Judge says Georgia GOP chair may not share a lawyer with other ‘alternate electors’
McBurney’s ruling undercuts a legal arrangement that 11 of Georgia’s 16 pro-Trump “alternate” electors had made amid the Fulton County special grand jury probe.
The judge overseeing an Atlanta-area grand jury probe into Donald Trump’s effort to subvert the 2020 election ruled Wednesday that Georgia’s Republican Party Chairman, David Shafer, may not share an attorney with 10 other GOP activists who served as false electors on behalf of Trump’s campaign.
Judge Robert McBurney said that while the criminal exposure for those “alternate electors” may be limited and relatively comparable, Shafer is in a different category because of his central role as an organizer of the effort. As a result, McBurney ruled, Shafer may not share lawyers with his 10 colleagues.
“Given the information before the Court about his role in establishing and convening the slate of alternate electors, his communications with other key players in the District Attorney’s investigation, and his role in other post-election efforts to call into question the validity of the official vote count in Georgia, the Court finds that he is substantively differently situated,” McBurney ruled in a seven-page opinion.
McBurney’s ruling undercuts a legal arrangement that 11 of Georgia’s 16 pro-Trump “alternate” electors had made amid the Fulton County special grand jury probe. They all retained the same two lawyers: Kimberly Burroughs Debrow and Holly Pierson.
The ruling is a partial victory for District Attorney Fani Willis, who had asked McBurney to disqualify Burroughs and Pierson from representing the 11 GOP electors (five other pro-Trump alternate electors have separate attorneys). Willis contended that the joint representation of so many of the GOP contingent electors would present a conflict if any of them were criminally charged and some of them were called to testify against each other.
Pierson and Debrow had argued that the contingent electors had not been charged with wrongdoing and faced minimal criminal exposure for their involvement in the 2020 election effort, and in any case they had all knowingly waived any concerns about a conflict in order to share the two attorneys.
McBurney agreed that any potential criminal charges against the group were “remote and hypothetical” based on what is currently known. He noted that the special grand jury will ,when it concludes, simply make a set of recommendations to Willis, rather than issue indictments, providing even more distance from a potential conflict for the GOP alternate electors.
But Shafer, he said, is “the exception.”
“His fate with the special purpose grand jury (and beyond) is not tethered to the other ten electors in the same manner in which those ten find themselves connected,” McBurney ruled. “This imbalance in exposure to the District Attorney’s investigation makes it impractical and arguably unethical for Pierson and Debrow to represent all eleven together.”
……..
- Discussion
-
NEWS: The judge overseeing the Fulton County grand jury probe says Georgia GOP Chairman David Shafer's central role in organizing a slate of "alternate" electors and casting doubt on the 2020 outcome sets him apart from other false GA electors.https://t.co/YLu0vKQXLF
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) November 30, 2022
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.