Trump’s Georgia Lawyers Seek to Quash Special Grand Jury Report

ATLANTA — As former President Donald J. Trump awaits a possible indictment in New York, his lawyers pushed back on Monday at another criminal investigation swirling around him in Georgia, filing a motion to quash the final report of a special grand jury that considered whether Mr. Trump and some of his allies interfered in the 2020 election results in the state.

The motion, filed in Atlanta, also seeks to suppress any evidence or testimony derived from the special grand jury’s investigation, and it asks that the office of Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, be disqualified from the case.

Noting that “the whole world has watched” the investigation in Georgia unfold, the motion described the grand jury proceedings as “confusing, flawed and, at times, blatantly unconstitutional.”

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump said in a social media post that he would be arrested on Tuesday as part of an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney into a hush money payment he made to a porn star, and called on his supporters to protest. A special counsel for the Justice Department is also investigating Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents that he kept at his home in Florida, as well as his efforts to overturn the national election results and his conduct related to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

In Georgia, Mr. Trump is seen as having two main areas of legal jeopardy: the calls he made in the weeks after the 2020 election to pressure state officials to overturn the results there, and his direct involvement in efforts to assemble an alternate slate of electors, even after three vote counts affirmed President Biden’s victory in the state. Experts have said that Ms. Willis appears to be building a case that could target multiple defendants with charges of conspiracy to commit election fraud, or charges related to racketeering.

The motion on Monday was filed by Drew Findling, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg, lawyers for Mr. Trump in the Georgia matter.

Among other things, the motion says that Ms. Willis had made numerous public statements that showed bias; that the judge presiding over the case, Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court, had made prejudicial statements; and that the Georgia laws governing special grand juries are so vague as to be unconstitutional.

“The results of the investigation cannot be relied upon and, therefore, must be suppressed given the constitutional violations,” the motion says.

A spokesman for the district attorney’s office declined to comment on Monday. But several legal scholars who have been following the case closely expressed doubts that the motion would meet with much success. Clark D. Cunningham, a professor of law and ethics at Georgia State University, said that the filing appeared to be premature.

Mr. Trump needs to wait to make the arguments asserted in his court filing until “when (and if) he is actually indicted,” Mr. Cunningham wrote in an email, noting that even then, it may be difficult to derail the process.

He noted that the state’s high court had referred to the dismissal of an indictment as “an extreme sanction, used only sparingly as a remedy for unlawful government conduct.”

Norman Eisen, a lawyer who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment of Mr. Trump, said the former president “has a half-century history of taking a spaghetti-at-the-wall approach to litigating. He throws everything out there to see what sticks. In this case, I don’t think that it will stick.”

The 23 members of the Fulton County special grand jury were sworn in last May and met behind closed doors for months, hearing testimony from 75 witnesses. They did not have the power to issue indictments; rather, they produced a report containing recommendations for Ms. Willis’s office on whether to indict, and whom. Portions of the report were released in February, but key sections remain sealed, including those detailing which people the jury believes should be indicted, and for what crimes.

In interviews late last month with a number of news outlets, the jury forewoman, Emily Kohrs, did not divulge specific details of the jury’s recommendations, although she discussed aspects of its work and told The New York Times that the jury had recommended indictments for more than a dozen people. Asked if Mr. Trump was among them, she would not answer directly but said: “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science.”

In her round of interviews, Ms. Kohrs, 30, said she was trying to carefully follow rules set out by the Judge McBurney. He has not barred the jurors from talking, though he told them not to discuss their private deliberations. Last week, five other jurors discussed aspects of their work in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In an interview after Ms. Kohrs spoke publicly, lawyers for Mr. Trump argued that she had “poisoned” the case by divulging a number of matters that they believed constituted “deliberations.” But Judge McBurney said at the time, in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, that “deliberations” only covered discussions that jurors had privately in the jury room. Other aspects of their work could be discussed publicly, he said, including anything that ended up in their final report.

Even given this leeway, the six jurors who have spoken with news outlets have declined to discuss whom they had singled out as meriting indictment. Any criminal indictments would be issued by a regular grand jury.

In some of Ms. Kohrs’s television interviews, she sometimes used light and playful language, prompting some critics to charge that the grand jury’s deliberations seemed to have lacked the gravity befitting a criminal inquiry into a former president. Ms. Kohrs was even the subject of a “Saturday Night Live” skit.

But some legal experts said they doubted whether Ms. Kohrs’s comments would have much of an effect on the Georgia case.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued in their motion that the jurors’ public comments revealed that their work was “tainted by improper influences,” noting that they were allowed to read news articles about the matter during their time of service. The motion also argued, based on some of Ms. Kohrs’s statements, that the jurors drew negative inferences about witnesses who declined to answer questions by invoking their Fifth Amendment rights.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers also maintain that the Georgia laws governing special grand juries are so vague as to threaten due-process rights.

The lawyers noted, in particular, that Georgia law is vague about whether special grand juries can be criminal in nature, or only civil. They contested Judge McBurney’s determination that the jury in this case was a criminal one — a decision, they said, that “had vast constitutional and procedural implications.”

Among other things, that determination allowed the special grand jury to compel testimony from out-of-state witnesses, something that would not have been permissible if it were investigating a civil matter. (A number of high-profile witnesses in the case tried to fight their subpoenas on the grounds that the special grand jury was a civil body, with varying success.)

The motion also asserted that Judge McBurney’s decision last July to block Ms. Willis’s office from investigating Lt. Gov. Burt Jones — a Republican and Trump ally who at the time was a state senator and running for his current position — should apply to everyone under investigation in the case. (Ms. Willis had headlined a fund-raiser for Mr. Jones’s Democratic rival in the lieutenant governor’s race.)

The lawyers requested that a judge other than Judge McBurney consider their motion.

Mr. Trump has frequently accused Ms. Willis of conducting a “witch hunt” with the investigation, and the motion reinforced the argument that she had shown bias against Mr. Trump. In a number of interviews with news outlets, the motion said, she had made statements that violated prosecutorial standards and created a “substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing” the special grand jury.

The motion also criticized Ms. Willis’s campaign Twitter account for posting “a biased political cartoon” in July that depicted her in a boat with a fishing rod, “fishing a recently subpoenaed witness out of a swamp.”

It also said that her office had been arbitrary in designating some witnesses, but not others, as “targets” of the investigation.

Mr. Trump announced a new presidential campaign in November, and he is leading his Republican opponents in most polls. But his legal troubles present him with challenges that have few, if any, precedents in American history. No president, sitting or former, has ever been charged with a crime.

Before his public statements this weekend anticipating an imminent indictment in New York, Mr. Trump sent out numerous fund-raising emails criticizing prosecutors in the various cases against him and portraying himself as a victim of partisan forces. “The left has turned America into the ‘investigation capital of the world,’ as our country’s enemies brilliantly plot their next move to destroy our nation,” he stated in one such email on March 13.