On Wednesday, a judge in Fulton County threw out several counts in the election interference case against former President Donald Trump and some of his co-defendants.
Judge Scott McAfee threw out six counts that were connected to one charge: Solicitation of Violation of Oath by a Public Officer. Trump’s call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, is directly linked to that charge. This call set off part of the investigation.
Three of the 13 charges against Trump were thrown out by the judge. Trump is now being charged with 10 things.
The decision is partly good news for Trump and some of his co-defendants, who asked the court to throw out the counts because they were not legally sound.
Judge McAfee mostly agreed, writing that the prosecutors “fail to allege sufficient detail” about what part of the oath they were trying to get public officials to break. He said that “lack of detail concerning an essential legal element” can be “fatal.”
“They do not give the defendants enough information to prepare their defenses intelligently, as the defendants could have violated the Constitution and thus the statute in dozens, if not hundreds, of distinct ways,” it says.
But the most serious charge in the indictment stayed in place: racketeering. All 15 of the remaining suspects are still facing this charge.
If they wanted to, the judge gave the Fulton County district attorney’s office six months to file new charges based on the dropped ones.
The DA’s office wouldn’t say anything to ABC News.
They were known as demurrers, and Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, election lawyer John Eastman, and others brought them.
The judge’s order on Wednesday throws out three of the 13 charges against Giuliani. He is now only facing two counts of bribery and one count of making false statements and writings, the order says.
The actions that led to those counts being dropped happened in December 2020. Giuliani spoke out against election fraud in Georgia three times in public hearings in front of Georgia lawmakers: once in the Georgia House of Representatives and twice in the Georgia Senate. He made false claims about the election and urged lawmakers to choose a fake slate of electors.
Giuliani is now being charged with 10 counts in the Fulton County case.
The judge’s ruling dismissed one of the two charges brought against Meadows. He is now only facing one count, which is the racketeering, or RICO, count that all 19 suspects were charged with.
There are nine counts against Eastman, three counts against Georgia lawyer Ray Smith III, and one count against Georgia lawyer Robert Cheeley. All of these counts are thrown out.
A lot of the defense lawyers in the case were happy with the decision.
A lawyer for Trump said in a statement, “The Court made the right legal decision to grant the special demurrers and quash important counts of the indictment brought by DA Fani Willis.” “The ruling is a correct application of the law, as the prosecution failed to make specific allegations of any alleged wrongdoing on those counts.”
The lawyer for Smith who first filed the demurrer, Don Samuel, told ABC News that he was “delighted with the court’s ruling.”
“We believe this is the first step to exonerate Ray of all the charges,” Samuel told us. “A few more counts to go.”
In August of last year, Trump and 18 others pleaded not guilty to all charges in a large racketeering case. They were accused of trying to change the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. After that, Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Scott Hall all agreed to plead guilty in exchange for telling the truth about other suspects.
The former president said that the investigation by the district attorney was political.
