Judge orders hearing on Trump’s motion to disqualify Fulton County DA
Written by ABC AUDIO on July 29, 2023
(ATLANTA, Georgia) — A judge scheduled a hearing on former President Donald Trump’s motion to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.
The motion also seeks to quash the special purpose grand jury report that gathered much of the evidence in the case.
The hearing is set for Thursday, August 10 at 10 a.m., and all briefs on the issue are due two days prior, on August 8. The hearing comes as charges in the case could be imminent — Willis previously said in a letter that she would be announcing her charging decisions by Sept. 1.
Earlier this month, Trump filed his motion seeking to disqualify Willis from the investigation and quash the report generated by the Special Purpose Grand Jury — claiming it is “fruit of a process that was both unlawful on its face and unlawful its application.”
“[Trump] now sits on a precipice,” the filings states. “A regular Fulton County grand jury could return an indictment any day that will have been based on a report and predicate investigative process that were wholly without authority.”
The Supreme Court of Georgia previously denied a similar motion by Trump and his team.
The filling claims the report is “targeting” Trump, and therefore “could not have comported with the process of laws that he was due under the 14th amendment and the Georgia Bill of Rights.”
“Yet, at every turn, the Supervising Judge and the District Attorney have trampled the procedural safeguards for Petitioner’s and other’s rights,” Trump’s filing states. “The whole of the process is now incurably infected. And nothing that follows could be legally sound or publicly respectable.”
The special purpose grand jury sat for approximately eight months and heard testimony from over 75 witnesses. That grand jury did not have the power to return indictments.
Trump had also filed this motion against the Fulton County judge overseeing the DA’s case, resulting in all of the Superior Court judges in Fulton County being recused.
Senior Superior Court Judge Stephen Schuster, who was previously a judge in the nearby Cobb County, was assigned to the case and ordered the hearing.
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