A Georgia judge on Thursday dismissed two criminal counts in the United States’ 2020 election interference case against Donald Trump and one other count against allies of the Republican presidential candidate.
The Fulton county judge Scott McAfee found that state prosecutors did not have the authority to bring those charges, which related to the alleged filing of false documents in federal court.
McAfee allowed the remainder of the case to move forward, including eight charges against Trump. Trump and 14 co-defendants have pleaded not guilty to racketeering and other charges stemming from what prosecutors allege was a scheme to overturn Trump’s narrow defeat in Georgia in the 2020 election.
The case focus on the ways Trump and his allies attempted to get Georgia officials to violate their oath of office as part of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, prosecutors said in their August indictment.
Those efforts ranged from pressuring Georgia lawmakers to appoint fake electors, to Trump’s infamous phone call with the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, urging him to find enough votes to overturn the election.
The Georgia trial was just one of numerous prosecutions of Trump in the wake of his tumultuous time as president and the insurrection at the Capitol in Washington DC on 6 January 2021, which attempted to block Joe Biden’s election win.
But Trump and his team have fought a largely successful delaying strategy against the prosecutions, including on the Georgia case, and any actual trial date there is still seen as distant and certainly not going to happen before November’s presidential election.
Reuters contributed reporting