Government

GA Supreme Court Declines Invitation To Shred State's Law To Protect Trump

Deep (South) State!

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(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Trump got some bad news yesterday, although apparently not as bad as the news he got Sunday from Special Counsel Jack Smith. We’ll wait a hot second to weigh in on that second one, since it’s virtually guaranteed that the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman is going to get that target letter by close of business.

But we don’t have to wait for the Georgia Supreme Court, since it took them just one business day to dropkick Donald Trump’s latest effort to bone the grand jury investigation into election interference being led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

On Friday, the former president’s attorneys Drew Findling, Marissa Goldberg and Jennifer Little filed nearly identical “Petitions for Writs of Mandamus and Prohibition” with the Supreme Court of Georgia and also “out of an abundance of caution,” with the Superior Court of Fulton County. Their goal is to magically disappear the report issued in January by the special purpose grand jury, along with its recommendations for who should be indicted and all the evidence and testimony it considered. They already made a similar motion in March to Judge Robert McBurney, the presiding judge, but with no ruling forthcoming and a regular grand jury empaneled to consider the evidence and prior report, Trump took a radical step to fend off an imminent indictment.

He demanded that the Georgia Supreme Court assert original jurisdiction over the case. His preference was that they declare the entire special purpose grand jury scheme invalid, although he’d settle for an order that DA Fani Willis is biased and any evidence obtained by her office is definitionally tainted.

“To be sure, the whole of Georgia’s special purpose grand jury scheme is so unadministrable as to be facially void. Ergo, it is not possible for this, or any, special-purpose grand jury to act within the law,” his lawyers wrote.

In the event, the high court declined to take him up on the suggestion that it should disregard all procedural requirements, allow him to skip the line, and then jettison well-established law and precedent.

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“A petitioner cannot invoke this Court’s original jurisdiction as a way to circumvent the ordinary channels for obtaining the relief he seeks without making some showing that he is being prevented fair access to those ordinary channels,” the nine judges agreed, adding that “Petitioner’s claim fails in the light of that precedent; he makes no showing that he has been prevented fair access to the ordinary channels.”

They note that what Trump really wants is for the Supreme Court to either order Judge McBurney to rule, or rule themselves in his stead. And that is not a thing.

Finally, after delivering a concise bar review on the difference between expungement (retrospective relief!) and quashal (prospective relief!), the judges take a moment to shred the the supposedly precedential cases Trump’s lawyers cited in their petition. As your ATL has now observed both times Trump made this dumb argument, there’s a 2015 decision from this very court holding that the remedy for overreach by a special purpose grand jury is not suppression of its findings because “grand juries, unlike petit juries, are authorized to consider evidence without regard to its eventual admissibility at trial.”

TLDR: You get NOTHING.

And PS, eight of the nine judges who signed onto this order are Republican appointees.

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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

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