Just hours after former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was dealt state charges accusing him, along with 18 other defendants including Donald Trump, of taking part in a broad criminal conspiracy to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results, he mounted an effort to move his case to federal court.
The former president is also expected to try to move the case to federal court, according to multiple sources familiar with his legal team’s thinking.
The attempt to transfer his case from the Superior Court in Fulton County, Georgia, to the federal court for the US Northern District of Georgia – a process officially referred to as “removal” – is the first in what is expected to be a series of major pre-trial issues District Attorney Fani Willis must navigate as she pursues convictions against the 19 defendants.
Successfully transferring their cases to federal court could provide some key advantages.
For starters, litigating the effort could help delay things, a strategy Trump has employed time and time and time and time again.
Should the case actually go to trial in the federal court, Trump and Meadows or others could end up with a jury pool more sympathetic than the one they might get from around Atlanta, where the state courthouse for this case is based. The district that includes Fulton County also includes the heavily Republican northern part of the state.
And if the case is removed to federal court and goes to trial, the limits of Georgia’s RICO statute – which has been used aggressively and successfully by Willis – could be under the microscope of a federal judge, who would be able to field novel legal challenges to it by a defendant.
“There’s very few cases in Georgia interpreting the RICO statute,” said Andrew Fleischman, a Georgia criminal defense attorney, adding that a successful removal in…
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