Judge in Georgia election case dismisses six charges against Trump and others

The Georgia judge overseeing the election-interference case against Donald Trump and 14 defendants dismissed six of the charges in the wide-ranging indictment on Wednesday, saying they were not detailed enough.

One of the 41 charges Trump and some of the co-defendants in the case were charged with was soliciting officials in Georgia to violate their oath of office. Those charges were dismissed. The other charges in the case against Trump and other defendants remain.

The six defendants who had the charge at issue in the case were Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Ray Smith and Robert Cheeley. In different ways all six men attempted to get Georgia officials to violate their oath of office as part of Donald 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.

But McAfee said on Wednesday that Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, had not given enough detail in charging documents as to what specific language in the oaths of office defendants were pressuring officials to violate. The August indictment says the defendants sought to get Georgia officials “to violate their oaths to the Georgia constitution and to the United States constitution”.

That language was too vague, McAfee said on Wednesday. “The United States Constitution contains hundreds of clauses, any one of which can be the subject of a lifetime’s study,” he wrote. “The Georgia Constitution is not a ‘mere shadow’ of its federal counterpart, and although some provisions feature similar