(AFP) – The top court in the southern US state of Georgia declined on Tuesday to hear the district attorney’s appeal of her removal from the election interference case against President Donald Trump. The move by the Georgia Supreme Court means the case brought against Trump before his November 2024 reelection will likely never go to trial.
A Georgia appeals court in December disqualified Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the case, citing the “impropriety” of an intimate relationship she had with the man she hired to be a special prosecutor. Willis appealed the ruling to the Georgia Supreme Court, but it declined 4-3 to hear her appeal.
Trump welcomed the decision in a post on Truth Social, calling it a “big win for justice and law in Georgia.” “They went after their Political Opponent at levels never seen before, and lost,” he wrote. “They are now criminals who will hopefully pay serious consequences for their illegal actions.”
Trump and a number of co-defendants were charged with racketeering and other offenses in Georgia over their alleged efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state. It will now be up to the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia to find a new prosecutor to handle the election interference case.
If another prosecutor does take up the case, it is unlikely, however, that Trump could be prosecuted since he is now president. Trump also faced two federal cases, but they were dropped by Special Counsel Jack Smith after the election under the Justice Department policy of not indicting or prosecuting a sitting president.
Trump was accused of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election and of removing large quantities of top-secret documents after leaving the White House, but neither case came to trial. The Republican real estate tycoon was convicted in New York of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election to stop her from revealing an alleged 2006 sexual encounter.
© 2024 AFP
