The state Supreme Court in Georgia has rejected an attempt by former President Donald Trump to effectively dismantle the criminal investigation in Fulton County that has been targeting attempts by the ex-president and allies of his to upend Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in Georgia.
Fulton County is an Atlanta-area jurisdiction. The specific areas of interest for the Fulton County prosecutors led by District Attorney Fani Willis have ranged from Trump’s direct pressure on state leadership to take action on the 2020 results to the sham slate of electors assembled in Georgia. Excuses for those efforts have included the notion that those involved were simply assembling a back-up plan for the Trump team in the event legal challenges were successful, though even that argument could prove difficult to sustain considering the consistently failed record for the legal challenges to the 2020 election from the then-president and those around him.
Some of those challenges have since resulted in penalties or the threat of such consequences for involved lawyers, including Rudy Giuliani, who authorities for attorneys in D.C. recommended be disbarred.
In his attempts to upend Willis’s probe, Trump had sought the Georgia Supreme Court’s intervention to block evidence that had been already assembled and block the future usage of covered materials. He also wanted Willis herself removed from the case, adding yet another potential lever to upend the whole operation. Judges have rejected it all. Donald “has not shown that this case presents one of those extremely rare circumstances in which this Court’s original jurisdiction should be invoked, and therefore, the petition is dismissed,” the court said, as CNN spotlighted. Almost all the members of the Georgia judicial body deciding the matter were appointed by Republican governors.
Potential charges in the Willis investigation are widely expected to emerge soon. Willis has taken security precautions with an eye towards the first couple of weeks of August. Any Georgia case against Trump, if he’s named, would be the third criminal case against the former president — at least.
