A federal appeals court on Monday rejected former Trump administration chief of staff Mark Meadows’s bid to have his criminal case prosecuted in federal court.
Former President Donald Trump, Meadows, and 17 others were charged in August after a grand jury handed up a sweeping racketeering indictment to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, alleging they ran a criminal enterprise seeking to undo his 2020 election defeat. A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit rejected Meadows’s request just days after hearing oral arguments on Friday.
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Meadows sought to move his case to federal court by arguing that the crimes he was accused of committing occurred while he was conducting official duties in his role as chief of staff.
“This appeal requires us to decide whether Mark Meadows, former chief of staff at the White House, may remove his state criminal prosecution to federal court under the federal-officer removal statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1442(a)(1),” Judge William Pryor Jr., an appointee of former President George W. Bush, wrote in the opinion.
“After a Fulton County grand jury indicted Meadows for conspiring to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, Meadows filed a notice to remove the action to the Northern District of Georgia,” Pryor added. “The district court held an evidentiary hearing and then remanded because Meadows’s charged conduct was not performed under color of his federal office. Because federal-officer removal under section 1442(a)(1) does not apply to former federal officers, and even if it did, the events giving rise to this criminal action were not related to Meadows’s official duties, we affirm.”
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Trump is among the 19 initial codefendants indicted in the case Willis brought against them in August. Four defendants, including lawyers Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis and local bail bondsman Scott Hall, have pleaded guilty as part of deals made with prosecutors.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
