Mark Meadows received a massive blow to his bid to shift his Georgia election interference criminal case to federal court. A three-judge panel has denied his appeal.
To make matters worse, the leading judge on the panel was a conservative judge, William Prior, who made Donald Trump’s shortlist for the Supreme Court just a few years ago.
CNN reports:
“At bottom, whatever the chief of staff’s role with respect to state election administration, that role does not include altering valid election results in favor of a particular candidate,” wrote Chief Judge William Pryor.
“So there is no ‘casual connection’ between Meadows’s ‘official authority’ and his alleged participation in the conspiracy,” Pryor added.
Pryor said that the federal removal statute at issue “does not apply to former federal officers,” but that even if it did, “the events giving rise to this criminal action were not related Meadows’s official duties.”
Pryor was joined in his opinion by Circuit Judges Robin Rosenbaum, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, and Nancy Abudu, an appointee of President Joe Biden.
The ruling is a disaster for Meadows. The Washington Post explained that Pryor’s ruling threw cold water on the defense that the former chief of staff (and the president) were acting within their official duties when they challenged the election results in Georiga following the 2020 election.
“In the course of making that case, Pryor repeatedly alluded to the concept of Meadows seeking to interfere in the election results. Sometimes it was discussed as an allegation. But at other points that careful caveat wasn’t there:
- He at one point cited “federal executive interference with state election procedures.”
- At another point, he described Meadows’s conduct in Cobb County, Ga., as “attempting to infiltrate the nonpublic signature-match audit.”
- Pryor also concluded that Meadows’s official “role does not include altering valid election results in favor of a particular candidate.”
You could read those sections as describing the allegations against Meadows rather than directly accusing him of something. But referring to election “interference” and Meadows’s attempt to “infiltrate” (a pretty loaded word) Cobb County’s process seems like a choice.
Perhaps most significant, the ruling in its own words describes Georgia’s election results as ‘valid’ — an adjective that wouldn’t seem to be strictly necessary in this context but is something Trump to this day wrongly disputes.”
Pryor has long been considered a conservative worthy of the Supreme Court, which the newspaper speculates means that Donald Trump may not like the ruling he gets on his immunity case scheduled over the next month.
