ATLANTA (AP) — Lawyers for former President Donald Trump are asking Georgia’s highest court to stop the district attorney who investigated his actions following the 2020 election from prosecuting him and dismissing a special report of the grand jury that is part of the investigation.
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 hinted 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 motions in the Georgia Supreme Court and Fulton County Superior Court naming Willis and Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the grand special jury, as respondents. A spokesperson for Willis declined to comment. McBurney did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Trump’s legal team — Drew Findling, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg — acknowledged the filings are unusual but necessary given the tight deadline. Willis said she would use the grand jury’s special report to seek an impeachment “in 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 importance, one would expect the cases to follow their normal procedural course within a reasonable time,” the documents say. “But nothing about these processes has been normal or reasonable. And the almost inevitable conclusion is that the anomalies below are because the petitioner is President Donald J. Trump.
The petitions seek to prohibit Willis and his office from continuing to pursue the case. He also asks that the report produced by the special grand jury that had sat in the case be dismissed and that prosecutors be barred from presenting any evidence of the panel’s investigation to a regular grand jury.
The documents ask the courts to halt “all proceedings related to and arising out of the special purpose grand jury investigation until this matter can be resolved.”
In a previous filing in March, Trump’s lawyers made similar requests and asked that a judge other than McBurney hear their claims. Willis dismissed the arguments as baseless. McBurney has maintained the case and has yet to rule on Team Trump’s claims.
That left Trump “stuck between prolonged passivity by the supervising judge and impending indictment by the district attorney” with no choice but to seek action in the Supreme Court, his lawyers wrote.
Willis opened his investigation shortly after Trump called Georgian Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021 and suggested the state’s top election official could help him “find” the votes needed to undo his electoral defeat in the state. Last year, she requested a special grand jury, saying the panel’s subpoena power would allow her to compel the testimony of witnesses who would otherwise be unwilling to speak to her team.
The special grand jury, which had no power to issue indictments, was seated last May and disbanded in January after hearing from 75 witnesses and submitting a report with recommendations for Willis. While most of that report remains secret for now by a judge’s order, the panel chairman said without naming names that the special grand jury recommended indicting multiple people.
Trump’s lawyers, in their March filing, argued that the special grand jury procedure “entailed a consistent lack of clarity as to the law, inconsistent applications of basic constitutional protections for individuals brought before him, and an office of the prosecutor who turned out to have a real conflict, but continued to pursue the investigation.
Willis argued in a response in May that those arguments failed to meet “rigorous standards” for disqualifying a prosecutor and did not prove that due process rights had been violated or that the grand jury process was “tainted” or that the law governing it was unconstitutional.
In documents filed Friday, Trump’s lawyers said Willis and McBurney had “trampled on procedural safeguards” for the rights of Trump and others who may be targeted by the investigation.
“The entire process is now incurably infected,” they wrote. “And nothing that follows could be legally valid or publicly respectable.”