The Georgia Supreme Court unanimously rejected former President Donald Trump’s last-ditch effort to derail a criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the state.
Trump’s legal team had sought late last week to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the investigation and to “quash the Special Purpose Grand Jury’s report and to bar use of its contents in any future proceedings, whether civil or criminal,” said the high court, on which eight of the nine justices were appointed by Republican governors.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that Trump’s legal team could not find any case over the last 40 years in which the state supreme court intervened in the manner that Trump’s legal team was requesting that they do for the former president.
“And, with regard to Petitioner’s request to disqualify Willis from representing any party in any and all proceedings involving him, we note only that Petitioner has not presented in his original petition either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Willis’s disqualification by this Court at this time on this record,” the justices said. “For these additional reasons, Petitioner 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.”
“All the Justices concur,” the ruling ends.
A grand jury in Georgia that could decide to indict the former president and his allies was officially sworn in Tuesday afternoon. Jurors were picked over the course of a three-hour selection process in front of Judge Robert McBurney in Atlanta, according to ABC News.
Willis has reportedly indicated in letters to local law enforcement officials that indictments in the case could happen between July 31st and August 18th, according to CBS News.
More than half of the so-called Georgia Republican “fake electors” who convened to declare Trump the winner of the state in the 2020 presidential election have accepted immunity deals from Fulton County prosecutors.
The New York Times reported that one additional elector represented by a different attorney also had an immunity deal already in place.
If Trump is indicted in the case, it will be the third criminal case that he faces charges in after he was charged earlier this year by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg over alleged hush money that was paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels. The case out of New York has been widely criticized, including by the political Left, as being weak and politically-motivated.
The most serious case that Trump faces criminal charges in involves his retention of classified national defense documents that were recovered during an FBI raid last August after the former president repeatedly refused to hand over all the documents that federal officials sought back from him. He was not charged over any of the documents that he did return, meaning that he likely would not have been charged if he had simply returned all of the requested documents.
The former president also faces potential federal criminal charges in a separate investigation over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump has maintained that he is innocent in all four instances.