Washington
CNN
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A Georgia judge has halted Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s attempt in October to try all 19 defendants together, including former President Donald Trump, in the Georgia election subversion case.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee announced Thursday that Trump and 16 co-defendants will proceed on their own schedule, with a trial date yet to be announced.
The two remaining co-defendants, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, requested a speedy trial scheduled to begin in October.
Thursday’s order is a victory for Trump and his co-defendants, who did not want to go to trial this October. The timeline set by the judge only cemented a few steps in the pretrial process and acknowledged the possibility that the trial itself will not take place until well into 2024 or even later. Trump’s legal calendar for the first half of next year is already packed with trial schedules for the other criminal cases he faces, and he is juggling those proceedings with his 2024 presidential bid.
“Fulton County Attorney Fani Willis’ politically motivated, unlawful attempt to deny President Trump due process on the grounds that no severance packages should be awarded was summarily struck down by the court,” a Trump spokesperson said. “Willis’s unwarranted judgment to please her radical political base has simply failed.”
While McAfee did not set a trial date for Trump and 16 of his co-defendants, the timeline he set in a court order Thursday means they will not go to trial until December at the earliest.
The new timeline set by the judge suggests he wants to begin resolving pretrial disputes with the group of 17 defendants by the end of the year. The judge orders the investigation to begin by October 6th.
However, there is still no set timetable for the trial of the 17 defendants, nor for resolving disputes over what evidence can be presented to the jury. McAfee ordered other types of pretrial motions to be filed by Dec. 1, but he has not scheduled a hearing on those motions.
At the pace set forth by McAfee, federal courts will have some time to address efforts by some defendants in the case to move their prosecution to federal court.
The election subversion case in Georgia is one of four criminal cases against the former president, who is also embroiled in several civil cases that are also clogging up his legal calendar as the 2024 election cycle heats up.
McAfee’s order reiterates that the indictment against Trump in Fulton County will not go to trial this year and raises the possibility that it could compete with trials in the three other criminal cases against Trump scheduled for the first half of next year.
One of these cases is the federal election subversion case that special counsel Jack Smith brought against Trump in Washington, DC and is currently going to trial in early March. Smith took a more targeted approach against Trump than Willis, bringing charges against him alone, without co-defendants.
The trial date for Trump’s indictment by Manhattan prosecutors over an alleged hush-money scheme in his 2016 campaign appears to be in limbo. Also originally scheduled for March 2024, the judge in the case signaled this week that he was willing to push back the start date to accommodate Trump’s increasingly complicated legal calendar.
The special counsel’s case, which alleges Trump mishandled classified documents, is scheduled to be heard in federal court in Florida in late May.
As he juggles these various criminal cases – as well as the New York Attorney General’s civil fraud case against his company and his family, which goes to trial in October, and the defamation case related to his smears against a woman who accused him of sexual assault – Trump is preparing for the 2024 presidential election, where he is the front-runner for the GOP nomination.
He argued that prosecutors’ attempt to bring him to trial in the coming months was a politically motivated attempt to interfere in the 2024 election. They responded that the public has a vested interest in seeing him and his co-defendants tried quickly, and that there are no legitimate legal reasons to delay trials in his cases until after the 2024 election.
Willis argued that the 19 defendants in her case should be tried together on a short schedule, arguing that splitting the case “into multiple lengthy proceedings would place a tremendous burden on the judicial resources of the Fulton County Superior Court.” .
McAfee’s new order did not say whether he is considering further dividing the 17 defendants who were not tried in October into smaller groups, but it is a proposal that some of the defendants are already open to.
“Three or more simultaneous, high-profile trials would create a variety of security issues and place an unavoidable burden on witnesses and victims who would be forced to testify about the same facts three or more times in the same case,” prosecutors in Willis’ office said it in a file this week.
In addition, several of the defendants in the Georgia case have parallel proceedings in federal court. These defendants — who include former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and three defendants allegedly involved in the election fraud scheme — are seeking to have the charges against them in federal court in Fulton County bring where they I will seek immunity under certain circumstances under the protections afforded to U.S. government agents. If any of those motions are successful, it’s still unclear what that would mean for the rest of Willis’ case.
Meadows is withdrawing his request for an emergency appeal that would have stayed state prosecution against him in the Georgia election subversion case.
Meadows will continue to fight in federal court to have the trial moved outside of state court. Given that he no longer faces a trial before the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office in October, Meadows said there is plenty of time to resolve the dispute in federal court.
In a new filing with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where oral arguments on the emergency motion were scheduled to take place Friday morning, Meadows’ lawyers noted that McAfee made clear Thursday morning that Meadows’ state case would not be expedited until it goes to trial next month .
This story has been updated with additional information.
