Judge Denies Meadows’s Request to Move Georgia Case to Federal Court
Georgia prosecutors leading the criminal election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump and 18 of his allies notched a victory on Friday when a judge rejected an effort by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, to move his case from state court to federal court. [R]emoval to federal court would have given him key advantages, including a jury pool that was more favorable to Mr. Trump.
The setback for Mr. Meadows came in the first of many rulings that are expected for the defendants who are seeking to have their cases moved out of state court. Mr. Trump has not filed for a removal to federal court, but he is widely expected to do so.
However, the ruling, by Judge Steve C. Jones of the Northern District of Georgia, does not bode well for any of those efforts. “Meadows had the strongest of the removal cases,” said Norman Eisen, who was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. “If Meadows has failed, then there’s little hope for Clark, or for that matter Trump,” he added, referring to Jeffrey Clark, a defendant and former Justice Department official who has also filed to move his case to federal court.
In the hearing on Mr. Meadows’s request, Fulton County prosecutors argued that he had overstepped the bounds of his chief-of-staff duties by acting as a de facto agent of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign. They noted that he had arranged and participated in the now-famous Jan. 2, 2021, call between Mr. Trump and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which Mr. Trump said he wanted to “find” roughly 12,000 votes, enough to reverse his election loss in the state. But Judge Steve C. Jones decided that the actions ascribed to Mr. Meadows in the indictment were not within the scope of his federal duties.
In addition to racketeering, Mr. Meadows is charged with one count of solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer for his participation in the phone call with Mr. Raffensperger, the secretary of state. Prosecutors accuse Mr. Meadows of having “unlawfully solicited, requested and importuned” Mr. Raffensperger to engage in the illegal act of changing the certified vote returns in the state. When asked to characterize the conversation with Mr. Trump and Mr. Meadows, Mr. Raffensperger said, “I thought it was a campaign call.”
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Note that Meadows was recently caught in a lie under oath, which tends to make judges and juries angry.
How long until he flips on Trump?
