The Georgia Supreme Court on Monday unanimously rejected former President Donald Trump’s bid to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from investigating the 2020 presidential election and void the final report of a special purpose grand jury recommending that individuals be indicted.
Acting quickly to address Trump’s motion filed late Thursday, the state’s highest court said the former president’s legal team had failed to present “extraordinary circumstances” to warrant its intervention. As for Willis, Trump “has not presented in his original petition either the facts or the law” necessary to justify his disqualification, the court said in an unsigned five-page order.
Willis has indicated that in the coming weeks he will ask one of the two recently seated grand juries to present an indictment in the election investigation. He has not said who could be formally charged, but Trump is expected to be one of those charged.
With that on the horizon, Trump’s lawyers asked the state Supreme Court to halt grand jury proceedings and hear their motion. He also sought to prevent Willis from using any evidence obtained by the special grand jury, which heard testimony from nearly 75 witnesses.
The state Supreme Court said the normal course of action would be for Trump’s legal team to file a petition first with a Fulton Superior Court judge, whose decision could be appealed. Trump, according to the order, cannot go to the state’s highest court to try to “circumvent the ordinary channels to obtain the relief he seeks without showing that he is being denied fair access to those ordinary channels.”
Trump’s lawyers filed that request in Fulton Superior Court, saying they had done so out of an abundance of caution. No ruling has been issued in that case, which was filed Friday.
The state high court’s order indicated that the High Court case likely won’t go anywhere. Even if Trump’s petition had been brought in due process posture, Trump “has not demonstrated that he would be entitled to the relief he seeks,” the state Supreme Court order said.
The order noted that the court has considered other requests (in the Trump case, so-called writs of mandamus and prohibition) only in the rarest of circumstances. But Trump, the court said, “has not shown that this case presents one of those extremely rare circumstances” and so the former president’s petition must be dismissed.
A spokesman for Willis declined to comment on the decision. Trump’s lead attorney, Drew Findling, did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.
