A former Justice Department official and three Georgia Republicans charged alongside Donald Trump in Georgia have appealed court rulings keeping their criminal cases in Fulton County court.
Former state GOP head David Shafer, state Sen. Shawn Still and Cathy Latham, the former chairwoman of the Coffee County GOP, asked the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday to transfer their cases from state to federal court, and former assistant U.S. attorney general Jeffrey Clark asked for a pause in his criminal case while his appeal moves through court, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
U.S. District Court Judge Steve Jones ruled a week earlier that all four failed to meet the burden to move their cases under the federal removal statute after their lawyers argued in court they had been acting as federal officials when they met Dec. 14, 2020, to proclaim Donald Trump had won the election in Georgia.
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Clark's lawyer argued in a separate hearing that he had been acting as a Justice Department official when he tried to help the former president overturn his election loss in the state.
Five of the 19 Fulton County defendants, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, have sought to move their cases to federal court, where juries might be drawn from a slightly more conservative pool, but none of them have been successful.
