2024-03-13 15:47:19
Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants were indicted in Georgia in August (File)
Washington:
A Georgia judge on Wednesday dismissed several charges against Donald Trump and his co-defendants for their alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the southern state.
Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee tossed out six counts in the indictment of the former president and his co-defendants in Fulton County.
“This does not mean the entire indictment is dismissed,” McAfee said in his nine-page ruling.
Trump and 18 co-defendants were indicted in Georgia in August on racketeering and various other charges.
Four co-defendants, including three former Trump campaign lawyers, have pleaded guilty already to lesser charges in deals that spared them any prison time.
McAfee dismissed minor charges in the indictment facing Trump, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and lawyers Charles Eastman, Ray Smith and Robert Cheeley.
In this section of the indictment they were accused of soliciting Georgia officials to violate their oath of office in the defendants’ drive to overturn the election result.
Trump was specifically accused of urging the Georgia secretary of state to unlawfully decertify the results of the election in Georgia, where Democrat Joe Biden won by some 12,000 votes.
In dismissing the counts, McAfee said the charges suffered from a “lack of detail.”
“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,” he wrote.
Lawyers for Trump and his co-defendants are seeking to have the entire case dropped because of alleged misconduct by the chief prosecutor, Fani Willis.
McAfee is expected to rule this week on a defense motion to have Willis disqualified following revelations she had a romantic relationship with a man she hired to work as the special prosecutor on the case, Nathan Wade.
Trump is also facing federal charges of conspiring to overturn the results of the November 2020 election won by Biden.
That case had been scheduled to start on March 4 but has been frozen as the Supreme Court considers Trump’s claim that as a former president he enjoys immunity from criminal prosecution.
Willis has asked for the Georgia trial of the former president and his 14 remaining co-defendants to begin on August 5, three months before the November presidential election expected to feature a rematch between Trump and Biden.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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