Mark Meadows, once Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, is asking that the election subversion case against him in Arizona be jettisoned to federal court, a move he has repeatedly—and unsuccessfully—attempted in Georgia, where he is facing separate but similar charges.
Meadows’ attorneys laid out their strategy in a court filing released to the public on Wednesday, saying they would seek for his charges to be dismissed after getting his charges punted to U.S. District Court. They argued that the removal was justified because his alleged actions, while not “criminal per se,” were undertaken while he was working as a federal official.
“The conduct giving rise to the charges in the indictment all occurred during his tenure and as part of his service as White House Chief of Staff,” they said, adding later that charging Meadows at the state level was “precisely the kind of state interference in a federal official’s duties that the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution prohibits.”
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Meadows is one of 18 people charged in an Arizona fake elector scheme, with a state grand jury indicting him in April for allegedly plotting to funnel the state’s electoral votes to Trump despite President Joe Biden’s victory there. He has pleaded not guilty.
U.S. District Judge John Tuchi, an Obama appointee, has scheduled an evidentiary hearing to weigh the request on Sept. 5, according to the Associated Press.
Meadows has made a number of similar bids in Fulton County, Georgia, where he was indicted last August for conspiring to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state. His most recent overture was rejected in February. (Four of his 19 co-conspirators have pleaded guilty in the matter.)
A move to federal court would offer the advantages of delays and, potentially, a more sympathetic Republican-leaning jury pool, experts have said.
