Lawsuit against Trump in Georgia is also delayed

• Marieke de Vries

  United States correspondent

Good court news for presidential candidate Trump; the Court of Appeals in the state of Georgia will consider his lawyers’ allegations that the prosecutor in the case against him there should be disqualified. The reason is that she was involved in a romantic relationship with a colleague, which she has not been honest about.

Because this will now be examined on appeal, this lawsuit will not start for the time being. Yesterday it was announced that the judge has indefinitely postponed the case against Trump in Florida for withholding state secret documents.

In Georgia, the focus is on possible collusion by Trump with other suspects to manipulate the 2020 election results. The phone call that Trump made shortly after the elections to the highest official in charge of the elections in the state of Georgia plays an important role in this. Trump put pressure on Brad Raffensperger to find him 11,780 votes, enough to challenge Biden’s victory.

Public prosecutor Fani Willis spent two years investigating Trump’s actions. An investigative jury determined in August last year that there was sufficient evidence to indict Trump and 18 co-defendants for, among other things, conspiracy with the aim of influencing the election results.

At the time of the investigation, Willis was in a relationship with Nathan Wade, a lawyer on her investigative team, with whom she went on romantic outings. According to Trump’s lawyers, that relationship has created an “untenable conflict of interest,” forcing her entire team to be removed from the case. But the judge overseeing the case decided that Willis could remain on the case as long as Wade resigned. Trump’s lawyers have appealed this, with the result that the Court of Appeals will now consider this issue.

According to former prosecutor Neama Rahmani, Willis screwed up; “This case will not happen again before the November elections,” Rahmani told Newsweek magazine. “It was already a complicated case with all those co-suspects, but she completely ruined it by hiring her lover and thereby creating an unnecessary circus.”

Law professor at Georgia State University Anthony Michael Kreis agrees: “This case will not come to court until early 2025 at the earliest. The entire process has been considerably derailed for the time being.”

In the same week that porn actress Stormy Daniels seriously embarrassed former President Trump in New York with intimate details about their relationship, two other much more important cases against him now appear to have been put on hold until after the election. Trump’s tactic of appealing and delaying has been successful to the extent that it appears that he will spend less time in court this year than initially thought and will have his hands free to fully campaign.