows, that has never been, and is not now, the law.”
The defense accuses the DA’s office of trying a sleight-of-hand argument based on a very basic procedural matter.
From the motion at length:
As the “Joint Application for Interlocutory Appeal” made plain, the vast majority, if not all, of the issues raised in these appeals are issues of law, not fact, which this Court reviews de novo. Most of the issues on appeal involve the trial court’s misinterpretation or misapplication of legal standards, not the trial court’s factual findings, many of which actually favor Appellants and undermine the State. For those reasons, the State’s focus on the “clearly erroneous” standard is largely irrelevant to the matters for litigation in these appeals. Simply stated, the State’s motion is a calculated, disingenuous attempt to mislead this Court for the obvious purpose of preventing interlocutory appellate review of the District Attorney’s misconduct.
Trump’s motion characterizes the Willis motion as “diatribe” filed “[w]ithout citation to any applicable statute, case, or court rule.”
Notably, the DA’s motion did cite several pieces of case law from the court of appeals and Georgia Supreme Court.
Trump’s lawyers, conversely, say those citations simply are not enough. Rather, the defense says, the cases cited do not provide “any authority” for the relief sought by the DA’s office and instead “merely reiterate the well-known ‘clearly erroneous’ standard of review for appellate challenges to factual findings.”
The defense motion insists the state intentionally based its dismissal request on the incorrect legal standard.
“The State’s motion is, at bottom, a red herring,” the filing continues. “The State devotes its entire motion to the standard of review of the trial court’s factual findings, when all — or substantially all — of the issues raised in this appeal are legal issues subject to de novo, not clearly erroneous, review.”
More Law&Crime coverage: The Trump Docket: With June nearly gone, how long can the Supreme Court wait to rule on Trump’s immunity claim?
As for the facts, the defense motion, on two separate occasions, also argues that a review on that front would not help Willis’ case.
The original crux of the defense’s basic argument for removing Willis was that the district attorney hired her then-boyfriend for the job, overpaid him, and then reaped something akin to a financial windfall in the form of vacations, travel, lodging, and other such gifts. Those alleged gifts, the defense argued, were paid for with public funds.
In the end, McAfee said the defense had not met its burden to show Willis obtained “a material financial benefit as a result of her decision to hire” Wade — or that the “financial gain flowing from her relationship” motivated Willis to prosecute and prolong the case.
After the appeals court decided to take up the case against Willis, the defendants filed for a stay pending the results of the appeal. Now, any proceedings, pretrial or otherwise, have been kiboshed.
The earlier appeal application was premised on “forensic misconduct” allegations against Willis over her Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech at Big Bethel A.M.E. Church in Atlanta — a speech that, the defense argued, was a direct public response to the nepotism allegations.
“While the trial court factually found DA Willis’ out-of-court statements were improper and Defendants proved an apparent conflict of interest, the trial court erred as a matter of law by not requiring dismissal and DA Willis’ disqualification,” the appeal reads. “This legal error requires the Court’s immediate review.”
The defense has accused the district attorney of using the nationally-televised speech to make “inflammatory extrajudicial racial comments” about the defendants and of improperly stoking “racial animus” to influence would-be jurors in retaliation for, and in order to deflect from the allegations raised in the motion to disqualify.
McAfee was withering in his prior estimation of this speech.
“The effect of this speech was to cast racial aspersions at an indicted defendant’s decision to file this pretrial motion,” the judge wrote.
In the Thursday motion, Trump also notes that McAfee left undecided a defense argument that Willis and Wade committed perjury in disputing the myriad allegations against them. The appellate court will be able to consider that issue in its wide-ranging review.
“The State has moved this Court to act contrary to statute and its own Rules,” the motion concludes. “It ignores that the issues to be raised in this appeal are largely legal, rather than factual, a distinction that undercuts the logic of the State’s own argument. In short, the State’s motion is unsupported by any relevant authority and has no basis in law or fact. Appellants respectfully request this Court DENY the State’s motion to dismiss.”
Jason Kandel contributed to this report.
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