WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ attempt to move his state’s prosecutors to federal court in the case stemming from an alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.
The court’s denial of Meadows’ appeal leaves a lower court decision that sends the claim back to state court. Meadows and President-elect Donald Trump, for whom he worked, were charged along with 17 others by Fulton County prosecutors over their alleged efforts to reverse Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia.
They pleaded not guilty to all charges. The proceedings have been on hold for months, with the Georgia Court of Appeals scheduled to consider in December whether to allow Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to continue prosecuting Trump and his allies.
Meadows served as Trump’s chief of staff from March 2020 to January 2021 and was a prominent figure in the president-elect’s attempts to remain in office for consecutive terms following the November 2020 presidential election.
Two charges have been brought against him by Fulton County prosecutors: the first alleging that he participated in a widespread extortion conspiracy with Trump, and the second alleging that he participated in an attempt to induce a public employee, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to violate the law. His oath of office.
Meadows was depicted in the indictment returned in August 2023 as an intermediary for Trump and others involved in coordinating the strategy to contest the 2020 election and disrupt the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021. He participated in a January 2, 2021, phone call between Trump and Raffensperger, in which he requested During which then-President Raffensperger “found” 11,780 votes, enough to make him the winner of the Georgia election.
After Meadows was charged, he sought to have the case transferred to federal court under the federal Impeachment Act, and said the actions alleged in the indictment related to his role as chief of staff.
However, the district court remanded the case to Fulton County Superior Court. While U.S. District Judge Steve Jones acknowledged that some of the conduct charged related to Meadows’ official duties, there was not enough evidence to prove that the “vast majority” of the actions alleged against him related to his role as chief of staff.
“Meadows’ alleged connection to post-election activities was not related to his role as White House chief of staff or the authority of his executive branch,” Jones wrote in his September 2023 decision.
The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld the district court’s decision, concluding that the federal impeachment statute did not apply to former federal officers and that his “participation in an alleged conspiracy to overturn the presidential election was not related to his official duties.” “
“Fundamentally, whatever the chief of staff’s role may be with respect to the state’s election administration, that role does not include changing the valid election results in favor of a particular candidate,” Chief Justice William Pryor wrote for the three-judge panel.
Meadows appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that whether a chief of staff who was impeached for actions related to his work for the president could take his case to federal court was not a close call.
Meadow’s lawyers called the 11th Circuit’s decision “miserable and counterintuitive” and warned in a memo that allowing it to stand would expose former federal officers to politicized state-level prosecutions over unpopular federal policies.
“The chief of staff is a unique federal officer, the highest-ranking aide to a co-equal branch of government embodied by the president,” they wrote. “If former officers cannot remove officers at all, and if even the current chief of staff cannot clear a case arising from actions taken in the White House in the service of the president, then the floodgates are wide open, and the ‘nightmare scenarios’ will not take long to come true.”
Fulton County prosecutors urged the Supreme Court to deny Meadows’ appeal and let the 11th Circuit’s decision stand. They noted that Trump did not even take his case to federal court, and said Meadows failed to “articulate any coherent source of authority for the president or his staff to oversee or influence the administration of elections in the state.”
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Melissa Quinn
