An Arizona appeals court will not hear Attorney General Kris Mayes’ request to reverse a decision sending her criminal case against electors for Donald Trump back to square one, another blow to the prosecution that alleges election interference nearly five years ago.
The Court of Appeals said on Sept. 22 it would not accept Mayes’ appeal of a Maricopa County judge’s May order sending the high-profile case back to a grand jury. The appeals court’s order cites the jurists’ discretion to take, or reject, cases and does not elaborate on its reasoning. The order was signed by Presiding Judge Kent Cattani, with Judges Daniel Kiley and Andrew Jacobs also on the case.
Mayes, a Democrat, declined to comment through a spokesperson.
The ruling leaves her prosecution on even more tenuous footing following the blockbuster ruling earlier this year and as similar cases in other states have been stalled by court rulings.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sam Myers in the May 16 ruling agreed with lawyers for the defendants, who had argued that the state left key information out when it originally presented the case to the grand jury in early 2024. Myers sent the case back to the grand jury — the earliest stage of a prosecution when charging decisions are made — leading to Mayes’ appeal, which put things on hold.
Dennis Wilenchik, a lawyer for former U.S. Senate candidate and 2020 elector Jim Lamon, said he believed the appeals court was right in its decision.
Mayes’ appeal was a “meritless and a desperate attempt to avoid a real, full and honest presentation to jurors that were misled” by her office, he said. The grand jury didn’t hear an applicable federal law that he said would have made clear that what the electors did was “perfectly legal.”
The first grand jury indicted 18 people in April 2024 in the case alleging a conspiracy to keep President Donald Trump in the White House in 2020 by creating a slate of false electors to send to Congress. Among those indicted were 11 Arizona Republicans and seven top Trump aides, including Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman and his former chief of staff Mark Meadows.
Mayes could ask the Arizona Supreme Court to review the appeals court’s decision, though it is unclear whether the state’s top court would have any appetite to hear a case a lower court did not accept.
She could also redo the grand jury process, which could be taxing on her office’s resources. The prior grand jury heard 18 days of testimony before reaching its decision to indict.
She is also likely to face pressure from Republicans, and lawyers representing those charged in the case, to drop the matter they have blasted from the start as a politically driven prosecution. Mayes is asking voters for a second, four-year term next year, hoping to hold on to an office she won by 280 votes in 2022.
“They’re tripping on the doormat,” Thomas Jacobs, an attorney representing Christina Bobb, said of Mayes’ struggling case. Bobb was an attorney who worked for Trump’s campaign and also was a conservative media personality.
Jacobs said the Attorney General’s Office should dismiss the case because it is unlikely the prosecutors can win convictions, and pointed to a recent decision in Michigan ending a similar but not identical case there.
“There is no reasonable likelihood of actually obtaining a conviction,” Jacobs said. “Can they vex these people more? Can they drag them through the gutter more? Sure. But that’s not the standard.”
In three other states recently, the cases against slates of Trump electors who also sent papers to Washington, D.C., falsely claiming Trump won in 2020, have fallen apart. The cases were brought before American voters — and Arizonans — returned Trump to the White House in 2024 for another term and Republicans won total control in the nation’s capital.
The Nevada Supreme Court heard arguments in August over whether the case there could continue in Las Vegas, according to the Reno Gazette Journal. A judge there previously dismissed the case against six electors saying it was filed in the wrong jurisdiction. Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat who is running for governor, filed charges in another county as something of a backup plan.
And a judge in Michigan dismissed the case charging 16 people with election and forgery-related felonies in early September, according to the Detroit Free Press. The ruling followed a lengthy and public process to determine if there was enough evidence to charge the Republicans. The judge said the state had not proven intent to commit a crime and that any such intent was more likely on behalf of the Trump campaign.
Trump’s aides were not charged in that case, as they have been in Arizona.
Not even a week ago the Supreme Court of Georgia declined to reconsider another court’s ruling disqualifying the local prosecutor from proceeding with a case against Trump, his electors and allies there. That case has been riddled with complaints of prosecutorial misconduct, and it is unclear if it will continue.
Timothy La Sota, an attorney for state Sen. Jake Hoffman, a Queen Creek Republican who was a Trump elector and was charged last year, pointed to those other states as evidence of where Mayes’ case was headed.
“Just two weeks ago, a similar prosecution in Michigan against electors in that state was thrown out when the judge determined that the electors were exercising their constitutional rights,” La Sota said. “The entire prosecutor’s office in Atlanta has been thrown off the case there due to an appearance of impropriety. And the Nevada case was thrown out almost as soon as it began.
“It’s long past time that this case was put to rest,” La Sota said.
Read the full azcentral.com article here.