Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff, filed a formal petition on Tuesday to transfer the criminal racketeering prosecution he is facing from a Georgia prosecutor in connection with suspected meddling in Georgia’s 2020 election from state court to federal court.
The request, which was submitted in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, claims that Meadows’ actions while serving as the top aide to then-President Donald Trump as a federal official are covered by the allegations brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D).
The attorneys for Meadows cite a federal law known as the “removal statute” in the motion, which generally permits “any officer… of the United States” who is being prosecuted for a crime in state court to transfer the case to federal court if the incident involved the person’s performance of official duties.
The charges against Mr. Meadows “plausibly give rise to a federal defense based on his role at all relevant times as the White House Chief of Staff to the President of the United States,” wrote Meadows’ lawyers George Terwilliger and Joseph Englert in the motion filed on Tuesday. “Mr. Meadows is entitled to remove this action to federal court,” they added.
The application was made one day after a Fulton County grand jury approved a lengthy criminal indictment accusing Trump and 18 loyalists, including Meadows, of engaging in a wide-ranging conspiracy to rig Trump’s election victory in Georgia in 2020.
Meadows, a former congressman from North Carolina who worked as Trump’s chief of staff in 2020, was charged with violating Georgia’s racketeering law and soliciting a public official to break the law.
The indictment mentioned Meadows’ emails and calls to state officials in Georgia and other competitive states as part of Trump and his associates’ efforts to sabotage the valid election results. It also mentions Meadows’ part in setting up Trump’s phone contact with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) and his unexpected visit to a facility in the Atlanta region in December 2020 where state election officials were auditing ballots. Trump pushed Raffensperger to “find” the votes required to nullify Biden’s victory in the state during the phone call.
Meadows’ lawyers defended their client’s activities in the petition on Tuesday, stating that he was only working in his “official capacity” as Trump’s chief of staff.
“Nothing Mr. Meadows is alleged in the indictment to have done is criminal per se: arranging Oval Office meetings, contacting state officials on the President’s behalf, visiting a state government building, and setting up a phone call for the President,” Meadows’ lawyers stated. One would anticipate such behavior from the Chief of Staff of the President of the United States.
They claimed Meadows intended to submit a motion to drop the accusations at a later time.
It was widely anticipated that Trump and former Justice Department employee Jeffrey Clark would file identical legal filings, so Meadows’ request to transfer the issue to federal court came as no surprise. If accepted, it would enable the case to be tried in front of a possibly more amiable jury pool made up of citizens called from Northern Georgia, which is more conservative than largely Democratic Fulton County.
In New York, where he is under investigation by the state for manipulating business documents to conceal payments of hush money to an adult film actress, Trump has attempted a similar legal strategy. The attempt was rebuffed by a federal judge there, who decided to keep the case in state court because the accusations there did not concern Trump’s official presidential duties.
Atlanta was waiting for information on who of the 19 defendants charged in Monday’s indictment would be the first to surrender and post bond in the keenly followed case when the action in Georgia took place. Willis gave those accused until noon on August 25 to appear in Atlanta so that they could be processed and fingerprinted. Then or in the upcoming weeks, one could make their initial appearance before a court.