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Supreme Court rejects Mark Meadows’ bid to move Georgia prosecution involving 2020 election to federal court
Washington — The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned away former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ bid to move his state prosecution to federal court in the case stemming from an alleged effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.
The court’s denial of Meadows’ appeal leaves in place a lower court decision that returned the prosecution to state court. Meadows and President-elect Donald Trump, for whom he worked, were charged alongside 17 others by Fulton County prosecutors for their alleged efforts to reverse Trump’s electoral loss in Georgia in 2020.
They pleaded not guilty to all charges. Proceedings have been on hold for months as a Georgia appeals court is set to consider in December whether to allow Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to continue prosecuting Trump and his allies.
Meadows served as Trump’s chief of staff from March 2020 to January 2021 and was a prominent figure in the president-elect’s attempts to stay in office for a consecutive term after the November 2020 presidential election.
Two counts were brought against him by Fulton County prosecutors: the first alleges that he engaged in a wide-ranging racketeering conspiracy with Trump, and the second alleges he participated in an effort to solicit a public officer, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to violate his oath of office.
Meadows is portrayed in the indictment returned in August 2023 as a go-between for Trump and others involved in coordinating the strategy for contesting the 2020 election and disrupting the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. He participated in a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call between Trump and Raffensperger, during which the then-president asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, enough to make him the winner of Georgia’s election.
After Meadows was charged, he sought to transfer the case to federal court under a federal officer removal statute and argued that the actions alleged in the indictment related to his role as chief of staff.
The district court, however, sent the case back to the Fulton County Superior Court. While U.S. District Judge Steve Jones conceded that some of the charged conduct involved Meadows’ official duties, there was not enough evidence to establish that a “heavy majority” of the acts alleged against him related to his role as chief of staff.
“Meadows’s alleged association with post-election activities was not related to his role as White House Chief of Staff or his executive branch authority,” Jones wrote in his September 2023 decision.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld the district court’s decision, finding that the federal officer removal statute does not apply to former federal officers and “his participation in an alleged conspiracy to overturn a presidential election was not related to his official duties.”
“At bottom, whatever the chief of staff’s role with respect to state election administration, that role does not include altering valid election results in favor of a particular candidate,” Chief Judge William Pryor wrote for the three-judge panel.
Meadows appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that whether a chief of staff prosecuted based on actions related to his work for the president can remove his case to federal court is not a close call.
Calling the 11th Circuit’s decision “miserly and counterintuitive,” Meadow’s lawyers warned in a filing that allowing it to stand would open former federal officers up to politicized state prosecutions for unpopular federal policies.
“The chief of staff is a unique federal officer, the top aide to a coequal branch of government personified by the president,” they wrote. “If former officers cannot remove at all, and if even a current chief of staff cannot remove a case arising out of acts taken in the White House in service of the president, then the floodgates are open, and ‘nightmare scenarios’ will not take long to materialize.”
Fulton County prosecutors urged the Supreme Court to reject Meadows’ appeal and leave the 11th Circuit’s decision in place. They noted that Trump did not even move his case to federal court, and said Meadows failed to “articulate any coherent source of authority for the president or his staff to supervise or affect a state’s administration of elections.”
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House Ethics Committee planned to vote Friday on whether to release report on Matt Gaetz
The House Ethics Committee, which has been conducting an investigation into sexual misconduct and obstruction allegations against Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, scheduled a vote for Friday on whether to release its report, according to three sources with knowledge of the committee’s work.
Hours after President-elect Donald Trump said he planned to nominate Gaetz to be attorney general, Gaetz resigned his congressional seat, effective immediately.
“I do not intend to take the oath of office for the same office in the 119th Congress, to pursue the position of Attorney General in the Trump Administration,” Gaetz said in his resignation letter obtained by CBS News
House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that there was about an eight-week period during which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis could fill his seat by setting the date for a special election.
Now that Gaetz has resigned, it is unclear whether the panel will vote on releasing the report, since Gaetz is no longer in Congress.
There is precedent in Congress on the Senate side for an ethics committee report to become public after a member resigns from Congress, however. In 2011, this happened when Sen. John Ensign of Nevada resigned amid allegations that he tried to hide an extramarital affair.
But it’s not clear that that would apply to the House, leaving open the possibility that the report on Gaetz would not be released.
In June, the House Ethics Committee released a statement saying it was investigating a range of allegations against Gaetz, including sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, and bribery.
Multiple sources at the time told CBS News that four women had informed the House Ethics Committee that they had been paid to go to parties that included sex and drugs, and that Gaetz had also attended. The committee has Gaetz’s Venmo transactions that allegedly show payments for the women.
Gaetz has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and has called the committee’s investigation a “frivolous” smear campaign.
Some of the allegations of sexual misconduct under review by the committee were also the subject of a previous Department of Justice probe into Gaetz. Federal investigators sought to determine if Gaetz violated sex trafficking and obstruction of justice laws, but no charges were filed.
The House Ethics Committee resumed its investigation into Gaetz in 2023, following the Justice Department’s decision not to pursue charges against him.
Gaetz has long blamed then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, also a Republican, for the probe. And Gaetz later led the movement to sack McCarthy as speaker.
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Democratic Congressman on the party’s messaging, focus
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11/13: The Daily Report – CBS News
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