Second chance for Mark Meadows to move racketeering case to federal court

A federal appeals court is expected to consider Friday whether Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, charged by Fulton county prosecutors over his role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, should see his criminal case transferred from state to federal court.

Meadows has so far been unsuccessful in his removal efforts. The US district judge Steve Jones denied the motion in September and Meadows challenged the decision to the US court of appeals for the eleventh circuit, which scheduled oral arguments for 9am.

The appeal before judges William Pryor, Robin Rosenbaum and Nancy Abudu – George W Bush, Obama and Biden appointees – marks possibly the final chance for Meadows to have his case transferred, a move that would give him key advantages at trial as well as affect the case against Donald Trump.

Trump and Meadows were charged in August alongside 17 co-defendants by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, in a sprawling indictment that alleged their efforts to reverse Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election in the state violated Georgia’s racketeering and conspiracy statutes.

The number of co-defendants has shrunk after three former Trump lawyers – Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis – as well as a local GOP operative, Scott Hall, took plea deals and agreed to flip on the former president as cooperating witnesses.

But prosecutors have been opposed to offering a plea deal to Meadows, the Guardian has previously reported, suggesting they see him as one of their main targets, and see it as important for their case against Trump to have them stand together at trial in front of a jury as Rico co-conspirators.

That outcome – having to go to trial at the same time and alongside Trump – is widely seen as the worst for Meadows because of the potential guilt by association. His only real option to avoid that fate, as things currently stand, is to transfer his case to federal court and go to trial alone.

Removing the case from Fulton county superior court to federal district court would bring Meadows the ancillary benefit of his criminal case eventually reaching the conservative-leaning US supreme court. It could also undercut the Rico case as a whole, which would benefit Trump.

Meadows was charged with violating Georgia’s racketeering statute and for setting up the infamous 2 January 2021 phone call between Trump and the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, where Trump pressed Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes so he could win the battleground state.

The call had been organised, according to Meadows, because Trump believed there was fraud in the 2020 election in Georgia and wanted to resolve questions about the ballot signature-verification process.

At issue for Meadows is whether the eleventh circuit decides he was acting in his official capacity as White House chief of staff when he set up the Raffensperger call and engaged in other actions related to trying to reverse Trump’s defeat, like organizing the so-called fake electors, or whether he was engaged in campaign activity.

To move a state criminal case to federal court, a defendant has to show that they were a federal official, that they were acting within the scope of their official duties as a federal official and they had a legitimate defense to the conduct under federal law.

Meadows had argued at his evidentiary hearing in September that the racketeering charges were related to his normal work undertaken as a White House chief of staff, which gave him immunity from prosecution and prevented him from being prosecuted at the state level.

But the federal judge overseeing the matter rejected his motion in a detailed 49-page decision, determining that Meadows did not meet his burden to show that he was acting within his duties when he undertook efforts to benefit Trump as a political candidate rather than Trump as president.

“The [duties] of the Office of the White House Chief of Staff did not include working with or working for the Trump campaign,” Jones wrote, “except for simply coordinating the president’s schedule, traveling with the president to his campaign events, and redirecting communications to the campaign.”

Broadly speaking, Jones determined that Meadows could not have undertaken any political actions as part of his official duties because the US constitution does not provide any basis for the executive branch to involve itself in state election and post-election procedures.

To determine Meadows’s scope, the judge used the Hatch Act, which plainly prohibits executive branch officials like Meadows from using their official authority to influence or interfere with the results of an election through partisan political activity.