President Donald Trump has filed a motion in Georgia state court to compel the Fulton County District Attorney's office to pay him $6.2 million in compensation for the now-dismissed election racketeering case, Lawfare's Anna Bower reported on Wednesday.
The motion relies on a law passed by Georgia Republicans last year, which entitles criminal defendants to compel district attorneys to pay their legal fees when the case is dismissed as a result of prosecutorial misconduct.
The Georgia case, filed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in 2023 after two years of investigation, charged Trump and a number of his lawyers and political operatives for essentially running an organized crime ring to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in that state.
However, in an unexpected twist, the case was derailed when some of Trump's co-defendants filed for Willis' removal under allegations that she was in a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, one of her office's special prosecutors working on the case. The defendants argued that the entire case was a smokescreen for Willis and Wade to finance their romantic liaisons with taxpayer money.
The judge presiding over the case, Scott McAfee, ruled Willis could remain on the case as long as Wade resigned, but an appellate court reversed this judgment and disqualified Willis altogether. That put the case in legal limbo for over a year, as the bipartisan Prosecuting Attorney’s Council of Georgia searched for another prosecutor to handle the case with no takers.
Finally, last November, the council's director assigned the case to himself and filed for its dismissal, as Trump's election to the presidency made a state criminal trial impractical.
