Georgia Supreme Court denies Trump bid to quash Fulton County investigation

The Georgia Supreme Court Monday declined to take up an effort from former President Donald Trump to quash an investigation into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state.

The unanimous decision from the court’s nine justices was swiftly delivered just days after Trump’s legal team asked the court Friday to block an investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D).

Trump in March filed a motion to block Willis’s investigation, a matter that has not yet been decided by a lower court.

The court called out Trump’s efforts as procedurally dubious, dismissing his team’s legal argument at every turn. 

“The Court has made clear that a petitioner cannot invoke this Court’s original jurisdiction as a way to circumvent the ordinary channels for obtaining the relief,” the justices wrote in the five-page opinion.

“Petitioner has not shown that this case presents one of those extremely rare circumstances in which this Court’s original jurisdiction should be invoked, and therefore, the petition is dismissed.”

Trump filed the suit last week along with a separate suit before the Fulton County Superior Court, noting that simultaneously seeking help from the state’s Supreme Court “is disfavored.”

The court noted the additional filing, arguing that doing so “forecloses the possibility that he has allowed that process sufficient time to play out in the superior court.”

“He is asking this Court to step in and itself decide the motions currently pending in the superior court. This is not the sort of relief that this court affords, at least absent extraordinary circumstances that petitioner has not shown are present here.”

Trump’s suits listed Willis as well as Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney as parties, complaining that the lower court judge had failed to issue a decision on the March suit.

“Petitioner’s every attempt to seek redress in the normal course have been ignored, and the District Attorney has given every indication that the injury is imminent,” Trump’s legal team wrote in the brief to the Georgia Supreme Court.

The court also backed Willis’s management of the grand jury investigation she is leading.

“Petitioner has not presented in his original petition either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Willis’s disqualification by this court at this time on this record,” they wrote.

Following his loss in the 2020 presidential election, Trump asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” another 11,780 votes to launch him to victory.

His campaign also organized a slate of false electors to certify he had won the election in the state.

Willis has yet to bring charges against Trump but suggested a high-profile case could be filed in August.