by WorldTribune Staff, June 10, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
The legal team representing former President Donald Trump has submitted a request for an oral arguments hearing at the Georgia Court of Appeals before a three-judge panel decides whether to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from his 2020 election subversion case.
Donald Trump's legal team wants Futon County DA Fani Willis disqualified due to ‘misconduct.'“We believe oral argument will assist the court by highlighting and clarifying the reasons why the case should be dismissed and Fulton County DA Willis should be disqualified for her misconduct,” said Steve Sadow, lead defense counsel for Trump in Fulton County.
The Trump team's request is rare given that most appeals in court cases are decided solely on written legal briefs. According to statistics from the court, requests for oral arguments are granted between 30 and 40 percent of the time.
The Georgia Court of Appeals said last week the effort by Trump and seven co-defendants to disqualify Trump will not be heard until October. That decision was seen as a huge win for Trump as it almost guarantees Willis's case against Trump won't move to trial before the Nov. 5 election.
Trump is among the nine of 15 remaining defendants who are appealing a March 15 order by Judge Scott McAfee of the Fulton County Superior Court that kept Willis on the case. McAfee found that while Willis’s romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a former special prosecutor on the case, did not create a disqualifying conflict of interest, the “odor of mendacity” the relationship caused amounted to an appearance conflict that required either her or Wade to resign.
Trump’s lawyers have said that Willis’s extrajudicial comments, including a speech she made at a historically black church on Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend., could prejudice the jury and violate professional conduct rules.
Willis spoke at the church about race and her relationship with God.
“In this speech, DA Willis injected race and her communications with God into the case (and the prospective jury pool) and stoked racial animus against the defendants and their counsel by, among other statements, asking God why the defendants challenged her conduct in hiring a black man but not his white counterparts, and why the judgment of a black female Democrat was not as good as white male Republicans,” Sadow wrote.
During hearings in February and early March, Willis and Wade vehemently denied that they improperly gained from their romantic relationship and role in the high-profile Trump case.
Trump’s legal teams said that Wade’s removal from the case “did nothing to cure nor mitigate the harm to the defendants from DA Willis’s extrajudicial speech,” noting that “this error” could cause the upheaval of multiple jury trials if the appeals court does not reconsider McAfee’s previous decision.
Trump requests rare oral arguments in Fani Willis disqualification hearing added by Editor Two on June 10, 2024
View all posts by Editor Two →
Source link