Watch Your Back, Jack Smith, DA Fani Willis Is Fixing To Beat You To The Indictment Punch

It's raining indictments, hallelujah!

As we wait for Special Counsel Jack Smith to drop a second Trump indictment in DC, there’s a bunch of crazy shit going down in the Fulton County District Attorney’s case. DA Fani Willis has signaled that she plans to indict in the next three weeks, so let’s check in on what will likely be the fourth indictment of presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Last Friday, Trump’s Georgia lawyers Drew Findling, Marissa Goldberg, and Jennifer Little filed almost identical “Petitions for Writs of Mandamus and Prohibition” in the Supreme Court of Georgia and the Superior Court of Fulton County demanding that someone — anyone! — save their client’s saggy, orange ass. Specifically, they want to magically disappear the special purpose grand jury report on 2020 election interference issued in January and remove DA Willis from any future 2020 election cases.

They urged the court to toss out Georgia’s entire special purpose grand jury scheme for being unconstitutional, or, barring that, to toss the report because DA Willis is biased against Trump.

Left untouched, the report’s existence will allow the District Attorney to circumvent the normal presentation of evidence and could invite a new grand jury to uncritically ratify the previous findings. It is one thing to indict a ham sandwich. To indict the mustard-stained napkin that it once sat on is quite another.

Without getting too deeply into the weeds (I’ve written a more nuanced post on that here), the standard for mandamus is abuse of discretion — i.e. NOT if you don’t give me what I want, they’ll indict me, and I really don’t want that to happen. The Georgia Supreme Court took one business day to dropkick this stupid motion, noting that it requires exceptional circumstances to invoke the high court’s original jurisdiction, and this ain’t it. They also observed that Trump made a similar motion before Judge Robert McBurney in March, and the fact that the trial judge hasn’t ruled yet is not a redressable injury.

This morning, Chief Judge Ural Glanville of the Fulton County Superior Court responded in a brief order recusing the judges under his purview from adjudicating this petition. Since Trump claims that Judge McBurney behaved improperly, Judge Glanville is transferring the petition so that it won’t be heard by one of McBurney’s immediate colleagues. Although in a footnote Judge Glanville suggests that this petition might not be long for this world, wherever it lands.

The undersigned notes that, although the Petition is styled as a Petition for Writs of Mandamus and Prohibition, the nature of the relief requested is that this Court (1) quash a special purpose grand jury report, (2) bar the District Attorney from using evidence obtained via the special purpose grand jury investigation, and (3) disqualify the District Attorney for conflict of interest; none of which actually appears to sound in mandamus.

Meanwhile, last week DA Willis sent target letters to multiple participants in the fake electors scheme, including Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, state Sen. Brandon Beach, and David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia GOP. Judge McBurney already forced Shafer to get separate counsel, finding him to be differently situated from the other electors. Which is … the kind of special you really don’t want to be.

Shafer responded this week in a letter in which his lawyers demanded that DA Willis call off her prosecution, insisting that his actions assembling a fake slate of electors are protected by the First, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

[U]nder the Constitution and the ECA, the December 14, 2020 meeting and execution of contingent electoral ballots was also a “petition” to the government, specifically Congress, which is the only governmental authority empowered to adjudicate and count electoral ballots from any State. Any attempt to punish our client for engaging in these protected activities would violate the United States and Georgia Constitutions, as well as unambiguous federal and state law.

Let’s take a wildass guess that this will not deter Willis for one single second. Particularly in light of a story from The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell this morning confirming prior reporting that the prosecutor “has developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month, according to two people briefed on the matter.”

Georgia’s robust racketeering statute requires two predicate crimes to demonstrate the existence of an “enterprise.” Here, they will reportedly be witness intimidation during the call where Trump pressured Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” and threatened him with criminal prosecution if he didn’t do it, and the breach of Dominion voting machines in Coffee County by Trump’s Kraken allies.

OMG, can it really be … RICO???? Guess we’ll find out pretty soon.

[AJC / Guardian / Yahoo]

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