Donald Trump’s two federal criminal cases are gone and we could soon learn what will happen in his New York hush money case that he’s trying to get dismissed ahead of sentencing. Now we have movement in Trump’s fourth case, his state election interference case in Georgia.
The president-elect’s counsel filed a notice in the Georgia state appeals court, where his case is pending on a pretrial appeal from Trump and co-defendants trying to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from handling the case. That issue was previously set for an appeals court hearing this week but was canceled last month without explanation.
In Wednesday’s filing, Trump’s counsel cited the president-elect’s impending White House return as reason for the appeals court to dismiss his appeal for lack of jurisdiction and to instruct the trial court to dismiss the indictment.
It’s understandable that criminal process won’t continue against Trump in Georgia or New York while he’s running the country, but in both cases it’s unclear what the grounds are for dismissing the indictments as opposed to pausing the cases while Trump is in office. Presidents don’t have the power to pardon away state cases or get the attorney general to dismiss them like federal ones, but we may learn in the coming weeks what the courts have to say about how presidential authority interacts with state criminal process.
In New York, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has floated the possibility of pausing the case while Trump is in office, which Trump opposes and we’ll see what the trial judge, Juan Merchan, says. We’ll also see what Willis says in the Georgia case and how the state courts there resolve any dispute. But now we have a filing in Georgia that puts in motion the process for answering these questions about how the case will proceed (or not) against Trump. 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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