Trump seeks dismissal of Georgia indictment, again claiming broad immunity

Donald Trump is urging a county judge in Georgia to throw out the criminal case brought against him by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, claiming he’s immune from prosecution for the alleged conspiracy to corrupt the 2020 election results.

Trump’s lawyers contended in court papers Monday that Trump’s January 2021 call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — encouraging him to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state — was part of his official duties as president.

Similarly, Trump’s attorneys contend that he was also acting as president when he allegedly directed efforts in Georgia and other states to organize so-called alternate slates of presidential electors who purported to cast electoral votes for him even though state officials determined he had lost those states.

“The indictment is based entirely on alleged actions that lie at the heartland of the President’s official duties,” Trump’s attorney Steve Sadow wrote of the case, a conspiracy charged under a Georgia racketeering law against Trump and 18 other co-defendants, several of whom have pleaded guilty to lesser charges.

The arguments echo Trump’s parallel attempt to scuttle the federal charges against him in Washington, D.C., where he’s facing similar conspiracy charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith. Trump’s motion claiming presidential and federal immunity came among a raft of other filings in Georgia that also mirrored his arguments in Washington, including an argument that he can’t be prosecuted because of his acquittal in a 2021 Senate impeachment trial.

The immunity issue is the trickiest test yet for Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee, who must grapple with the historic constitutional question as it winds its way simultaneously through the federal courts. Trump is planning to attend oral arguments Tuesday in Washington, where a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals will consider his immunity argument as well. U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan previously denied Trump’s claim of immunity from criminal prosecution for his acts as president, an unprecedented decision that led to the current appeal.

McAfee’s decision on the matter is expected to result in pretrial appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court or the U.S. Supreme Court. Smith urged the U.S. Supreme Court last month to take up the immunity issue in the federal case on an expedited basis, but the justices declined to do so, leaving the issue at the D.C. Circuit for now.

As in Washington, Trump’s filing Monday in Atlanta is replete with ominous warnings that the case against him could lead to routine prosecutions of former presidents.

“The current Fulton County, Georgia indictment of President Trump threatens to open the floodgates of politically motivated criminal prosecutions of virtually every future President,” Sadow wrote. “This break with two centuries of historical precedent virtually ensures that all future Presidents will suffer similar prosecutions by state and local prosecutors in locales of the greatest political hostility to them.”

A federal appeals court raised a similar specter last month when it shot down an effort by one of Trump’s co-defendants, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, to force the case from state court to federal court. The judges acknowledged concerns about politicized local prosecutions of federal officials, but said the federal law governing such transfers does not apply to former officials such as Meadows.

Trump has elected not to try to force a so-called “removal” of his case to federal court, but instead to level his arguments about the powers of the presidency in front of McAfee.

In addition to his immunity argument and his “double jeopardy” claim tied to the impeachment acquittal, Trump filed a motion to dismiss the indictment by contending that the application of the Georgia racketeering law to an election dispute is so novel that it deprives him of due process and “fair notice” that the conduct he engaged in was criminal. He is also seeking to compel prosecutors to disclose details of any contacts with the House’s Jan. 6 select committee.