A judge in Georgia has struck out some of the charges against former United States President Donald Trump and his allies, even as they continue face criminal prosecution over alleged election interference in the southeastern state.
According to a nine-page court filing released on Wednesday which was obtained by Africa Today News, New York, six of the 41 counts in the Georgia indictment will be thrown out.
That includes three counts against Trump, although he still faces 10 other counts.
The six dismissed counts all focus on whether Trump and his co-defendants solicited elected officials to violate their oaths of office in their alleged attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race.
That vote saw Democrat Joe Biden emerge victorious over Trump, the incumbent, with wins in battleground states like Georgia proving pivotal.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, however, noted that the six counts in question, at present, did not offer enough information to move forward with.
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“As written, these six counts contain all the essential elements of the crimes but fail to allege sufficient detail regarding the nature of their commission,” McAfee wrote.
“They do not give the Defendants enough information to prepare their defences intelligently, as the Defendants could have violated the Constitutions and thus the statute in dozens, if not hundreds, of distinct ways.”
McAfee’s ruling, however, left intact the most serious charge in the case, racketeering. It also left open the possibility that prosecutors could seek a new, more detailed indictment on the six rejected counts.
Two of the charges that were thrown out related to an hour-long phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in early January 2021.
That phone call, which was leaked to the media in the days after it occurred, appeared to show Trump pressuring Raffensperger to tweak the Georgia election results in his favour. Biden had won the state by a narrow margin: 11,779 votes.
“All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump told Raffensperger in a recording of their call.
At the time, Trump was seeking to advance his false claim that the presidential election had been marred by widespread voter fraud. He has insisted in the years since that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him, as part of a conspiracy.
Biden’s victory in Georgia allowed him to claim all 16 of the state’s Electoral College votes, which ultimately decide who is elected president.
The six counts identified in Wednesday’s ruling also concerned actions taken by key Trump allies, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, lawyer Ray Smith III and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
They too previously faced charges that they had pressured members of Georgia’s legislature, as well as Raffensperger, to “unlawfully appoint presidential electors” or “unlawfully influence the certified election returns”.
As a result of Wednesday’s decision, Meadows now faces only a single count in the Georgia case: racketeering.