The judge overseeing the election interference case against Donald Trump and others issued an order on Wednesday dismissing six charges in the case, including three against the former president.
The dismissed charges related to alleged efforts by Trump and others working on his behalf to persuade elected representatives in the state to throw out President Joe Biden’s win in the state and instead give its electors to Trump, according to CNBC.
The charges accused Trump and five other defendants of “solicitation of violation of oath by public officer,” but “not detail the exact term of the oaths that are alleged to have been violated,” the outlet reported.
As a result, the accused and their legal teams were left without enough information to defend themselves against the charges.
None of the other defendants affected by the order were named in initial reports about Judge Scott McAfee’s order.
In his order, McAfee agreed with defense attorneys that the indictment was “so generic as to compel” him to dismiss it, CNBC reported.
“On its own, the United States Constitution contains hundreds of clauses, any one of which can be the subject of a lifetime’s study,” the judge wrote.
Axios noted that McAfee left the door open for prosecutors to re-file the charges.
“Trump was charged with three of the dismissed solicitation counts. One of them, related to his effort to get the speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives to convene a special session to unlawfully appoint presidential electors who would cast ballots for him in the Electoral College,” according to CNBC’s Dan Mangan.
“Another of the dismissed counts accused Trump and his White House chief of staff Mark Meadows of asking Georgia’s secretary of state to unlawfully influence the certified election returns,” Mangan added.
“The third tossed count accused Trump of asking the secretary of state to decertify the election,” he wrote.
Of the 13 charges originally filed against Trump in the Georgia election interference case, according to Axios, now “more than half a dozen” remain.
This order may not be the only bad news Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis receives from McAfee this week.
A decision is also expected this week on whether Willis should be disqualified from the prosecution because of an alleged improper romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade.
One of the defendants she indicted in the racketeering case against Trump and his supporters has sought to have her removed from the case because of her relationship with Wade, who is in the process of getting a divorce.
Both Willis and Wade have denied they were involved at the time Willis hired him, but cellphone records submitted to the court seemed to tell a different story, with thousands of calls and texts between the two.
Earlier this month, Willis received bad news of a different sort when she found out that she will face not one, but at least two opponents in her run for re-election as district attorney.
via magatribute
