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An attorney for former President Donald Trump filed a motion in a state court in Georgia today to fend off an expected indictment resulting from a special purpose grand jury investigation in Georgia.
Besieged by legal challenges after announcing a 2024 presidential bid, the former president kicked off his first major counterpunch against what he calls a political “Witch Hunt” by Democrats with his Monday filing (pdf). A court ruling in Trump’s favor on this motion would dissolve one of four legal challenges that seek a criminal charge against the former president.
Trump’s motion comes as an attempt to uproot a year-long investigation on allegations that Trump and his allies engaged in election interference in the 2020 election. Initiated in early 2021 and run by Fani Willis, District Attorney of Fulton County, Georgia (“FCDA”), the investigation focused on a call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021, when Trump asked Raffensperger to investigate potential voter fraud in Georgia during the 2016 presidential election. Critics of Trump have alleged that the call constituted an act of election interference. Trump has denied all allegations of wrongdoing on his part.
The grand jury, which was discharged in January, reportedly recommended indictments in its final report. In early February, the Fulton County Superior Court released a portion of the jury panel’s report, which did not include the list of names to whom indictments were recommended. It is widely expected that DA Willis will bring charges against the former president alleging election interference.
In his Monday filing, Trump’s attorney Drew Findling asked the court to squash the special purpose grand jury (SPGJ) report, preclude the use of any evidence from that investigation, and disqualify Willis’s office due to a conflict of interest.Media Tours
A key objection Findling raised in his Monday filing to the Georgia investigation is regarding media tours taken by Emily Kohrs, a foreperson of the SPGJ; DA Willis; and the judge overseeing the case. Findling alleges that these interviews compromised the case legally and judicially.
It pointed to Kohrs’s high-profile interviews with several media outlets in early 2023, including The New York Times, when she said that the jury panel recommended indictments on people who were subpoenaed, and subsequently provided the publication with some details of the proceeding.
“It is not a short list,” Kohrs told The New York Times in February, referring to the currently sealed list of indictment recommendations. She did not reveal specific names of people for whom the panel recommended indictments. Kohrs told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in another interview on Feb. 21 that she also spoke to her boyfriend regarding her experience in the panel’s proceedings.
According to Findling, the foreperson’s media tour showed that the procedures set forth for the jury panel and the application of these procedures by the overseeing judge, Robert C. McBurney of the Superior Court of Fulton County, “failed to protect the most basic procedural and substantive constitutional rights of all individuals discussed by this investigative body.”
The harm brought by Kohrs’s publicity was compounded by additional exposure by DA Willis herself, Findling said in the filing.
“[T]he FCDA’s media interviews violate prosecutorial standards and constitute forensic misconduct, and her social media activity creates the appearance of impropriety compounding the necessity for disqualification,” the filing reads.
