Former U.S President, Donald Trump’s lead Georgia attorney says trying his client during a presidential election would amount to election interference.
In the historic case of The State of Georgia Versus Donald John Trump, Steve Sadow also argued before Fulton County Superior Court, Judge Scott McAfee that the U.S. Constitution’s right to free speech, under the First Amendment, protects Trump from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ indictment.
Donald Trump attempted to have his federal criminal case against him dismissed on Friday, but a federal judge rejected his request. The judge decided that Trump was not immune from prosecution because the case concerned actions he took while he was still president.
Trump is expected to file an appeal with the DC Circuit and eventually the US Supreme Court after the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan simultaneously denied two of his motions to dismiss on the grounds of presidential immunity and the constitution.
Trump’s lawyers filed their motions to dismiss in October, advancing a sweeping and unprecedented interpretation of executive power that argued former presidents could not be held criminally accountable for actions undertaken while in office.
The filing contended that all of Trump’s attempts to reverse his 2020 election defeat in the indictment, from pressuring his vice-president, Mike Pence, to stop the congressional certification to organizing fake slates of electors, were in his capacity as president and therefore protected.
At the heart of the Trump legal team’s filing was the extraordinary contention that not only was Trump entitled to absolute presidential immunity, but that the immunity applied regardless of Trump’s intent in engaging in the conduct described in the indictment.
The judge emphatically rejected the presidential immunity arguments in the opinion accompanying her order, writing that neither the US constitution nor legal precedent supported such an extraordinary extension of post-presidential power.
