Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis smacked down Donald Trump’s latest effort to disrupt her probe into potential 2020 election interference in Georgia, including an attempt to remove her from the case.
In a legal filing Monday, Willis didn’t mince words in responding to motions from Trump and one of the Georgia “fake electors,” Cathy Latham, who joined in the long-shot legal effort.
They tried to throw a kitchen sink of legal arguments at the probe — that the judge should be kicked off the case; that Willis should be kicked off the case; that the special grand jury was tainted and its report should be quashed and expunged from the record; and that any use of evidence presented to the special grand jury should be prohibited.
In her response to Trump's efforts to disqualify her from the Fulton County investigation & recuse the judge, DA Willis argues his motions should be denied, arguing his legal arguments fail to meet the exacting standards required for this type of motion. https://t.co/gmnyUE0UmW pic.twitter.com/eLEhiVkGsF
— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) May 15, 2023
Willis threw it all right back at them, telling the judge that Trump and Latham raised arguments “for which they have no standing” or “which have no basis in law at all.” The prosecutor basically said that Trump wants to be above the law, writing that he and Latham “seek to ‘restrain’ a criminal investigation before any charges are filed or even sought; they ask that the judicial system place them above and apart from the common administration of the criminal law.”
And if Willis’ thrashing weren’t enough, several media companies submitted their own filing Monday, telling the judge that quashing the special grand jury report would be “unsupported by any legal basis.”
One thing to remember about the special grand jury is that it’s not even the mechanism that would return an indictment against Trump or anyone else; rather, it was an investigative body. As followers of the Georgia investigation may know by now, it’s a regular grand jury that Willis would need to go through to secure an indictment. In a letter to local law enforcement officials that I wrote about last month, Willis indicated her intent to announce charging decisions sometime between July 11 and Sept. 1.
Meanwhile, Trump just asked for 21 days to file a reply. JUST IN: Following Fulton County DA Fani Willis’s response to Trump’s efforts to scrap her investigation, counsel for Trump ask Judge McBurney for *21 days* to prepare a reply brief. pic.twitter.com/Z6q605KGp7 Even if Judge Robert McBurney indulges Trump’s timeline request, the next big practical question for the judge may be whether he holds a hearing on the matter before ruling. But at this point, barring an unexpected move by McBurney, there’s no reason to think that Willis is in danger of missing her summer time frame for announcing charging decisions. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Blog newsletter for weekly updates on the top legal stories, including news from the Supreme Court, the Donald Trump investigations 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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