A federal judge in Atlanta denied two separate requests by former officials in the Trump administration seeking to remove their criminal case in Georgia state court to federal court.
Former Trump administration officials Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark had both asked U.S. District Judge Steve Jones to block Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from arresting them by a Friday at noon deadline for the 19 defendants in the sweeping racketeering case to turn themselves in. Both former officials say their case should be handled in federal courts because they were working under the executive branch at the time of their alleged crimes.
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In two separate six-page orders, Jones sided with Willis, holding that Clark’s request to remove his case to federal court was “premature” and similarly denying Meadows’s request. Both defendants will have to surrender to authorities by noon on Friday or risk Willis filing an arrest warrant, but they may still seek to remove their case to federal court at a later date.
At least three defendants, including Clark and Meadows, want to move their case to federal court. Jones scheduled a Monday hearing to gather evidence about Meadows’s request.
Willis argued there is no basis for both defendants’ request to delay their arrest and their bid to remove their case from state court, telling Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, that his former boss “voluntarily agreed to surrender himself to state authorities, while other defendants have already surrendered,” according to a 13-page response to Meadows’s effort.
“Federal courts have repeatedly denied requests to interfere in state criminal prosecutions,” Willis’s team wrote. “Generally, only in cases of proven harassment or prosecutions taken in bad faith without hope of obtaining a valid conviction is federal intervention against pending state prosecutions appropriate.”
Willis also told former Justice Department official Clark in a separate filing that he “seeks to avoid the inconvenience and unpleasantness of being arrested … but provides this Court with no legal basis to justify those ends.”
The response to Meadows and Clark marks the most Willis’s team has said since indicting the former president and 18 others last week on charges that they schemed to subvert the 2020 election in the Peach State.
Clark faces two charges, including racketeering and one count of a criminal attempt to commit false statements and writings, over his alleged yearning to send a letter to Georgia authorities asking them to stall certifying their election while the DOJ investigated.
Meadows faces a racketeering count and a charge of soliciting a public officer to violate their oath. Meadows was also a participant in a call that Trump had with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, when Trump asked Raffensperger to help “find 11,780 votes.”
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Willis would like the trial to begin on March 4, she told Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee last week. Also on Wednesday, defendant Kenneth Chesebro, a close associate in Trump’s alleged bit to subvert the election, made a “speedy trial” request to start the trial even earlier than Willis’s springtime preference. McAfee has not yet responded to this motion.
Nearly all 19 defendants have been heard from by Wednesday afternoon, while a handful, including Harrison Floyd and Trevian Kutti, two defendants alleged of pressuring local election officials to alter the results of the 2020 election, have yet to sign a bond order.
