An appellate ruling by the same circuit that is overseeing President Trump’s criminal trial in Georgia could reshape the landscape of that sprawling racketeering prosecution just as its first two defendants are set to go to trial. 

The facts of United States v. Timothy Jermain Pate are colorful, but they generate a case of black letter law. The defendant, Timothy Pate, who goes by “Akenaten Ali” and describes himself as the “heir to the kingdom of Morocco,” was criminally charged with filing false liens against multiple public officials, including  a former secretary of the treasury, Jacob Lew, who will soon be nominated to be America’s next ambassador to Israel.

“Akenaten” appears to be a reference to the pharaoh otherwise known as Amenhotep IV, the 10th ruler of Egypt’s 18th dynasty who reigned in the second millennium before the common era. His queen was Nefirtiti, his successor was Tutankhamun, and he is famous for introducing an early and short-lived monotheism to the polytheistic melange that ruled the Nile.    

This modern day would-be pharaoh is now the owner of a victory in the 11th Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals, one that could amount to an incipient defeat for some of the 19 defendants charged by the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis, in connection to efforts to overturn the 2020 election. It also could reverberate in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s January 6 case.  

Pate was indicted on 16 charges under a statute that makes it a federal crime to file a “​​lien or encumbrance” that is “false or contains any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation” against “any officer or employee of the United States.”   

While Pate did not mount a full defense, he did claim that the lien charges should be dismissed because they were against a former federal official, not a current one. Mr. Lew sat in Alexander Hamilton’s seat between 2013 and 2017. The self-proclaimed monarch also filed a lien claim against a former head of the Internal Revenue Service, John Koskinen.  

While the government argued that it would be “ridiculous” for former officers to be excluded from the statute, jurists have not been so sure. The district court found against Pate, and he was convicted. A panel of the 11th circuit affirmed, but then a majority of circuit riders vacated that decision and ordered an en banc hearing, meaning a full host of the circuit’s riders rendered this decision. They sided with Pate, that former officials are not treated as current ones  

In finding for Pate, the 11th Circuit held that what mattered more than his intention to fiduciarily frustrate federal officials was whether they were in office at the time his liens were filed in federal court. The jurists find that the “average speaker of American English” would not find that the law comprised former officials. 

The 11th Circuit explains that “we federal judges, for example, had jobs before we came to the bench,” but that it would be “passing strange to describe a judge as an ‘employee’ of the law firm or university for which he used to work” before he donned a black robe. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a legal treatise, “words are to be understood in their ordinary, everyday meanings.”

The riders’ reasoning that the government’s position on former officials “makes little (which is to say no) grammatical sense” and that Pate’s interpretation of the statute is correct creates new law that, at least for the purpose of this statute, views the current status of an officer or employe as decisive in arriving at whether they find place under the federal umbrella.  

That outcome looms over the case brought by Ms. Willis as district attorney of Fulton County. A slew of defendants, including Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, moved to relocate their cases to federal court under the theory that they were federal employees in fall and winter 2020.

Federal removal is available for “any officer (or any person acting under that officer) of the United States” for any act undertaken “under color of such office or on account of any right, title or authority claimed under any Act of Congress.” Mr. Meadows argues that former officials are eligible for removal, while Ms. Willis writes that “only current federal officers may remove state actions to federal court.”

Thus far, the prosecutor has had the upper hand, as removal actions by Mr. Meadows as well as a former lawyer at the Department of Justice, Jeffrey Clark, have foundered at the district court level. The question as it relates to Mr. Meadows now sits before the same riders of the 11th Circuit who just found that, at least when it comes to one federal statute, former officials are not treated like current ones.

Mr. Trump did not join his erstwhile aide–de-camp in requesting removal, possibly figuring that he would see if the motion succeeded before he ventured it himself. Even if he had, though, it is unsettled law whether a president is an “officer of the United States,” which is the same term employed in the statute under which Pate was charged. 

The question of whether the prerogatives of an office extend beyond a person’s tenure in that office is at the heart of Mr. Trump’s defense in Mr. Smith’s January 6 case. The former president argues that presidential immunity — which the Supreme Court has held extends “within the ‘outer perimeter’” of a president’s “official responsibility” — protects him even now. 

While 11th Circuit law does not control at the District of Columbia, it would be considered by the Supreme Court, should the matter reach its bench. The precedent of “Akenaten” could then bear on whether Mr. Trump can evade time behind bars.