Appeals Panel Rejects Meadows’s Request to Move Georgia Case to Federal Court

A federal appeals court panel on Monday rejected an effort by Mark Meadows, a White House chief of staff under former President Donald J. Trump, to move a Georgia election interference case against him to federal court.

The decision was made by judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta. Mr. Meadows and Mr. Trump were among 19 defendants charged in August with racketeering and other crimes related to their efforts to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Mr. Meadows has sought from the beginning to move his case out of state court, which would widen the jury pool to a geographic area with somewhat more support for Mr. Trump. He claimed that the allegations against him concerned actions he took as a federal officer, and thus should be dealt with in federal court.

But in September, a federal judge sided with Atlanta prosecutors, writing that Mr. Meadows’s conduct, as outlined in the indictment, was “not related to his role as White House chief of staff or his executive branch authority.”

The appellate judges who heard the case, two Democratic appointees and one Republican, unanimously backed that ruling.

“At bottom, whatever the chief of staff’s role with respect to state election administration, that role does not include altering valid election results in favor of a particular candidate,” Chief Circuit Judge William Pryor, an appointee of President George W. Bush, wrote.

Mr. Meadows’s lawyer, George J. Terwilliger III, did not return requests for comment; it is not clear if he will appeal to the Supreme Court.

“I think the opinion will carry a lot of weight,” said Clark Cunningham, a professor of law and ethics at Georgia State University, adding that the Republican-appointed members of the Supreme Court “know Judge Pryor well and, I believe, share his judicial philosophy to a significant degree.”

Among other things, the indictment accuses Mr. Meadows of setting up and participating in a call aimed at pressuring Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to alter the outcome of the election. Mr. Trump lost narrowly to Joseph R. Biden in the state.

Mr. Meadows also made a surprise visit to Cobb County, Ga., after the election, seeking to observe a nonpublic audit of the vote that was in progress there. And, according to the indictment, he asked a Trump aide to draft a memo “outlining a strategy for disrupting and delaying” the certification of the vote by Congress in early January.

Earlier this year, after Mr. Meadows’s effort to move the case was rejected at the district court level, Mr. Trump’s Georgia lawyers said that the former president would not seek to have his own case moved. But four other defendants are still trying to move their cases to federal court, arguing that they were federal officials at the time, carrying out their official duties.

Those defendants, who are waiting for the 11th Circuit to hear their appeals, include Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official accused of advancing false claims of election fraud, and three Georgia Republicans who were among a group of pro-Trump electors who submitted votes to Congress even though their candidate lost the Georgia election. Monday’s ruling against Mr. Meadows does not augur well for them.

“Meadows had the strongest argument out of all of them,” said Melissa Redmon, a law professor at the University of Georgia. “I mean, he was the chief of staff of the White House.”

The cases all concern the concept of “removal,” which means transferring a case from state to federal court. If the case was removed, Mr. Meadows would continue to face the same state charges, but with a federal judge and jury. It could have delayed the proceedings overall, and possibly could have led to all of the other defendants’ cases being moved to federal court as well.

But in his ruling, Judge Pryor rejected two key points argued by Mr. Meadows’s lawyers. He wrote that removal does not apply to former federal officers. Even if it did, he wrote that “Meadows fails to prove that the conduct underlying the criminal indictment relates to his official duties.”

In a concurring opinion, Judge Robin Rosenbaum, an appointee of President Barack Obama, said that Congress should allow removal as an option for former federal officials facing state charges, to insulate them from potentially political state prosecutions. But she said that her concerns did not extend to Mr. Meadows, who “has not established that the state has charged him for or relating to an act under the color of his office.”

She was joined in her opinion by Judge Nancy Abudu, an appointee of President Biden.

The rejection of Mr. Meadows’s quest for a change of venue means that, barring a Supreme Court reversal, he will be tried in Fulton County Superior Court with Mr. Trump and the 13 other remaining defendants. Four others have already pleaded guilty to lesser charges and agreed to cooperate. Prosecutors have said they want a trial to begin in August.

The ruling came as Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer in Georgia, Steven H. Sadow, became the latest defense attorney to file a motion seeking to have the entire case thrown out on grounds that anything his client said after the election was protected by the First Amendment. In the filing, Mr. Sadow argued that “the charges against President Trump seek to criminalize core political speech.”

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs contributed reporting from Atlanta.