Donald Trump was among 19 who were criminally charged with conspiracy to overturn Georgia’s election results
Former US President Donald Trump got relief in his legal troubles Wednesday as a judge overseeing his case of alleged election interference discarded six out of 41 criminal charges against him as the Republican gears up to face Democrat Joe Biden in November this year.
The key counts dismissed by Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee were related to “soliciting an elected official to do otherwise of their public duties”, according to US media reports.
Judge McAfee wrote Wednesday: “The lack of detail concerning an essential legal element is, in the undersigned’s opinion, fatal.”
He further said that 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.”
However, the judge also said the charges could be refiled at a later date.
Donald Trump was among 19 others who were criminally charged with a conspiracy to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.
The probe by a 26-member jury commenced when a phone conversation between the 77-year-old Trump and Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was leaked on 2 January 2021 in which the former president asked the official to “find 11,870 votes”.
He lost Georgia to his rival Democrat candidate Joe Biden.
Republican presidential candidate for 2024 was indicted for the fourth time in August last year by a grand jury in Georgia in the 2020 election subversion case.
The other charges that have been thrown out apply to some of his co-defendants: Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Mark Meadows, US media reported.
“The ruling affects three of the 13 felony counts the business mogul faces in the case,” it reported.
Judge McAfee stated that prosecutors’ allegations in the indictment don’t explain precisely how the defendants sought to violate the state and federal constitutions, the latter of which he noted: “Contains hundreds of clauses, any one of which can be the subject of a lifetime’s study.”
“This is an area of law where federal courts have achieved greater efficiency, and one might wish that future grand jurors could be spared this inconvenience for something so easily remedied,” the judge wrote.
