Former President Donald Trump on Friday asked Georgia‘s top court to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from investigating him for election interference and to reject a final report of a special purpose grand jury recommending people be indicted.
Attorneys for the former president made similar pleas at both the Georgia Supreme Court and the Fulton County Superior Court. The request comes as Willis recently notified local court officials and law enforcement that she is likely to seek an indictment at some point between July 31 and Aug. 8.
TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY, OR THE MINORITY OF ONE
“Stranded between the supervising judge’s protracted passivity and the district attorney’s looming indictment, [Trump] has no meaningful option other than to seek this court’s intervention,” according to a copy of the motion filed before Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, the supervising judge of the special grand jury.
Trump’s attorneys asked for similar relief in a motion filed in March before McBurney, who has yet to issue a ruling.
Attorneys for the former president also said the inaction over the March request “should be shocking.”
“Even in an extraordinarily novel case of national significance, one would expect matters to take their normal procedural course within a reasonable time. 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,” the attorneys added.
In May, Willis asked McBurney to toss out Trump’s motion to end the special grand jury investigation, arguing Trump was attempting to “restrain a criminal investigation before any charges are filed or even sought.”
Willis’s investigation started just after a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call to Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger surfaced, revealing Trump told him, “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” the number needed to overtake then-president-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state.
Over the duration of six months last year, a special purpose grand jury, equipped with the power to issue subpoenas and create a final report with indictment recommendations, interviewed 75 witnesses. In subsequent media interviews after the report was handed to Willis’s office, the special purpose grand jury foreperson suggested that multiple indictments were recommended.
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On Tuesday, a slate of Georgians was selected to be grand jurors to consider charges against Trump and his allies over efforts to subvert the state’s 2020 election results.
The Washington Examiner contacted attorneys for Trump in response.
