Judge Tosses Six Charges In Trump Georgia Indictment

The state judge presiding over Donald Trump’s criminal case in Georgia has thrown out six of the indictment’s 41 charges, ruling that the state had failed to make specific enough allegations to support them.

The ruling affects three of the 13 felony counts Trump faces in the case, though not the central charge of a racketeering conspiracy aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state. Several of the dismissed counts do not involve Trump but instead apply to some of his most prominent co-defendants, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Mark Meadows.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee emphasized that prosecutors may refile the charges with greater detail or appeal his ruling.

However, McAfee found that as written, the allegations that Donald Trump and several allies solicited Georgia officials to violate their oaths of office — in part by sending false electors to Congress — were too generic.

“The lack of detail concerning an essential legal element is … fatal,” McAfee wrote.

It’s the latest setback for prosecutors in a case already waylaid for weeks by allegations that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis improperly benefited from the case by appointing a special prosecutor she had a romantic relationship with, Nathan Wade. Defendants have alleged that Wade used income he earned from his contract as a special prosecutor to take lavish vacations with Willis.

McAfee has held extended hearings on the defendants’ claims that Willis and Wade’s alleged impropriety requires that Willis and her office be disqualified from the case and it be assigned to prosecutors elsewhere in the state. The judge has yet to rule on that issue.

Willis obtained an indictment against Trump and many of his allies in August 2023. The case has not yet been scheduled for trial, and it seems increasingly unlikely to reach a jury this year. Four defendants initially charged in the case have pleaded guilty to lesser charges and negotiated non-jail sentences. Trump and 14 other defendants remain.

The charges dismissed Wednesday all centered on efforts by Trump and his allies to convince state legislators in Georgia, as well as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to violate their oaths by taking actions to block Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state.

McAfee emphasized that prosecutors’ allegations in the indictment don’t explain precisely how the defendants sought to violate the state and federal constitutions, the latter of which he noted “contains hundreds of clauses, any one of which can be the subject of a lifetime’s study.”

“They do not give the Defendants enough information to prepare their defenses intelligently,” McAfee wrote, “as the Defendants could have violated the Constitutions and thus the statute in dozens, if not hundreds, of distinct ways.”

Some of the dismissed counts also apply to defendants Ray Smith and Robert Cheeley, two attorneys who worked on the false elector effort.

Georgia legal experts said the impact of McAfee’s ruling may be limited because Willis could simply re-indict the charges with more detail in relatively short order. And the ruling may be a signal of where he intends to land on the potential disqualification of Willis.

“[The ruling] presupposes that the DA’s office is going to still be around,” said Michael Mears, an associate professor at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School. “It’s a clue that he’s not going to disqualify her in this case.”

McAfee added another clue Wednesday when he told CNN that he intends to decide on the Willis disqualification matter this week, despite efforts by Trump and several co-defendants to reopen the evidence-gathering phase of the matter.

Georgia standards for indictments are strict and often require dismissal of a charge containing any ambiguity, while under federal law defendants can get further detail on a charge through other means.

McAfee, a former federal prosecutor, said that renders his state’s courts less efficient, but he’s obliged to follow state legal precedent on the issue.

“This is an area of law where federal courts have achieved greater efficiency, and one might wish that future grand jurors could be spared this inconvenience for something so easily remedied,” the judge wrote.