The filing comes three weeks after Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, failed to move his own case out of Fulton to federal court.
Former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, will not seek to move his Georgia election case to federal court, his lawyers said Thursday.
“President Trump now notifies the Court that he will NOT be seeking to remove his case to federal court,” his lawyers said in a court filing in Fulton Superior Court.
“This decision is based on his well-founded confidence that this Honorable Court intends to fully and completely protect his constitutional right to a fair trial and guarantee him due process of law throughout the prosecution of his case in the Superior Court of Fulton County, Georgia.”
The former president had on Sept. 7 notified the court he may seek to move the case to federal court, and that his notice of removal would need to be filed in federal court by Sept. 29, his lawyers noted.
President Trump and 18 others were criminally charged with various felonies in August by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis—among them a racketeering conspiracy—stemming from their efforts to dispute the 2020 election results in Georgia. All pleaded not guilty.
The filing from his lawyers on Thursday comes three weeks after Mark Meadows, President Trump’s former chief of staff, failed to move his own case out of Fulton to federal court.
Mr. Meadows is appealing the Sept. 8 decision by U.S. District Judge Steve Jones to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Jones stated in his ruling that Mr. Meadows “has not met even the ‘quite low’ threshold” needed to transfer the case to federal court, saying that Mr. Meadows’s alleged actions mentioned in the indictment weren’t taken as part of his duties as a federal official.
Federal law permits the transfer of criminal cases to federal court when the alleged actions pertain to official government duties.
If President Trump had moved his case to federal court, he could have sought to get the charges completely dropped on the grounds that federal officials are immune from prosecution over actions taken in their official capacities.
By Mimi Nguyen Ly
