CNN: Tierney Sneed & Zachary Cohen: ‘Georgia Judge Shuts Down DA’s Effort To Try Donald Trump & Co-Defendants’

Source:CNN- former President Donald J. Trump (Republican, Florida) and perhaps I should thank God, that’s he’s the former President.

Source:The New Democrat

“A Georgia judge shut down the effort by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to have all 19 defendants, including former President Donald Trump, to be tried together in October in the Georgia election subversion case.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee announced Thursday that Trump and 16 co-defendants will move forward on their own schedule, with a trial date yet be announced.

The two remaining co-defendants, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, sought speedy trials and are scheduled to begin in October.

Thursday’s order is a victory for Trump and his fellow co-defendants who did not want to go to trial this October. The schedule laid out by the judge only cemented some of the steps in the pre-trial process, setting up the possibility that the trial itself does not happen until well into 2024, or even later. Trump’s legal calendar during the first half of next year is already clogged with plans for trials in the other criminal cases he faces, and he is juggling those proceedings with his 2024 presidential run.

“Fulton County DA Fani Willis’ politically motivated, wrongful attempt to deny President Trump due process of law by arguing that no severances should be granted has been summarily squashed by the court,” a spokesperson for Trump said. “Willis’ unjust rush to judgment in order to please her radical political base has simply failed.”

While McAfee didn’t set a trial date for Trump and 16 of his co-defendants, the timeline he sets out in a court order Thursday means they wouldn’t go on trial before at least December.

The new schedule laid out by the judge signals he wants to start hashing out pretrial disputes with the batch of 17 defendants by the end of the year. The judge is ordering discovery to start by October 6.

However, there is no set timeline yet for the trial for the 17 defendants nor is there one for resolving disputes over what evidence can be presented to the jury. McAfee ordered that other types of pretrial motions be filed by December 1, but he has not scheduled a hearing on those requests.

At the pace McAfee laid out, federal courts will have some time to address the efforts by some defendants in the case to move their prosecutions to federal court.” 

From CNN 

For any left-wing conspiracy theorists out there (and I know there are at least a few) who think that Judge Scott McAfee is simply trying to do Donald Trump a favor here: keep in mind, this is the same judge who ruled that Mark Meadows won’t be tried in Federal court and ruled against him last Friday.

And once again I’m not a lawyer, (and if you weren’t a lawyer either, you would probably feel the need to keep mentioning that when you were writing about legal issues also) but the Judge’s ruling here is just being realistic. There’s so much evidence against all these defendants, all 16 of them, that the court, as well as the defense lawyers are going to have to go through and prepare for and will have many motions to file, that no way all 16 of them could be tried next month. Probably next spring at the earliest. And this case will probably go after Jack Smith’s case in Washington next year anyway.