Fox News legal analyst Andy McCarthy warned that former President Donald Trump's indictment by a Fulton County, Ga., grand jury is "his most perilous" case yet. McCarthy in a New York Post op-ed ahead of the indictment compared the Georgia case with Trump's prosecution by special counsel Jack Smith and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, arguing that the New York hush-money case "harmed no one" and although there is "significant overlap" between the D.C. indictment and the one in Georgia, "Smith's problem is that the federal penal statutes he has invoked — relating to fraud, obstruction, and civil rights — do not clearly and narrowly target the kind of conduct in which Trump engaged."
"Willis, by contrast, is probing serious misconduct — the duplicitous and heavy-handed schemes by which Trump tried to remain in power despite losing the election," McCarthy wrote, predicting that Willis would have "smoother sailing" than Smith because state laws are "specifically designed to deal with election-interference conduct of the kind Trump engaged in." Though the Fulton case isn't as "cut-and-dried" as the Mar-a-Lago documents case, he wrote, "Willis' case may well be more straightforward — less legally problematic — than Smith's election interference case, and it will surely be more compelling than Bragg's nakedly partisan business records indictment."
"What should most concern Trump is that the Georgia case could be the most enduring of all the criminal indictments," he added. "If Trump or another Republican were to win the 2024 election, the new president could issue a pardon or otherwise have their Justice Department drop Smith's federal indictments against Trump... It remains to be seen whether Wills can convince a jury of Atlantans to convict Trump. But even a newly elected President Trump could not make the Georgia prosecution go away."
