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In Mark Meadows’ attempt to move his Georgia state prosecution to federal court, he points to the calendar. The legal team for Trump’s onetime White House chief of staff wrote in a Monday filing:
Absent a stay, the State will continue seeking to try Meadows 42 days from now on October 23, 2023. If the State gets its way, Meadows could be forced to go to trial — and could be convicted and incarcerated — before the standard timeline for a federal appeal would play out.
Meadows’ motion was directed to U.S. District Judge Steve Jones, who ruled Friday that Meadows can’t move his racketeering case out of state court. As Meadows appeals that ruling to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, he has, in the meantime, asked Jones to pause the ruling. That’s the “stay” he’s asking for.
But in addition to the fact that state prosecutions proceed while defendants try to have their charges moved to federal court — so it’s unclear how much a stay would help Meadows even if he gets one — there isn’t good reason to think he’s going to trial next month. Indeed, only defendants who requested speedy trials should be going to trial next month, and Meadows isn’t one of them.
Indeed, only defendants who requested speedy trials should be going to trial next month, and Meadows isn’t one of them.
You may recall that two of Meadows’ co-defendants, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, requested speedy trials. In challenging their attempt to get separate speedy trials, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis insisted on not only trying those two defendants together, but also on trying all 19 defendants together. The state court judge, Scott McAfee, said Chesebro and Powell can’t split from each other. But he technically left open, for now, whether they can be split from the other 17 defendants, while suggesting that he doesn’t think the remaining ones should all be tried next month.
But with it technically still being an open question, Meadows was able to point to the possibility of a trial for him starting next month. That is, he’s not inventing that possibility. Rather, he’s stating the preferred position of the prosecutor, even if the state court is exceedingly unlikely to adopt Willis’ preferred position.
But Meadows’ latest filing (unintentionally) reinforces that it would be good for the state court to clarify sooner rather than later the likely reality that only the defendants who requested speedy trials will be slated for trial in October.
Whatever the state trial schedule means for Meadows’ removal litigation (and the removal litigation for any of his co-defendants), the courts should be operating with that likely reality in mind.