Trump Seeks to Dismiss Georgia Criminal Case, Citing Presidential Immunity

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Trump’s attorneys said presidential immunity and the supremacy clause protected him from prosecution.

President-elect Donald Trump’s attorneys asked the Georgia Court of Appeals on Dec. 4 to dismiss his election interference case, arguing it lacks jurisdiction due to presidential immunity.

Addressing the jurisdictional issue, Trump’s attorneys said that sitting presidents are immune from prosecution and that the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution protects against state judges and prosecutors interfering with a president’s official duties.

“President Trump has filed a motion requesting the Georgia Court of Appeals confirm its lack of jurisdiction to continue hearing his appeal now that he is President-Elect and will soon become the 47th President of the United States, and then direct the trial court to immediately dismiss the case,” Steve Sadow, lead counsel for Trump in Georgia, said in a statement provided to The Epoch Times.

“The filing states that any ongoing criminal proceeding against a sitting president must be dismissed under the U.S. Constitution.”

Like special counsel Jack Smith, Trump’s attorneys in Georgia pointed to a Department of Justice memo stating that prosecution of a sitting president would violate the Constitution.

In November, the court of appeals canceled oral argument that was scheduled for December. Trump was appealing a lower court’s decision not to require Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis’s removal from the case.

On Dec. 2, a court in Georgia ordered Willis to search for and turn over communications she might have had with either special counsel Jack Smith or the House Jan. 6 committee.

The Dec. 4 filing comes as Trump’s two federal cases concluded and a court in New York considers dismissing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s business documents case against Trump.

Trump’s legal team similarly cited the supremacy clause and presidential immunity as reasons to dismiss the case against him in New York. New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan set a deadline of Dec. 9 for Bragg’s office to respond.

In May, a New York jury found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsified business records, raising the prospect that he could face prison. Experts told The Epoch Times that the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution would preclude Trump from serving prison time.

Trump was 1 of 19 people charged in Willis’s prosecution last year.

Among the co-defendants listed in Georgia were former Trump advisers, including Rudy Giuliani and his former chief of staff Mark Meadows.

Heritage Foundation Vice President John Malcolm said the supremacy clause would likely interfere with Willis’s attempt to continue the prosecution but noted that the question of state prosecutors continuing against presidents was a “brand new question.”

“There’s nothing that would prevent a state prosecutor from prosecuting a sitting president,” Georgia criminal defense attorney Keith Johnson previously told The Epoch Times, “especially when that individual was the president when the alleged offense occurred.”

Outside Willis’s potential disqualification, the Georgia case faced another setback after the judge overseeing the case, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, dismissed two counts from the indictment in September—leaving just five of the 13 original criminal counts.

Republican attorneys general sent a letter last month insisting that Willis, Smith, and New York Attorney General Letitia James discontinue their prosecutions of Trump.

“As the chief legal officers in our States, we write to strongly encourage you to discontinue your political prosecutions of President Trump,” the state attorneys general from Florida, Texas, and other states said. “While each of these prosecutions should never have been brought in the first place, they now risk fomenting a Constitutional crisis.”

James had won a civil fraud lawsuit against Trump earlier this year, but the case went before an appeals court in September. It’s unclear how the judges in that case will rule, but some of them seemed skeptical of James’s application of the state’s anti-fraud law.

Trump’s attorney and pick for U.S. solicitor general, D. John Sauer, requested in a Nov. 26 letter that James dismiss the case against his client.

“I strongly believe that it is necessary for the health of our Republic for the strife and lawfare to end,” Sauer said. “You now have the singular opportunity to help cure this division.”