Left: Former President Donald Trump speaks at the annual Road to Majority conference in Washington, DC, June 22, 2024 (Photo by Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP). Right: Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis arrives during a hearing on the Georgia election interference case on March, 1, 2024, in Atlanta to determine whether she should be removed from the case because of a relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade (AP Photo/Alex Slitz, Pool).
Months after the Georgia judge presiding over the RICO case against Donald Trump and his allies tossed out several counts in the indictment, Fulton County DA Fani Willis (D) is asking the state appellate court to step in and revive the charges.
In a Tuesday brief, Willis made the case that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee in March wrongfully threw out counts 2, 5, 6, 23, 28, and 38 to the benefit of Trump, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Ray Stallings Smith III and Robert Cheeley, two Atlanta-area lawyers.
Those counts, charging solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, were thrown out because the state failed to “allege sufficient detail regarding the nature of their commission, i.e., the underlying felony solicited.”
Dismissed count 28 accused Trump and Meadows of “unlawfully” soliciting Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) to “find 11,780 votes” during a phone call on Jan. 2, 2021.
“The Court’s concern is less that the State has failed to allege sufficient conduct of the Defendants – in fact it has alleged an abundance,” McAfee wrote at the time. “However, the lack of detail concerning an essential legal element is, in the undersigned’s opinion, fatal.”
More Law&Crime coverage: Trump opening brief says appeals court must remove ‘unethical’ Fulton County prosecutor from RICO case and dismiss indictment entirely
Willis now claims the indictment “clearly alleged the underlying facts” and that McAfee “erred.”
“The indictment more than sufficiently placed Cross-Appellees on notice of the conduct at issue and allowed them to prepare an intelligent defense to the charges,” the brief said. “The indictment included an abundance of context and factual allegations about the solicitations at issue, including when the requests were made, to whom the requests were made, and the manner in which the requests were made.”
“The trial court erred by requiring the State to plead with specific details as to the target crime of violation of oath by public officer, which is not required for a charge of solicitation of violation of oath by public officer,” Willis added. “Solicitation, an inchoate offense, is complete before the target crime commences and often well before the target crime is fully considered or planned out. As a result, the target offense in an allegation of solicitation does not need to be detailed as though it were the completed, substantive crime itself.”
In response to Willis’ brief, Trump defense attorney Steven Sadow reportedly said that the DA is “simply incorrect on the law.”
“The trial court’s dismissal order properly decided that the State failed to sufficiently plead the allegations in the dismissed counts under Georgia law,” he said, according to local Fox affiliate WAGA.
Read the Willis brief here.
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