As we await Judge Scott McAfee’s decision on whether to disqualify Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis from her prosecution of Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants, McAfee has dismissed some of the charges in the case. While this sounds like good news for Trump and his co-defendants on the surface, they aren’t necessarily out of the woods.
“Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee wrote in an order that six of the counts in the indictment must be quashed, including three against Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee,” reports the Associated Press. “But the order leaves intact other charges, and the judge wrote that prosecutors could seek a new indictment on the charges he dismissed.”
The charges that McAfee dismissed concern the phone call that Trump made to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger suggesting that Raffensperger could “find the votes” that would put Trump ahead of Biden in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
“All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump suggested to Raffensperger.
When Willis began her investigation of Trump, I wrote:
In his phone call to Raffensperger, Trump was just being Trump. He wasn’t encouraging Raffensperger to cheat; he simply asked Raffensperger in his indelibly Trumpy way to make sure the secretary of state was doing all he could to make sure the election was fair. If Raffensperger magically “found” votes, then we might have had a problem.
Donald Trump was just guilty of speaking inartfully, one of the things that his detractors have always tried to use against him. He didn’t break any laws because nothing actually happened — unlike the ballot harvesting from Democrats that almost surely did take place.
Thus, it makes sense that McAfee would dismiss these flimsiest of charges.
“The case accuses Trump and 18 others of conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state to Democrat Joe Biden,” the AP reports. “The nearly 100-page indictment details dozens of acts by Trump or his allies to undo his defeat, including harassing an election worker who faced false claims of fraud and attempting to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the will of voters and appoint a new slate of electoral college electors favorable to Trump.”
“Four people — bail bondsman Scott Hall and attorneys Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis — have pleaded guilty to charges,” reports WSB Radio. “The remaining defendants, including Trump, have denied wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty.”
This is a developing story, and we will update it as events warrant.
Read the order from McAfee below:
Judge dismisses some counts… by WSB-TV