(C) Georgia Recorder
This story was originally published by Georgia Recorder and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Live coverage from Fulton County: Trump, allies surrender in election interference case [1]

['Georgia Recorder Staff', 'Stanley Dunlap', 'Jill Nolin', 'More From Author', '- August']

Date: 2023-08-23

Federal judge rejects bid by Trump White House Chief of Staff, lawyer behind elector plan to avoid Fulton jail

A former U.S. Department of Justice official and another high-ranking aide to former President Donald Trump suffered legal setbacks in their challenges to the Fulton County 2020 presidential election interference case Wednesday.

Jeffrey Clark, Trump’s top environmental lawyer who provided advice that encouraged states to appoint an alternate slate of 2020 electors, and Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, both fought to stave off their Fulton County prosecution on Wednesday.

Trump is scheduled to turn himself into the Fulton County jail on Thursday on charges that he was one of the ringleaders in alleged criminal racketeering and conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and several other states.

The deadline for the remaining defendants to turn themselves in is noon Friday.

Clark will be required to turn himself in at the Fulton County jail after a judge denied his motion to halt the county proceedings. The indictment alleges that Clark solicited a U.S. attorney general and deputy attorney general to make false statements about significant concerns about the election’s outcome in December 2020. That was after Georgia election officials certified the presidential victory for President Joe Biden.

In response to Meadows’ request for removal, Judge Steve Jones of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia wrote that the state prosecutors can proceed with the case despite the request for removal.

Meadows is alleged to have set up a Jan. 2, 2021, phone conversation in which Trump asked Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to tilt Georgia’s election in the outgoing president’s favor.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, strongly rebuked Meadows’ request that the case be moved from state court.

Willis argued in a legal filing on Wednesday that Meadows’ “baseless” request was an attempt to avoid arrest before the Friday deadline she set for the 19 defendants indicted last week.

“Despite his determination to characterize the pending indictment against him as anything but criminal, the defendant has not directed this court’s attention to any statute, case law, or other authority for his ‘civil-criminal hybrid’ theory of the criminal charges pending against him,” Willis said.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://georgiarecorder.com/2023/08/23/live-coverage-from-fulton-county-trump-allies-surrender-in-election-interference-case/

Published and (C) by Georgia Recorder
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/georgiarecorder/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.