Judge Scott McAfee, who oversaw an election interference case against Donald Trump in Georgia, has thrown out some criminal charges, but left most in place.
The judge found six counts in the 41-count indictment against Donald Trump and some of his co-defendants, including Rudy Giuliani, lacked detail.
But he said the charges can be refiled at a later date.
Donald Trump was among 19 people charged with a conspiracy to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
“The lack of detail concerning an essential legal element is, in the undersigned’s opinion, fatal,” Judge McAfee wrote in his order on March 13.
He said the charges do not provide the accused with enough information to prepare their legal defences “intelligently”, adding that “this does not mean the entire indictment is dismissed”.
Judge McAfee was randomly assigned the Trump case in 2023, just six months after being appointed as a judge by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican.
He previously worked as a prosecutor, including for the Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat who led the investigation into the former president.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Judge McAfee’s ruling affects three of the 13 charges against Donald Trump.
They relate to a call Donald Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which he told him: “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”
One of the charges accused the former president of soliciting public officials to break the law by violating their oath of office.
However, Judge McAfee said the indictment was not specific enough about exactly what Donald Trump wanted the officials to do.
The other dismissed charges apply to some of his most prominent co-defendants: Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Mark Meadows.
In his order, Judge McAfee said the charges “contain all the essential elements of the crimes but fail to allege sufficient detail regarding the nature of their commission, i.e., the underlying felony solicited”.
It comes as a win for Donald Trump and his co-defendants, who had filed to dismiss the charge. Prosecutors could now choose to refile the charges with more information in their allegation, or let the ruling stand and focus on the other charges.
The group had initially faced 41 total charges. Donald Trump is facing up to 20 years in prison in Georgia if convicted of the most severe charge of racketeering.
In a statement, Donald Trump’s lawyer in the Georgia case, Steve Sadow, called the ruling “a correct application of the law, as the prosecution failed to make specific allegations of any alleged wrongdoing on those counts”.
Donald Trump, who is running for president against Joe Biden in November, has slammed the case as politically motivated.
President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, is urging an investigation into those he accuses of trafficking in stolen material from his laptop.
In letters filed on February 1, lawyers representing Hunter Biden named a computer repair shop owner and Rudy Giuliani as among those who they say had broken the law.
He also threatened to sue Fox News’ Tucker Carlson for defamation.
It’s a shift in strategy for Hunter Biden to hit back after years of scrutiny, a source close to him told CBS News.
The laptop’s existence was first brought to the public’s attention by the New York Post less than one month before the 2020 presidential election.
It had allegedly been left by Hunter Biden in a repair shop and never collected.
The Post alleged that emails found on the computer’s hard-drive suggested Hunter Biden’s business dealings abroad were influencing US foreign policy while his father was vice-president.
Former president Donald Trump seized on the laptop as a campaign issue, saying it was evidence of corruption.
Hunter Biden, 52, is a lawyer and lobbyist who has worked abroad including in China and Ukraine.
The FBI has been investigating his business dealings since 2018 and has gathered enough evidence to charge him with tax crimes, and CBS News claim that they appear to have gathered enough evidence suggesting tax crimes may have been committed.
Republicans have vowed to investigate him and the family business now they have control of the House of Representatives.
President Biden and his family have denied any wrongdoing in overseas business dealings.
In the latest development, Hunter Biden’s lawyers wrote letters to the Justice Department, the attorney general of Delaware and the Internal Revenue Service.
They asked them to investigate former computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac, former Trump advisers Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon and their lawyer, Robert Costello.
Lawyers said they believed various Delaware laws were breached “in accessing, copying, manipulating, and/or disseminating Mr. Biden’s personal computer data”.
But Abbe Lowell, an attorney for Hunter Biden, said in a statement to CBS News that the letters “do not confirm Mac Isaac’s or others’ versions of a so-called laptop.”
In response to Hunter Biden’s new suite of legal threats, a lawyer for Mr Isaac said “the only thing I see is a privileged person hiring yet another high-priced attorney to redirect attention away from his own unlawful actions”.
Mac Isaac also claims that the laptop was left with him for repair in April 2019, and Hunter Biden never returned to collect it.
He said he reviewed the laptop files shortly after receiving it and discovered information about Hunter Biden’s personal finances. After waiting 90 days – the amount of time that had to pass before something could be considered abandoned property – Mac Isaac considered it abandoned.
He turned the laptop over to the FBI and provided a copy of the contents to Rudy Guiliani, who later would pass it along to the New York Post.
Robert Costello, a lawyer for both Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, told CBS News the letters to the Justice Department and Delaware were a “frivolous legal complaint trying to intimidate”.
Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani has tested positive for Covid-19, the president has announced.
The president tweeted: “Get better soon Rudy, we will carry on!”
Rudy Giuliani, who has been leading the Trump campaign’s legal challenges to the 2020 election results, is the latest person in the president’s inner circle to be infected.
President Trump and his team have been criticized for shunning safety guidance. He got ill in October.
Nearly 14.6 million people have been infected with Covid-19 in the US, according to Johns Hopkins University, and 281,234 people have died – the highest figures of any country in the world.
On December 6, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force co-ordinator, criticized the Trump administration for flouting guidelines and peddling “myths” about the pandemic.
She told NBC: “I hear community members parroting back those situations, parroting back that masks don’t work, parroting back that we should work towards herd immunity.”
“This is the worst event that this country will face,” she said.
Rudy Giuliani, 76, has not commented publicly on his diagnosis.
It is not clear whether the former New York mayor is experiencing symptoms, whether he is self-isolating or when he caught the virus.
Since the November 3 election, Rudy Giuliani has travelled the country as part of efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s election defeat. During many of his events, he was seen without a face mask and ignoring social distancing.
On December 3, he travelled to Georgia where he repeated unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud at a Senate committee hearing about election security.
Dozens of people in Trump’s orbit are said to have tested positive for Covid-19 since October, including his chief of staff Mark Meadows and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
First Lady Melania Trump and sons Donald Jr. and Baron also contracted the virus.
President Trump’s own diagnosis upended his unsuccessful campaign for a second term in office, less than a month before he faced Joe Biden in the presidential election.
Former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch has told Congress she was ousted over “unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives”.
She said she was “incredulous” at being dismissed by President
Donald Trump in May.
Marie Yovanovitch’s testimony is part of an impeachment inquiry against President
Trump.
The Democratic probe is looking into whether the Republican president
improperly pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rival Joe Biden.
The scandal was sparked by a whistleblower complaint about a July phone call
between President Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky.
During that conversation, President Trump described Marie Yovanovitch as “bad news”, according to a rough transcript released by the White House.
The decision to dismiss Marie Yovanovitch several months earlier reportedly
followed President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and other
conservatives arguing she was biased against the president.
Rudy Giuliani had been working in
Ukraine to press the authorities to investigate widely debunked corruption
allegations against Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter, who was associated with a
Ukrainian company.
The lawyer is coming under
increasing scrutiny over his work for the president. Asked by reporters on
October 11 if Rudy Giuliani was still his lawyer, President Trump answered
ambiguously: “I don’t know. He’s a
very good attorney and he has been my attorney.”
In a prepared statement, Marie
Yovanovitch said:“Although
I understand that I served at the pleasure of the president.
“I was nevertheless incredulous that the US government
chose to remove an ambassador based, as best as I can tell, on unfounded and
false claims by people with clearly questionable motives.”
Marie Yovanovitch said she
did not know Rudy Giuliani’s reasons for attacking her.
“Equally fictitious is the notion
that I am disloyal to President Trump,” she said.
“I have heard the allegation in
the media that I supposedly told the embassy team to ignore the president’s
orders ‘since he was going to be impeached.’ That allegation is false.”
She warned of the harm that will come to the US when “bad actors”
realize “how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our
system”.
Marie Yovanovitch said she had never met or spoken with Hunter Biden and
that Joe Biden had never raised with her the subject of his son or the
Ukrainian gas company that employed him.
She also said she learned that President Trump had called for her ousting
since 2018 despite Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan telling her she had
done nothing wrong.
Marie Yovanovitch said: “He said
that the president had lost confidence in me and no longer wished me to serve
as his ambassador. He added that there had been a concerted campaign against
me.”
A Barack Obama-appointee, Marie Yovanovitch was confirmed by the
Republican-controlled Senate and served as US ambassador to Ukraine from August
2016 until last May.
The whistleblower complaint noted Marie Yovanovitch’s surprise dismissal was a red flag for some officials.
Donald Trump personally repaid lawyer Michael Cohen the $130,000 that was used to buy Stormy Daniels’ silence about an alleged affair, his legal aide Rudy Giuliani has said.
It appears to contradict President Trump, who said he did not know about the payment made by lawyer Michael Cohen to Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election.
Donald Trump has denied Stormy Daniels’ claims of an affair in 2006.
The former New York City mayor said no campaign finance was used, a key issue in the matter.
Rudy Giuliani recently joined President Trump’s legal team and was talking to Sean Hannity on Fox News.
The campaign finance issue appears to be one his main motives – to deny that there was any wrongdoing.
Michael Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election could count as an illegal contribution to President Trump’s campaign.
Rudy Giuliani said: “That money was not campaign money. Sorry, I’m giving you a fact now that you don’t know. It’s not campaign money. No campaign finance violation.
“They funneled it through a law firm and the president repaid it.”
He said the repayment was made “over a period of several months”.
Rudy Giuliani added that the president “didn’t know about the specifics of it, as far as I know, but he did know about the general arrangement that Michael would take care of things like this”.
When asked by reporters a month ago if he knew about the payment to Stormy Daniels, President Trump said: “No.”
When asked why the payment was given to Stormy Daniels, the president added: “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen.”
President Trump might argue that the lawyer “took care of things like this”, as Rudy Giuliani suggested and that he knew nothing of the “specifics”, making the repayment personally later.
Speaking on Fox TV last week, President Trump suggested some knowledge of the matter in admitting Michael Cohen had represented him during the “crazy Stormy Daniels deal”, but did not go into specifics.
Michael Cohen, for his part, told the New York Times in February: “Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly.”
If Michael Cohen did co-ordinate with the Trump campaign, the $130,000 payment would be a violation of federal election law.
Rudy Giuliani’s comments also raise the question of whether President Trump was repaying an undisclosed loan. Donald Trump’s personal financial disclosure form from June 2017 makes no mention of a debt to Michael Cohen.
Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, said that Americans “should be outraged” at Rudy Giuliani’s comments.
He tweeted: “We predicted months ago that it would be proven that the American people had been lied to as to the $130k payment and what Mr. Trump knew.”
The payment relates to allegations by Stormy Daniels that she had relations with Donald Trump in 2006, allegations he denies.
After initially denying the payment, Michael Cohen eventually admitted he had paid the sum privately to Stormy Daniels, real name Stephanie Clifford, in October 2016 out of his own funds in exchange for her silence in a non-disclosure agreement.
Michael Cohen denied that Donald Trump was a party to the transaction.
The lawyer is now facing a criminal investigation. FBI agents searched his home and office in New York recently in relation to the nondisclosure agreement.
Two months ago, Stormy Daniels filed a lawsuit against the president, alleging that the agreement was invalid because Donald Trump did not sign it.
Ex-NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani has said there were “pockets” of people celebrating when the World Trade Center towers fell on September 11, 2001.
Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor at the time, disputed claims by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that thousands of people were involved.
Donald Trump’s comments have been refuted by local political leaders because of a lack of evidence.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie simply said “it didn’t happen”.
Rudy Giuliani, who ran unsuccessfully for the 2008 Republican nomination himself, said: “We did have some [reports of] celebrations, there were pockets of celebration, some in Queens, some in Brooklyn.”
The former mayor said in one specific report which was later proved to be true, owners of a sweet shop were celebrating and children from a nearby housing development “beat them up”.
However, Rudy Giuliani said Donald Trump was willfully exaggerating the numbers and he himself “would’ve been thrown out of the race” had he made such an inflated claim during his 2008 campaign.
Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik later backed up Rudy Giuliani’s comments, saying “10-50” people were reported to be celebrating in different areas throughout the city.
Donald Trump, who comes from New York and runs his billionaire property empire from the city, has come under constant attack for days, ever since he made his controversial 9/11 remarks at a rally in Alabama.
The mayor of Jersey City, which Donald Trump named, said no such thing happened and accused the Republican of “shameful politicizing”.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, his Republican rival in the race for the White House, said it was not true.
“It didn’t happen and the fact is, people can say anything, but the facts are the facts, and that didn’t happen in New Jersey that day and hasn’t happened since.”
Donald Trump leads the Republican race to be presidential nominee, two months before voting begins in the primary contests.
The Republican presidential hopeful has also urged increased surveillance of Muslims in the US, in light of the Paris terror attacks that killed 130 people.
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