The judge overseeing the Georgia election-fraud case struck down six counts in the indictment on Wednesday finding that the language in the counts didn’t provide “sufficient detail” to former president Donald Trump and more than a dozen other co-defendants “to prepare their defenses intelligently.”
The counts that Fulton County Superior Court judge Scott McAfee struck down all involved allegations that some of the defendants in the case solicited various Georgia elected officials to violate their oaths of office and to unlawfully appoint pro-Trump presidential electors.
The six counts struck down by McAfee on Wednesday involved Trump, his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Ray Smith and Bob Cheeley. The defendants were accused in the various counts of soliciting elected members of the Georgia House and Senate and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to violate their oaths “to unlawfully appoint presidential electors.” Trump and Meadows also requested that Raffensperger “unlawfully decertify” the 2020 presidential election, according to the indictment.
Defense lawyers had argued that indictment was defective because it didn’t cite the specific oath that each elected official was urged to violate. McAfee disagreed, writing that Georgia code only provides one oath option for “each category of public official.
“Without the possibility of alternative oaths prescribed by law, the Court agrees with the State that the Defendants are sufficiently apprised of which oath is at issue in each indicted count,” McAfee wrote.
But, McAfee wrote, the accusations that the defendants solicited Georgia officials to violate their oaths to the Georgia and U.S. constitutions, were too “generic” because they didn’t specify which requirements or clauses of the constitutions were at issue.
“As written, these six counts contain all the elements of the crimes but fail to allege sufficient detail regarding the nature of their commission, i.e., the underlying felony solicited,” McAfee wrote. “They do not give the defendants enough information to prepare their defenses intelligently, as the Defendants could have violated the Constitution and thus the statute in dozens, if not hundreds, of distinct ways.”
McAfee’s ruling comes before an expected ruling this week on whether Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade can continue leading the election-fraud case. Defense lawyers say Willis had a financial conflict of interest due to a previously unacknowledged romantic relationship with Wade.
A ruling disqualifying Willis would likely upend the case against the former president.