In a significant setback for Fulton County DA Fani Willis, on Thursday, a Georgia judge denied a request to consolidate all the Trump RICO defendants into a single trial.
Last month, Fani Willis filed RICO and conspiracy charges against President Trump and 18 others, for daring to question the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
Willis had sought to have all 19 defendants tried together, potentially compromising Trump’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. This approach seemed to be the most convenient for Fani Willis, who may have been unprepared for the complexities of separate trials involving the 18 co-defendants.
Fani Willis invoked four unrelated cases to issue threats to all the defendants, even though these cases bore no relevance to Trump’s RICO case. This action was taken in response to requests for speedy trials by Chesebro and Powell.
Fani Willis argued, “By filing a statutory speedy trial demand, the Defendants elected to proceed to trial without the benefit of the type of prior notice of the State’s discovery and similar transaction evidence that would have otherwise been afforded to them.”
In his decision, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee ordered that Trump and 16 of the defendants will undergo separate trials from the remaining two defendants, namely lawyers Ken Chesebro and Sidney Powell. This separation followed their formal requests for speedy trials and their petition to have their cases tried separately.
The trial for Sidney Powell and Ken Chesebro in the Georgia RICO and conspiracy case has been scheduled for October 23rd.
Judge McAfee has decided to have Ken Chesebro and Sidney Powell tried jointly, as he believes that severing the cases is essential to protect the due process rights of each defendant.
“The precarious ability of the Court to safeguard each defendant’s due process rights and ensure adequate pretrial preparation on the current accelerated track weighs heavily, if not decisively, in favor of severance,” Judge Scott McAfee wrote.
“The precarious ability of the Court to safeguard each defendant’s due process rights and ensure adequate pretrial preparation on the current accelerated track weighs heavily, if not decisively, in favor of severance,” Judge Scott McAfee wrote.
President Trump is seeking a postponement of his trial and has also made a formal request for his case to be severed from the other co-defendants.
BREAKING: Pres. Trump has filed to sever his case from the other defendants in Georgia seeking a speedy trial.
— Daniel Baldwin (@baldwin_daniel_) August 31, 2023
Pres. Trump is arguing it would violate his right to a fair trial…which it would. pic.twitter.com/KiNH6lRjfB
Simultaneously, DA Willis is fighting requests from a minimum of five co-defendants, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who are seeking to transfer their cases from state courts to federal jurisdiction. Earlier this week, a judge rejected Meadows’s initial attempt to achieve this, but his case is still under consideration in the appeals court.
