According to a court document, the judge in Donald Trump’s Georgia election subversion trial on Wednesday allowed the case to move on while dismissing several of the claims against the former US president and a few of his co-defendants.
Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee dismissed six of the 41 felony counts, citing insufficient detail in the prosecutors’ claims that they attempted to persuade officials to break their oaths.
Three accusations against Trump, the Republican nominee for president in the November election, were among the dropped charges. The primary accusation of racketeering against Trump and his other fourteen co-defendants is still pending.
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In response to accusations that they organized a criminal conspiracy to try and reverse Trump’s loss in Georgia during the 2020 election, Trump and his co-defendants have entered not guilty pleas.
As he attempts to unseat Democratic President Joe Biden, Trump is being prosecuted on four counts of felonies, including the one in Georgia. In addition, he is charged federally for his attempts to overturn his election loss.
Later this month, he will go on trial in New York for allegations including the payment of hush money to a porn star.
In each of the four instances, Trump has denied any wrongdoing and claimed that the goal of them is to prevent him from being reelected.
Requests for comment from a Trump attorney and a representative for the Fulton County District Attorney’s office were not immediately answered.
Attorneys for President Trump and five of his allies, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, contested claims that they tried to persuade Georgia lawmakers to take office by posing as pro-Trump electors in order to violate their oaths of office.
Two of the six allegations that McAfee dropped have to do with a phone call that occurred in January 2021 during which Trump urged Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s chief election official, to “find” ballots in order to overturn his loss in the state.
According to McAfee, the indictment did not include enough information on how Trump and his co-defendants might have broken their oaths of office or their separate obligations under the state or federal constitutions of Georgia.
“They do not give the defendants enough information to prepare their defenses intelligently, as the defendants could have violated the Constitutions and thus the statute in dozens, if not hundreds, of distinct ways,” the judge stated in his decision.
Prosecutors may file a fresh, more thorough indictment on those counts, according to McAfee.
McAfee’s decision was made just before he was about to make a highly anticipated finding regarding the disqualification of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, the prosecutor in charge of the case, due to her intimate involvement with the lawyer she hired to handle the prosecution.
In Washington, Andrew Goudsward and Kanishka Singh reported; Rami Ayyub and Scott Malone edited.
