A Georgia judge has rejected former president Donald Trump’s attempt to block Fulton County DA Fani Willis from bringing indictments against him or anyone else based on the results of a special grand jury investigation into his effort to overturn his 2020 election loss in the Peach State.
In March, Mr Trump sued to have Ms Willis barred from indicting him based on any evidence uncovered during the special grand jury probe and asked to have Ms Willis disqualified from any further investigation or prosecution of his alleged interference in the election he lost to President Joe Biden.
The next month, one of the Republican activists who signed a fake electoral certificate purporting to award Georgia’s electoral votes to Mr Trump joined the lawsuit, which sought the same relief from Judge Robert McBurney, the Superior Court judge who oversaw the grand jury investigation.
But in an opinion and order issued on Monday, Judge McBurney said Mr Trump and the fake elector, Cathleen Latham, both lacked any standing to challenge the investigation before indictments are returned by a grand jury that began meeting last month.
“The movants’ asserted ‘injuries’ that would open the doors of the courthouse to their claims are either insufficient or else speculative and unrealized,” he said.
“They are insufficient because, while being subject (or even target) of a highly publicized criminal investigation is likely an unwelcome and unpleasant experience, no court ever has held that that status alone provides a basis for the courts to interfere with or halt the investigation.”
Judge McBurney also called Mr Trump and Ms Latham’s “professed injuries” from being targets of the investigation “speculative and unrealized” because neither has been indicted as of yet, and the mere possibility of an indictment “not enough to create a controversy, cause an injury, or confer standing”.
Mr Trump and Ms Latham had also sought to have the special grand jury’s report, which remains largely sealed and out of public view, completely suppressed and kept from ever becoming accessible. But the judge said such a “permanent silencing” of the special grand jury was “not what either statutory or case law generally allows,” and added that he was denying that particular request as moot because it’s not publicly known whether either have been named in the report.
Continuing, the judge addressed Mr Trump and Ms Latham’s demand that Ms Wills be disqualified from any case against them.
He noted that under Georgia law, prosecutors can only be disqualified for “conflict of interest” and “forensic misconduct,” and said neither of those conditions had been met.
The judge pointed out that the definition of a conflict of interest is a specific one, under which a prosecutor would have once consulted with or represented a defendant “in a professional capacity” regarding charges against them, or “has acquired a personal interest or stake in the defendant’s conviction”.
He also recounted that Georgia’s definition of “forensic misconduct” involves a prosecutor who has improperly expressed a “personal belief in the defendant’s guilt”.
But Judge McBurney said neither of those conditions had happened because neither Ms Willis nor her assistants have represented either Mr Trump or Ms Latham, and no evidence had emerged that the DA or her office had a financial interest in the outcome of a case against them.
He added that public statements made by Ms Willis which Mr Trump claimed to require her disqualification had “been neither partisan (in the political sense) nor personal, in marked and refreshing contrast to the stream of personal invective flowing from [Mr Trump]”.
“Put differently, the District Attorney’s Office has been doing a fairly routine —and legally unobjectionable — job of public relations in a case that is anything but routine,” he said. “None of what movants cite rises to the level of justifying disqualification”.
Ms Willis, who requested the empanelment of a special grand jury after a tape emerged of Mr Trump pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to reverse his loss to Mr Biden by “finding” non-existent votes, is currently presenting evidence to a regular grand jury which began meeting last month.
Over the weekend, she told WXIA TV that she and her team are “ready to go” as far as announcing charges in the long-running probe is concerned.
