George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said Wednesday that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis may have “tripped the wire” with a prosecutorial approach he compared to the work of Jackson Pollock.
A grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, handed down ten indictments Monday night, charging Trump and other associates over Trump’s efforts to contest the 2020 election results in that state. Willis, who launched a probe into Trump’s efforts to contest the 2020 election results in that state in 2021, announced in April that the probe could lead to the indictment of Trump. (RELATED: Laura Ingraham Says Trump Charges Will ‘Justify’ Limits On Speech After Media Begs For Protection From GOP Voters)
“This is going to be this massive production and she is going to do it in this rather short period of time. Now, the defense has to go through what are effectively three grand juries, three years of investigation, there’s 19 defendants that may have conflicts,” Turley told Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “There is going to be a flurry of motions, constitutional questions raised.”
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“The question is: Why this mad rush? Why is everyone not just piling on indictments but jamming together these trials, daisy-chaining them from Super Tuesday to virtually the inauguration, if you count the civil cases as well?” Turley asked. “At some point judges are going to have to step in and be a mature voice and say, ‘look, okay, stop it, this guy has got to prepare a defense in multiple cases.’”
Special Counsel Jack Smith secured a four-count indictment of Trump relating to his efforts to contest the results of the 2020 election. He sought a trial date of Jan. 2, 2024, while Willis wants a trial to start on March 4, 2024.
Legal experts noted that much of the conduct Smith claimed was criminal in the indictment appeared to be protected by the First Amendment. Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz said that the indictment not only attacked the First Amendment, but also Trump’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel.
“In some ways, Willis may have really tripped the wire here. You know, I called this sort of the Jackson Pollock school of prosecution,” Turley said. “She threw everything against the canvas and looked to see if a picture emerged, said this is all one big conspiracy, every tweet, every speech that we cite. Well, by doing that she also tripped wires with regard to his time as president, and that has created this question of whether it could be removed.”
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