Trump Seeks to Toss Georgia Election Case, Citing Immunity (1)

Donald Trump asked a Georgia judge to toss the state’s criminal case accusing him of leading a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, arguing he’s immune from prosecution because the US Senate acquitted him after he was impeached over the same conduct.

In a filing Monday in Atlanta, the former president argued he was cleared of wrongdoing stemming from the 2020 election when the US Senate acquitted him at his impeachment trial. Under the US Constitution, a president can only be criminally charged if he is impeached and convicted of the same conduct by the Senate, Trump argues. Parallel state charges are also barred “on double jeopardy grounds,” he said.

“The indictment must be dismissed because President Trump was impeached, tried by the Senate, and acquitted on articles of impeachment that arise from the same alleged facts and course of conduct as the criminal indictment in this case,” his lawyer Steven Sadow said in the filing.

Trump will press the same immunity argument at the an appeals court hearing on Tuesday in Washington, where he’s seeking dismissal of a criminal case on related election allegations brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith. Trump appealed after a district judge struck down his immunity defense.

The former president said in a social media post Monday he will attend the appeals court arguments.

“Of course I was entitled, as president of the United States and commander in chief, to immunity,” Trump wrote. “I wasn’t campaigning, the Election was long over.” He said he was looking for voter fraud, “and finding it,” although courts across the country rejected his claims.

The election cases are among four criminal prosecutions Trump is facing as he campaigns to return to the White House in November. He denies wrongdoing in all of them, claiming they’re part of Democratic “witch hunt” to undermine his campaign.

In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis charged Trump and 17 others in August with violating the state’s racketeering law by participating in a “criminal enterprise” to stay in office. Several defendants have already pleaded guilty. Willis has requested an Aug. 5 trial date but the court has yet to set a schedule.

When Trump’s immunity defense was rejected in federal district court in Washington, the judge overseeing that case said the office of the presidency doesn’t come with a “lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass.”

Trump’s “four-year service as Commander in Chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens,” US District Judge Tanya Chutkan said in a Dec. 1 ruling.

(Updates with detail from Trump’s filing.)

To contact the reporter on this story:
Erik Larson in New York at elarson4@bloomberg.net

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Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net

Elizabeth Wasserman

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