“There is no basis in law for this”: Experts trash Trump’s “desperate” bid to disqualify Fani Willis

Former President Donald Trump on Friday filed a petition to Georgia’s Supreme Court seeking to squash the final report of a special purpose grand jury recommending people for indictments and disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis from continuing to investigate him for attempting to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results — ahead of his widely expected indictment this summer.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Trump’s lawyers also requested the court prohibit Willis from using any evidence obtained by the investigative jury, which heard testimony between May 2022 and January 2023 from 75 witnesses.

The petition also asks the court to block any ongoing proceedings “related to and flowing from the special purpose grand jury’s investigation until this matter can be resolved.” These proceedings would include the two regular grand juries seated Tuesday, one of which is expected to be asked to hand up indictments for the alleged scheme to upend Georgia’s 2020 presidential election.

Though Trump’s attorneys recognized that such a motion would typically be frowned upon, they said “extraordinary circumstances” now justify the filing.

“Even in an extraordinarily novel case of national significance, one would expect matters to take their normal procedural course within a reasonable time,” the document said. “But nothing about these processes have been normal or reasonable. And the all-but-unavoidable conclusion is that the anomalies below are because petitioner is President Donald J. Trump.”

Trump’s legal team also filed a separate but similar motion in the Fulton Superior Court out of what they said is an abundance of caution. They also noted that Judge Robert McBurney, the supervising judge of the special grand jury, has yet to rule on a motion they filed in March requesting Willis’ disqualification and that Willis has notified local law enforcement that she is likely to make a charging decision between July 31 and Aug. 18. 

“Stranded between the supervising judge’s protracted passivity and the district attorney’s looming indictment, (Trump) has no meaningful option other than to seek this court’s intervention,” the motion said.

Willis’ office has previously countered Trump’s arguments for dismissal on the grounds that they lack merit, were untimely and had other procedural flaws. Prosecutors said that the former president’s efforts were premature because no charges have been filed yet.

“If an investigation results in actual criminal charges against (Trump), the justice system ensures they will have no shortage of available remedies to pursue,” the D.A.’s May response said.

Trump’s petition also assailed Willis’ investigation, arguing that Willis and McBurney have mowed down the procedural safeguards and rights of those under investigation “at every turn,” and that the Georgia statute allowing for special grand juries to operate is unconstitutionally vague.

“The whole of the process is now incurably infected,” the motion said. “And nothing that follows could be legally sound or publicly respectable.”

The document also claimed that publishing excerpts of the final report would infringe upon Trump’s rights to fairness and due process, which could cause “irremediable injury” to his reputation as he pines for the Republican party nomination and another shot at the presidency.

The GOP frontrunner’s attorneys also repeated arguments previously made by Willis’ opponents — and rejected by several judges — that the special grand jury’s case was civil, not criminal, and therefore allowed Willis to access evidence she would have otherwise been barred from. They also said that Willis should have been disqualified from the entire investigation rather than just the portion involving Lt. Gov. Burt Jones over the fundraiser she held last summer for Jones’ Democratic opponent.

National security attorney Bradley Moss called the motion “desperate.”

“This petition is a political screed, not a realistic legal filing. It is beneath our profession to have lawyers write things like this with such overblown rhetoric,” he tweeted.

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“There’s no basis in law for this. Zero,” Georgia State Law Professor Anthony Michael Kreis wrote on Twitter Friday before breaking down the questionability of the motion in a separate thread.

Kreis explained that the special purpose grand jury Trump’s attorneys are levying a complaint against is an investigative body that Trump can’t skirt “simply because he doesn’t like the ordinary operations provided by Georgia law for public corruption crimes.”

“The complaint is essentially that the SPGJ is not a regular grand jury and the safeguards of a regular grand jury are undermined because the SPGJ is not a regular grand jury. This is just circular drivel. Ga. is a little more transparent than other places. But them’s the breaks,” Kreis continued.

“Trump’s team is attacking the credibility of the process through a strange assertion of the rights of third parties and that the DA can’t use the statutory authority on the books to investigate— nowhere has Trump alleged that *his* rights have been violated by the SPGJ’s work,” he concluded.

He went on to describe his confusion surrounding the Trump attorneys’ decision to file the motion in the first place because of the capabilities of the former president’s Georgia representation.

“Trump’s Georgia lawyer is the best he’s got. Truly, he’s good,” Kreis wrote. “So, I’m perplexed that team Trump continues to hammer the same claims of procedural deficiencies without any connection to Trump and a constitutional due process claim that boils down to the DA can’t investigate.”