Fani Willis’ Indictment Against Trump Suffers From a ‘Fatal’ Flaw, Judge Rules in a Blow to the District Attorney

The quashing of six — out of 41 — charges in Georgia against, among others, President Trump, Mayor Giuliani, Chief of Staff Meadows, and attorney John Eastman is a defeat for the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis, and her sprawling racketeering case with respect to the 2020 election.While the quashing of the six charges — three of them just against Mr. Trump — is a separate issue from the pending matter of whether Ms. Willis and her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, will be disqualified from the case because of their romantic relationship, it presents yet another headache for the beleaguered office of the district attorney. The challenge to the charges came by way of an unusual motion called a “special demurrer,” which is a means of enforcing Due Process as well as the Sixth Amendment’s promise that “the accused shall enjoy the right to . . . be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation” against them. A special demurrer, a challenge to the indictment, is a request for greater specificity and information.The presiding judge, Scott McAfee, writs that the “lack of detail concerning an essential legal element is, in the undersigned’s opinion, fatal” because “these six counts contain all the essential elements of the crimes but fail to allege sufficient detail regarding the nature of their commission,” or the underlying felonies alleged. “The ultimate purpose,” of a special demurral, Judge McAfee, writes, “is to put the Defendant on notice and protect against double jeopardy.” The counts that have been dismissed as a result of this motion all stem from a crime called “Solicitation of Violation of Oath by Public Officer.” Judge McAfee, though, notes that the counts “do not detail the exact term of the oaths that are alleged to have been violated.”Ms. Willis maintains that alleging solicitation is enough to provide fair notice to the defendants. Judge McAfee, though, declares that the “elements of the underlying, predicate felony that is alleged to have been solicited cannot be so easily ignored.” He adds that a “naked charge of solicitation cannot survive unless accompanied by additional elements establishing the solicited felony.”While Judge McAfee’s dismissals do not cut to the case’s bedrock — an allegation of a racketeering enterprise to reverse the results of the last presidential election — they do touch on one of the indictment’s most infamous episodes, the phone call between Mr. Trump and Georgia’s secretary of state, Bradley Raffensperger. The 45th president told the official that “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” Ms. Willis merely writes that this colloquy constituted an effort to solicit Mr. Raffensperger to violate his oaths to Georgia’s and America’s constitutions. Judge McAfee, though, writes that such a reference is “so generic as to compel this Court” to quash the charges. He explains that “on its own, the United States Constitution contains hundreds of clauses, any one of which can be the subject of a lifetime’s study. Academics and litigators devote their entire careers to the specialization of a single amendment.”This generality, Judge McAfee writes, means that Mr. Trump et al. “could have violated the Constitutions and thus the statute in dozens, if not hundreds, of distinct ways.” Such a grab bag approach, the jurist writes, does not give the defendants “enough information to prepare their defenses intelligently.” Mr. Willis can revise and refile the charges. Mr. Trump’s attorney, Steven Sadow, shares in a statement that the “entire prosecution of President Trump is political, constitutes election interference, and should be dismissed.”

Fani Willis’ Indictment Against Trump Suffers From a ‘Fatal’ Flaw, Judge Rules in a Blow to the District Attorney

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