“Mark Meadows seems to have disappeared from the news. He lost his appeal to have his Georgia case moved to federal court, but I have not seen his name anywhere. Will he ever face trial?”
— Judith Campbell, Huntersville, N.C.
Hi Judith,
The Supreme Court last month rejected Meadows’ attempt to move his Georgia state election interference charges to federal court. That means his case will stay in state court. When it might go to trial is unclear, but we shouldn’t expect that to happen too soon.
The main thing happening with the case currently is that there’s a pretrial appeal in which defendants are trying to get Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her office disqualified from handling the case. If Willis and her office are booted, then when — and even whether — the case moves forward under a new office or prosecutor is also unclear. But the appeal itself could take awhile to resolve.
Once that appeal is resolved, if Willis stays on the case, then there will still be pretrial litigation, as well as a question about which defendants will go to trial next. You may recall that there are many defendants left on the indictment who haven’t pleaded guilty. While more guilty pleas may come, it’s possible that the remaining defendants will need to be split up into more than one trial, due to both the sheer number of defendants on the indictment as well as each defendant having different situations and litigation strategies. For example, we don’t know what will happen to Trump’s Georgia charges, which, as I noted in this week’s newsletter, he’s trying to get tossed. If his case is paused while he’s in office (instead of being dismissed outright as he hopes), that separation alone would raise the possibility of other defendants being ready to be tried well before Trump leaves office in 2029 — even if it will be awhile before any trial happens in Fulton County against any defendants in this case. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in Donald Trump’s legal cases.
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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