Georgia Supreme Court denies Trump’s petition to remove DA, judge from election probe case

ATLANTA — The Georgia Supreme Court has denied former President Donald Trump’s latest petition to have Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis removed from the 2020 election probe case and to have the special grand jury report thrown out.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been investigating since early 2021 whether Trump and his allies broke any laws as they tried to overturn his narrow election loss in Georgia to Democrat Joe Biden. She has suggested that she is likely to seek charges in the case from a grand jury next month.

Trump’s Georgia legal team on Friday filed similar petitions in the Georgia Supreme Court and Fulton County Superior Court naming Willis and Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the special grand jury, as respondents.

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The petitions sought to bar Willis and her office from continuing to prosecute the case. It also asks that the report produced by the special grand jury that had been seated in the case be tossed out and that prosecutors be prevented from presenting any evidence from the panel’s investigation to a regular grand jury.

The filings also asked that the courts stop “all proceedings related to and flowing from the special purpose grand jury’s investigation until this matter can be resolved.”

In their ruling, the Georgia Supreme Court justices said this about banning Willis from the case: “We note only that Petitioner has not presented in his original petition either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Willis’s disqualification by this Court at this time on this record.”

The court said that Trump and his team, “has not shown that this case presents one of those extremely rare circumstances in which this Court’s original jurisdiction should be invoked, and therefore, the petition is dismissed.”

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