U.S. President-elect Donald Trump attends a viewing of the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket, in Brownsville, Texas, U.S., November 19, 2024.
Brandon Bell | Via Reuters
President-elect Donald Trump asked the Georgia Court of Appeals on Wednesday to effectively end the criminal case related to his effort to overturn his defeat in the state’s 2020 presidential election.
Trump’s lawyer Steven Sadow asked the appeals court in a filing to confirm that it lacks jurisdiction over the case, and then direct a trial-level state court in Atlanta to “immediately dismiss” the indictment against the president-elect.
Sadow argued that Georgia courts lost jurisdiction over the case because Trump won the 2024 election.
Another Trump defense attorney made a similar argument Tuesday in asking a New York state court judge to dismiss the criminal hush money case against him there.
Sadow, in his filing Wednesday in Georgia, wrote, “A sitting president is completely immune from indictment or any criminal process, state or federal” under the U.S. Constitution.
Although Trump will not be sworn in until Jan. 20, the appeals court should “inquire into its jurisdiction” to continue hearing the appeal “well before the inauguration,” Sadow wrote.
“That inquiry should result in this Court deciding that both this Court and the trial court lack jurisdiction to entertain any further criminal process against President Trump,” he wrote, “as the continued indictment and prosecution of President Trump by the State of Georgia are unconstitutional.”
The criminal case was already on hold before the election as Trump pursued an effort at the appeals court to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis because of her romantic relationship with a prosecutor on her team.
Sadow, in a separate statement Wednesday, noted that special counsel Jack Smith recently dropped two federal criminal prosecutions of Trump due to his electoral victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in November.
Those federal cases related to Trump’s effort to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden in the 2020 national election and Trump’s retention of classified government documents after leaving the White House in January 2021.
Smith’s move left just two criminal cases pending against Trump: in Fulton County, Georgia, and Manhattan Supreme Court.
Trump was convicted in May in Manhattan on all 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 payment his then-personal lawyer Michael Cohen made to porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 presidential election.
