CNN chief legal analyst Elie Honig recently speculated that lawyers for Donald Trump will lose a motion to throw out evidence and disqualify the prosecutor investigating him in Georgia via Media Ite.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is probing the former president’s actions relating to the 2020 presidential election in the state, which Trump lost. In the ensuing weeks, Trump initiated a pressure campaign on Republican state officials in a harebrained attempt to overturn the election. He falsely claimed that it was rife with fraud. In a phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Trump asked him to “find” him the necessary number of votes to win the state.
On Friday, lawyers for Trump filed a motion seeking to toss evidence gathered by a grand jury last year, which would prevent prosecutors from showing the evidence to another, more recently-impaneled grand jury. The motion also seeks to disqualify Willis from prosecuting Trump.
“Elie, how do you assess the Trump team’s case to throw out evidence and disqualify the Fulton County D.A., Fani Willis?” asked guest host Jim Acosta during Friday’s edition of The Situation Room. “This is something that they’ve talked about for a long time. Does it have any merit?”
Honig was blunt, though he did say Wills has used the case to gain political clout:
“Legally and procedurally, they’re not gonna win on this, Jim. The thing they are asking for here is not a thing, legally. There’s basically no way that a judge can prevent a grand jury from taking action [or] can stop a grand jury ahead of time from indicting.
But it’s important to note, Donald Trump does have some legitimate points he makes in this brief about the way that the D.A., Fani Willis has injected politics into this case. She’s already been disqualified from a piece of the case and chastised by the judge for a political conflict of interest. She’s used pieces of this case to fundraise and to ask for more Twitter followers. She’s made public statements that may cross a line. So, Donald Trump’s team is not going to win this motion. But there are issues that are going to crop up as we move along about the way Fani Willis has handled this case.”
Trump has already been charged in two other venues; in Manhattan where he has been hit with 34 state counts for allegedly falsifying business records; and in Miami, where he faces 37 federal counts stemming from his retention of government documents upon leaving the White House.
