CNN’s Elie Honig Says Trump Faces ‘Uphill Battle’ in Latest Attempt to Get GA Election Case Thrown Out
CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig said that former President Donald Trump faced an “uphill battle” in trying to get the 2020 election case against him in Georgia thrown out on First Amendment grounds Thursday.
After listening to lawyers for Fulton County and Trump make their arguments before Judge Scott McAfee, Honig summed up their arguments and offered his opinion on whether Trump had much chance of success.
“The core argument that we just heard from Donald Trump’s lawyers is that everything he’s being prosecuted for here is protected First Amendment political speech. And you heard the lawyer argue that even if the speech is false, even if it’s unpopular, it’s still protected,” began Honig. “Now, the response from the prosecutors from the DAs here is that, no, he crossed the line to where his speech became part of the charged criminal acts. Now, there’s a sort of separate dispute here about whether the court has to accept the indictments, the allegations, as they are in the indictment. Donald Trump’s team says, why do we just have to take it as a given that this was illegal because that’s what it says in the indictment. Don’t we get to contest that?”
He continued:
That led to sort of the last point that we heard there, which is the question of when does this First Amendment issue get decided? And you heard the judge sort of say, well, why don’t we, isn’t the way we decide this is we put it in front of the jury and we let the jury decide at trial? Donald Trump’s lawyer objected to that. He said, no, we’d like you to throw it out now. Why go through with the whole exercise of a trial if this indictment ultimately is going to be no good? Really important, one other thing to note, Laura, this same argument was made by Donald Trump in his federal case in Washington, D.C. relating to election subversion and the federal judge there — you heard reference to this, Judge Chutkan — she rejected that First Amendment argument. She said, no, I find this is not protected speech, it crossed the line into criminality, and we’ll leave it for the jury. So, Trump’s team is fighting an uphill battle here legally, but the judge is willing to hear them out.
Watch above via CNN.
