FILE PHOTO: Former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attends his criminal trial at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City, on May 30, 2024. – The judge in Donald Trump’s criminal hush money case ordered on November 22, 2024, that sentencing be delayed indefinitely, a legal win for the President-elect as he prepares to return to the White House. (Photo by Seth Wenig / POOL / Agence France-Presse)
WASHINGTON, United States — Donald Trump asked a Georgia appeals court on Wednesday to toss out the only remaining criminal prosecution facing him as he prepares to return to the White House.
In a filing with the court, Trump’s attorney Steven Sadow said the indictment accusing Trump of seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia should be dismissed now that he is the president-elect.
A sitting president is “completely immune from indictment or any criminal process, state or federal,” Sadow said, and the continued prosecution of Trump in Georgia would be unconstitutional.
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“President Trump respectfully submits that upon reaching that decision, this Court should dismiss his appeal for lack of jurisdiction with directions to the trial court to immediately dismiss the indictment against President Trump,” he said.
Sadow noted that Special Counsel Jack Smith has dropped the two federal cases brought against Trump.
Trump, 78, was accused of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden and of removing large quantities of top secret documents after leaving the White House, but neither case came to trial.
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Smith cited a long-standing Justice Department policy of not indicting or prosecuting a sitting president in his motions to have the cases dismissed.
In Georgia, Trump was charged with racketeering over his alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election results in the southern state.
The case has been bogged down in accusations of impropriety by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, who acknowledged having had an intimate relationship with the man she hired to be a special prosecutor.
Trump was convicted in New York in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election to stop her from revealing an alleged 2006 sexual encounter.
However, the judge in that case has postponed sentencing while he considers a request from Trump’s lawyers that the conviction be thrown out in light of his election victory, and a Supreme Court ruling in July that an ex-president has broad immunity from prosecution.