Lawyers for former President Donald Trump responded after midnight Tuesday morning to the late-night indictment in Fulton County, Georgia, by District Attorney Fani Willis, calling it “as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process.”
Their full statement — issued by Drew Findling, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg — follows:
The events that have unfolded today have been shocking and absurd, starting with the leak of a presumed and premature indictment before the witnesses had testified or the grand jurors had deliberated and ending with the District Attorney being unable to offer any explanation. In light of this major fumble, the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office clearly decided to force through and rush this 98-page indictment. This one-sided grand jury presentation relied on witnesses who harbor their own personal and political interests— some of whom ran campaigns touting their efforts against the accused and/or profited from book deals and employment opportunities as a result. We look forward to a detailed review of this indictment which is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been.
Critics noted that the 41-count indictment (which include 13 counts against Trump) accuses the defendants of crimes for simply arguing that the 2020 presidential election was flawed. That, in turn implicates the First Amendment right to free speech and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The indictment also attempts to use a county court in Georgia to charge the defendants for crimes allegedly committed on a national scale and in violation of a federal election, which typically fall under federal jurisdiction.
The Fulton County court also leaked a document that listed the charges in the indictment several hours before the grand jury had finished hearing testimony and before it had voted, leading critics to claim Trump’s constitutional rights had been violated.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.