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When Donald Trump was indicted in Georgia, the former president wasn’t alone: He was one of 19 people charged with participating in an illegal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Among those included in the indictment was former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who pleaded not guilty.
But that wasn’t all he did. Meadows and his defense counsel have also tried to get the case against him moved to federal court. A lower court rejected the Republican’s argument, and as my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin recently explained, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals appeared skeptical, too. It was against this backdrop that NBC News reported:
A federal appeals court on Monday rejected an effort by former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to move his Georgia election interference case out of state court. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a judge’s ruling from September that said Meadows had not demonstrated that the alleged conduct that prompted his prosecution was related to his official duties in the Trump administration.
It was a unanimous ruling, issued just three days after oral arguments, written by Judge William Pryor — one of the federal judiciary’s most conservative jurists, and a man considered by Trump for the U.S. Supreme Court.
He and his 11th Circuit colleagues were nevertheless wholly unimpressed by Meadows’ case. At the heart of the matter was a relatively straightforward question: If current federal officials can have state-level charges moved to federal court, can former federal officials do the same?
Evidently, no. The three-judge appellate panel not only rejected Meadows’ core claim, they added that even if the Republican were still in the White House, he still wouldn’t be allowed to transfer the case because his alleged crimes were separate from his official duties.
The judges went so far as to describe Meadows’ post-defeat visit to Georgia as part of a scheme to “infiltrate” an ongoing recount, which wasn’t the job of a White House chief of staff.
“Meadows cannot point to any authority for influencing state officials with allegations of election fraud,” Pryor wrote. “At bottom, whatever the chief of staff’s role with respect to state election administration, that role does not include altering valid election results in favor of a particular candidate.”
Ouch.
As for why this is important, a Politico report added, “Had the judges agreed with Meadows and transferred the charges to federal court, it could have upended the case against Trump and all of the defendants, causing significant delays and even a potential ruling that the matter could be dismissed altogether because of its relationship to Trump’s authority as president.”
It’s not yet clear exactly what Meadows will do next — he and his lawyers can appeal to the Supreme Court or ask the full 11th Circuit to consider the case en banc — though we probably haven’t heard the last of this case. Watch this space.