Trump Petitions GA Supreme Court to Block DA From Prosecuting Case, Throw out Grand Jury Report

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

In mid-February, we reported that Fulton County (Georgia) Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ordered a limited release of excerpts from a special grand jury’s report on former President Donald Trump and his associates’ alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia:

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The probe’s objective was to look into Trump’s alleged attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election in the Peach State. The report was scant on details, but in one section, jurors expressed concerns over perjury on the part of some of the witnesses.

Later that month, Bonchie wrote about Emily Kohrs, a member of that special grand jury, giving interviews to NBC News and CNN.

As to what Kohrs says, there’s nothing especially ground-breaking, but it’s how she says it that is most noteworthy. For one, it may be illegal for her to discuss these grand jury deliberations. At best, she’s attempting to toe a line that she appears to have crossed multiple times. To give an example, she says the list of indictments is very long. She also says at the end of the CNN clip, which I’ll post below, that Trump was mentioned a lot in the proceedings. There are several other breaches in the clips as well.

As Bonchie noted, “No doubt, Trump’s lawyers are salivating over this.”

Fast-forward to July. On Friday, Trump’s legal team petitioned both the Fulton County Superior and the state Supreme Court to block the District Attorney from continuing to prosecute the case, and to throw out the rest of the sealed grand jury report.

via The Associated Press:

ATLANTA (AP) — Lawyers for former President Donald Trump are asking Georgia’s highest court to prevent the district attorney who has been investigating his actions in the wake of the 2020 election from prosecuting him and to throw out a special grand jury report that is part of the inquiry.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been investigating since early 2021 whether Trump and his allies broke any laws as they tried to overturn his narrow election loss in Georgia to Democrat Joe Biden. She has suggested that she is likely to seek charges in the case from a grand jury next month.

Trump’s Georgia legal team on Friday filed similar petitions in the Georgia Supreme Court and Fulton County Superior Court naming Willis and Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the special grand jury, as respondents.

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Here are some of the details from the Trump petitions:

The petitions seek to bar Willis and her office from continuing to prosecute the case. It also asks that the report produced by the special grand jury that had ben [sic]seated in the case be tossed out and that prosecutors be prevented from presenting any evidence from the panel’s investigation to a regular grand jury.

The filings ask that the courts stop “all proceedings related to and flowing from the special purpose grand jury’s investigation until this matter can be resolved.”

The filings continue:

In Friday’s filings, Trump’s attorneys said that Willis and McBurney had “trampled the procedural safeguards” for the rights of Trump and others who may be targeted by the investigation.

“The whole of the process is now incurably infected,” they wrote. “And nothing that follows could be legally sound or publicly respectable.” […]

Trump’s legal team — Drew Findling, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg — acknowledged that the filings are unusual but necessary given the tight time frame. Willis has indicated she will use the special grand jury report to seek an indictment “within weeks, if not days.” Two new regular grand juries were seated this week, and one is likely to hear the case.

“Even in an extraordinarily novel case of national significance, one would expect matters to take their normal procedural course within a reasonable time,” the filings say. “But nothing about these processes have been normal or reasonable. And the all-but-unavoidable conclusion is that the anomalies below are because Petitioner is President Donald J. Trump.”

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The Associated Press notes in its report that Trump filed a similar petition in March, asking that a different judge be appointed to the case, but “Willis rejected the arguments as being without merit. McBurney kept the case and has yet to rule on the Trump team’s requests.”

According to the AP, McBurney did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment, and a spokesperson for Willis declined to comment for the story.

As this is an ongoing story, RedState will bring you further updates as they become available.

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