WASHINGTON: According to a court document on Wednesday, the judge in Donald Trump’s Georgia election subversion trial rejected three criminal counts against the former US president and three more against co-defendants while permitting the case to go forward as a whole.
According to the court document, Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee determined that the state prosecutors’ claims that Trump and his co-defendants attempted to persuade Georgia officials to break their oaths of office were insufficiently specific to support those six counts.
The judge upheld 35 other criminal counts, ten of which were against Trump, the Republican nominee running against the Democratic nominee, President Joe Biden, in the US election scheduled for November 5. The primary accusation of racketeering against Trump and his other fourteen co-defendants is still pending.
In response to allegations that they organized a criminal conspiracy to try and reverse Trump’s defeat by Biden in Georgia during the 2020 election, Trump and his co-defendants have entered not guilty pleas.
Prosecutors may file a fresh, more thorough indictment on the dropped counts, according to McAfee.
One of the four criminal cases that Trump is up against in his attempt to defeat Biden is the one from Georgia. In addition, he is charged federally for his attempts to overturn his election loss. Later this month, he will go on trial in New York for allegations pertaining to hush money given to a porn star.
In each of the four instances, Trump has denied any wrongdoing and said that they are all intended to prevent him from winning the presidency again.
Prosecutors “failed to make specific allegations of any alleged wrongdoing” in the counts that were dismissed, said to Steve Sadow, Trump’s main attorney in the Georgia case.
In a statement, Sadow said, “The entire prosecution of President Trump is political, amounts to election interference, and ought to be dropped.”
The case was brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, whose office issued the statement stating that prosecutors are analyzing the decision. She declined to provide any additional comments.
Attorneys for President Trump and five of his allies, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, contested claims that they tried to persuade Georgia lawmakers to take office by posing as pro-Trump electors in order to violate their oaths of office.
Two of the six allegations that McAfee dropped have to do with a phone call that occurred in January 2021 during which Trump urged Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s chief election official, to “find” ballots in order to overturn his loss in the state.
According to McAfee, the indictment did not include enough information about how Trump and his co-defendants could have encouraged officials to break their oaths of office or their separate obligations under the state constitutions of Georgia or the United States.
The judge ruled that the defendants may have broken the law in dozens or perhaps hundreds of different ways, and that they did not provide them with enough information to build an intelligent defense.
