The Georgia judge overseeing the election-interference case against Donald Trump and 14 defendants dismissed six of the charges in the wide-ranging indictment on Wednesday, saying they were not detailed enough.
One of the 41 charges Trump and some of the co-defendants in the case were charged with was soliciting officials in Georgia to violate their oath of office. Those charges were dismissed. The other charges in the case against Trump and other defendants remain.
The six defendants who had the charge at issue in the case were Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Ray Smith and Robert Cheeley. In different ways all six men attempted to get Georgia officials to violate their oath of office as part of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, prosecutors said in their August indictment. Those efforts ranged from pressuring Georgia lawmakers to appoint fake electors, to Trump’s infamous phone call with the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, urging him to find enough votes to overturn the election.
But McAfee said on Wednesday that Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, had not given enough detail in charging documents as to what specific language in the oaths of office defendants were pressuring officials to violate. The August indictment says the defendants sought to get Georgia officials “to violate their oaths to the Georgia constitution and to the United States constitution”.
That language was too vague, McAfee said on Wednesday. “The United States Constitution contains hundreds of clauses, any one of which can be the subject of a lifetime’s study,” he wrote. “The Georgia Constitution is not a ‘mere shadow’ of its federal counterpart, and although some provisions feature similar language, the Georgia Constitution has been interpreted to contain dramatically different meanings.”
“As written, these six counts contain all the essential elements of the crimes but fail to allege sufficient detail regarding the nature of their commission, ie, the underlying felony solicited,” McAfee wrote in his opinion. “They do not give the Defendants enough information to prepare their defenses intelligently, as the Defendants could have violated the Constitutions and thus the statute in dozens, if not hundreds, of distinct ways.”
Jeff DiSantis, a spokesman for Willis’ office, declined to comment on the ruling, but said it was being reviewed.
All of the defendants continue to face racketeering charges.
“I think it is a minor hiccup for the DA and less so signs of a fatal flaw,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University who has been closely following the case. “It was never particularly clear what constitutional theory undergirded the oath of office charges. I suspect the DA’s office will button up their theory and go back to the grand jury.
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“The ruling is consistent with Judge McAfee’s approach all along. It is a very thorough opinion,” he added. “Importantly, I think he’s explaining the law in very plain terms, which I think is meant to communicate what he’s doing and why to the public in addition to the parties. That suggests to me that he understand his rulings need a public education component, too.”
