Georgia Supreme Court rejects Trump’s bid to shut down grand jury report, Fulton County DA in election probe

Georgia’s Supreme Court on Monday rejected former President Donald Trump’s request to quash the final report of a special purpose grand jury on alleged 2020 election interference that recommended people be indicted.

The state’s highest court unanimously shot down a petition that Trump’s attorneys filed last week asking the court to intervene. Trump’s legal team argued that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her office should be barred from seeking charges and that a special grand jury report that is part of the inquiry should be thrown out.

In its five-page ruling Monday, the state Supreme Court noted that Trump has a similar petition pending in Fulton County Superior Court. 

The justices unanimously declined to overstep the lower court, writing that Trump “makes no showing that he has been prevented fair access to the ordinary channels.” Regarding Trump’s attempt to block the prosecutors, the justices said his legal filing lacked “the facts or the law necessary to mandate Willis’s disqualification by this Court at this time on this record.”

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In their 36-page motion last week, Trump’s attorneys Drew Findling, Marissa Goldberg and Jennifer Little argued that “stranded between the supervising judge’s protracted passivity and the district attorney’s looming indictment,” Trump has “has no meaningful option other than to seek this court’s intervention.” 

“Even in an extraordinarily novel case of national significance, one would expect matters to take their normal procedural course within a reasonable time,” the motion said. “But nothing about these processes have been normal or reasonable. And the all-but-unavoidable conclusion is that the anomalies below are because petitioner is President Donald J. Trump.”

The motion also asked the court to prohibit Willis from using any evidence obtained by the jury, which heard testimony from about 75 witnesses between May 2022 and January 2023, faulting the prosecutor for spearheading the probe while at one point hosting “a fundraising for the political opponent of one of her investigation’s targets.” 

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Trump’s attorneys made similar requests in a previous filing in March in Fulton County Superior Court. They asked Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the special grand jury, to step aside and let another judge hear the Trump team’s claims. McBurney kept the case and has yet to rule.

Willis has been investigating since early 2021 whether Trump and his allies broke any state laws as they tried to overturn his narrow election loss in Georgia to now-President Biden. Willis opened her investigation shortly after Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021 and suggested the state’s top elections official could help him “find” the votes needed to overturn his election loss in the state. 

The special grand jury, which did not have the power to issue indictments, was seated last May and dissolved in January. Though most of that report remains sealed for now, the panel’s foreperson has said without naming names that the special grand jury recommended charging multiple people.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.