Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis does not need to worry that a judge will move Mark Meadows' Georgia election interference case to a federal court, according to a lawyer who worked on the January 6 House committee.
Meadows, Donald Trump's ex-chief of staff, has been charged alongside the former president and 17 other defendants as part of Willis' expansive probe into alleged illegal attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
U.S. District Judge Steve Jones is set to rule on whether Meadows should be allowed to move his case to a federal court on the basis his actions in and around the 2020 election were under his capacity as a federal officer.
If this happens, Meadows could cite immunity as he was acting "under color of such office" and have the case thrown out entirely, putting Willis's entire RICO case at risk if Trump follows suit.
Marcus Childress, a former investigator for the House committee investigating the events leading up to the January 6 attack, told CNN's The Situation Room that Willis "has to feel good" about the chances of Jones keeping Meadows' case in a state court.
"Any trial attorney will tell you the facts matter, when you have the facts on your side, you're feeling good about your chances of winning the day," Childress said.
"We wanted to talk to Mark Meadows for the exact reasons we saw during cross examination during his hearing, and that's because he was part of the greater conspiracy to overturn the election, particularly in Georgia. And I think those are the facts that the Fulton County DA keeps harping on and keeps going back to.
"We've seen the Meadows team focused on little issues such as scheduling meetings or phone calls. But as Fulton County DA keeps pointing out, those phone calls were in furtherance of the criminal enterprise to overturn the election," Childress added.
"We keep going back to that being a conspiracy, the act that serves as the predicate of removal, I think that the Fulton County DA has to feel good about their chances."
One such phone call Meadows arranged was the January 2021 call between Trump and Brad Raffensperger, in which the former president asked the Georgia secretary of state to "find" the 11,870 votes needed to beat Biden in the state at the last election, which triggered Willis' criminal inquiry.
Elsewhere, criminal defense attorney Vida Johnson suggested it would be "very difficult" for Meadows to prove he was merely acting under his role as the White House chief of staff to suggest the charges against him are not warranted.
"Obviously, they are going to succeed in proving that he was working in some capacity in his federal role, but it's going to be really difficult to say that his conduct was 'under the color of his office,'" Johnson told CNN.
"Particularly in light of the fact that, according to Willis, his conduct violated the Hatch Act, which is this provision that says that federal employees cannot be engaged in political activity. So I think that makes his argument really difficult."
Meadows' legal team has been contacted for comment via email.
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Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, domestic policy ... Read more
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