Trump asks top Georgia court to disqualify election probe prosecutor and toss grand jury report
Associated PressATLANTA — Lawyers for former President Donald Trump are asking Georgia’s highest court to prevent the district attorney who has been investigating his actions in the wake of the 2020 election from prosecuting him and to throw out a special grand jury report that is part of the inquiry. 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. The filings ask 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 a previous filing in March, Trump’s lawyers made similar requests and asked that a judge other than McBurney hear their claims. Trump’s lawyers, in their March filing, argued the special grand jury proceedings “involved a constant lack of clarity as to the law, inconsistent applications of basic constitutional protections for individuals being brought before it, and a prosecutor’s office that was found to have an actual conflict, yet continued to pursue the investigation.” Willis argued in a response in May that those arguments failed to meet the “exacting standards” for disqualifying a prosecutor and failed to prove that due process rights had been violated or that the grand jury process was “tainted” or the law governing it unconstitutional.