When it comes to legal perils, 2023 hasn’t exactly been a great year for Donald Trump. The former president was, after all, indicted in New York. Then he was indicted again in Florida. There was also the civil case in which a jury found the Republican liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.
Trump and his lawyers, however, seem all too aware of the fact that his troubles can — and very likely will — get considerably worse. Indeed, there is every reason to believe the former president might soon be indicted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who’s spent months investigating his alleged election interference in Georgia in the wake of his 2020 defeat.
Team Trump last week asked the Georgia Supreme Court to prevent such charges from being filed, claiming that the ongoing investigation risked violating his “fundamental constitutional rights.” As NBC News reported, that effort has flopped spectacularly.
Georgia’s Supreme Court on Monday denied Donald Trump’s bid to halt the Fulton County district attorney’s probe into whether the former president and his allies interfered in the state’s 2020 presidential election. … The petition sought to disqualify Willis from investigating Trump and to quash a report from the special grand jury she used to help her investigation.
The nine-member state high court, in a unanimous ruling, concluded that what Trump was seeking “is not the sort of relief that this Court affords, at least absent extraordinary circumstances that Petitioner has not shown are present here. Moreover, even if the petition were procedurally appropriate, Petitioner has not shown that he would be entitled to the relief he seeks.”
There are no appeal options.
As a practical matter, Trump’s failure doesn’t alter the landscape: The Atlanta-area prosecutor was poised to move forward with her process, and now that process will move forward unimpeded. In fact, the former president’s effort was all but certain to fail: Joyce White Vance, a former U.S. attorney and an NBC News legal analyst, explained over the weekend that the desperate court filing effectively tried to position Trump as “above the law.”
So, the Republican’s legal troubles in Georgia are intensifying, but perhaps the news is better for him elsewhere? Unfortunately for Trump, that’s clearly not the case. Special counsel Jack Smith’s federal criminal investigations are ongoing, including the probe related to Jan. 6 and Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. In recent days, we’ve learned that federal investigators have been in communication with secretaries of state in several states where Republicans tried to execute fake-elector schemes. As for the former president’s classified documents scandal, Trump apparently thought it’d be a good idea to offer gushing public praise for the judge in his case — conservative Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed — ahead of a meeting with prosecutors and the defendant’s attorneys to discuss the upcoming proceedings. That meeting is scheduled for this afternoon. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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