Fani Willis Asks Appeals Court to Reinstate 6 Charges Against Trump in Georgia Election Case

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis speaks during a news conference at the Fulton County government building in Atlanta on Aug. 14, 2023. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has asked a Georgia appeals court to reinstate six counts that were dismissed against former President Donald Trump and his co-defendants in the election interference case earlier this year.

The charges were struck down by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee in March and involved accusations that Trump and the co-defendants asked state officials to violate their oaths of office.

Specifically, prosecutors alleged that Trump and his co-defendants solicited Georgia House Speaker David Ralston and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to violate oaths of office by trying to certify alternate electors or “influence the certified election returns.”

Willis argued in a filing on Oct. 16 that the trial court “erred by quashing six counts of the indictment in this case, each of which alleged the crime of Solicitation of Violation of Oath by Public Officer.”

The charges were part of a wider 41-count indictment against Trump and 18 others unveiled by Willis in 2023 that accused them of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

When dismissing the charges in March, McAfee said it was necessary in order to protect due process rights. The charges, he said, were too vague to stand separately.

“The Court’s concern is less that the State has failed to allege sufficient conduct of the Defendants—in fact it has alleged an abundance,” McAfee wrote in a court order at the time. “However, the lack of detail concerning an essential legal element is, in the undersigned’s opinion, fatal.”

As a result, McAfee said, the defendants did not have “enough information to prepare their defenses intelligently.”

In September, McAfee also tossed out two more charges against Trump—conspiracy to commit filing false documents and conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree—after finding that prosecutors lacked the authority to bring the charges.

In the Oct. 16 filing with the Georgia appeals court, Willis pushed back on McAfee’s ruling, arguing that the indictment “more than sufficiently placed Cross-Appellees on notice of the conduct at issue and allowed them to prepare an intelligent defense to the charges.”

“[The indictment] included an abundance of context and factual allegations about the solicitations at issue, including when the requests were made, to whom the requests were made, and the manner in which the requests were made,” Willis wrote. “When read as a whole, the indictment provided an extremely clear picture of the acts committed by Cross-Appellees.”

Willis said the court “should reverse the trial court’s order and reinstate counts 2, 5, 6, 28, 36, and 38 of the indictment.”

Trump has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.

Willis has faced scrutiny over her involvement in the case against Trump and his co-defendants after it emerged that she had been in a romantic relationship with a former special prosecutor in the case, Nathan Wade.

The case has been on hold since June while an Appeals Court considers whether Willis should be disqualified. The court is set to hear arguments on the matter in December, roughly a month after the 2024 presidential election.

Steve Sadow, the lead defense counsel for Trump, said Willis’ brief was “simply incorrect on the law.”

“The trial court’s dismissal order properly decided that the State failed to sufficiently plead the allegations in the dismissed counts under Georgia law,” he said in a statement emailed to The Epoch Times.

Catherine Yang contributed to this report.

This report was updated with comment from Trump’s attorney.