ATLANTA — In a ruling Monday, the Georgia Supreme Court dismissed a protracted attempt by former President Donald J. Trump’s legal team to drop an investigation into election interference weeks before the expected indictment.
The court’s decision was unanimous and swift, coming just three days after Mr Trump’s attorneys filed their filings. They had requested a court order that would dismiss the work of a special Atlanta grand jury and bar Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney, from the trial. She was the lead prosecutor investigating whether Mr Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 Georgia election.
Most of the court’s nine judges were originally appointed by Republican governors; So far, the case has been heard in the Superior Court in Atlanta.
Mr Trump’s lawyers had admitted in their filing that they had faced great adversity and found “in no case in 40 years” in which the court had intervened in the way they wanted. In their ruling, the judges said the Trump team “failed to establish that this case constitutes one of the extremely rare circumstances in which the original jurisdiction of this court should be invoked, and therefore the petition is dismissed.”
They also said that Mr. Trump’s attorneys “have not produced the facts or the law necessary to order Willis’s disqualification.”
Lawyers for Mr Trump had previously sought to derail the investigation with a motion filed in March to destroy much of the evidence Ms Willis’ team had gathered since the investigation began in early 2021 and have Ms Willis released from the remove investigation. However, Supreme Court Justice Robert CI McBurney handling the case has yet to rule.
“Caught between the protected passivity of the supervising judge and the impending indictment of the district attorney, the plaintiff has no other reasonable choice but to seek the intervention of this court,” the attorneys wrote in their filing with the state Supreme Court on Friday.
The lawyers were not immediately available on Monday; The district attorney’s office had no immediate comment.
Ms Willis has signaled any charges will be received in the first half of August; She recently asked judges at a downtown Atlanta courthouse not to schedule a hearing for part of that time as she prepares to press charges. The probe has looked into whether the former president and his allies illegally interfered in the 2020 Georgia election, which saw Mr Trump narrowly lose to Joe Biden.
The special grand jury spent about seven months hearing evidence and recommending indictments of more than a dozen people; Her foreman clearly indicated that Mr. Trump was among them in an interview with The New York Times in February. In order to face charges, Ms. Willis must now face charges before a regular grand jury.
