The Georgia state election interference case against Donald Trump and several co-defendants is officially paused while they seek to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on appeal.
The stay order from the state appeals court Wednesday follows that court’s setting of a tentative October hearing date for the appeal earlier this week. The order further affirms the already apparent reality that there won’t be a pre-election trial in this case against the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
In a March ruling, Judge Scott McAfee declined to force Willis’ removal from the historic case. The defense alleged a conflict of interest stemming from her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade. McAfee declined to find an actual conflict but said the appearance of impropriety required Willis or Wade to step down, and the latter did. On another point the defense raised against Willis, the judge criticized a speech the prosecutor gave whose effect, McAfee said, “was to cast racial aspersions at an indicted Defendant’s decision to file this pretrial motion.” But the judge concluded that the speech didn’t cross the line to the point of denying a fair trial or requiring the DA’s disqualification.
Trump and his co-defendants hope that the appeals court reaches different legal conclusions than McAfee did after a dramatic evidentiary hearing earlier this year that sidetracked the prosecution. Per Wednesday’s order, the pause applies to Trump, Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark, Michael Roman, David Shafer, Robert Cheeley, Cathleen Latham and Harrison Floyd. That leaves several other remaining defendants, including John Eastman. (They have all pleaded not guilty.)
Pretrial matters in the case against Trump and those co-defendants could have proceeded prior to the stay. But the fact of the pending appeal, whose outcome could upend the case itself, already made a pre-election trial unlikely. There wasn’t a trial date in the case as it was, and we might not know for a while whether Willis and her office can remain on the case. No matter how the appeal ends, don’t bank on a resolution before we know whether Trump wins the presidency again in November. If he does, that would further complicate the state case moving forward against him, in which, unlike with his federal cases, he can’t dismiss or pardon himself. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for weekly updates on the top legal stories, including news from the Supreme Court, the Donald Trump cases and more.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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