The judge hearing Trump's state criminal case in Georgia issued a ruling in the case dropping two charges against Trump and a different charge against others in the case.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/09/12/trump-georgia-case-charges-dismissed/The charges involved false documents -- the actual filing, the preparation and conspiracy to file. As the Post story stated,
McAfee ruled that because filing false documents in federal court is subject to sanctions under federal law, state law cannot be used as it was in one of the counts he dismissed Thursday.
The idea that an action that is a crime under both federal law and state law can ONLY be prosecuted at the federal level is NOT the intent of the supremacy clause in the US Constitution. The purpose of the supremacy clause is to dictate that when any state law conflicts with a federal law, the terms of the federal law supersede those of any state law. The supremacy clause was not intended to settle issues of jurisdiction over prosecution of an action in violation of both state and federal law. The documents involved in the charges dismissed by McAfee could be viewed as "dual scope" documents. When you prepare certification of a slate of electors for a particular state, you are first preparing documents clearly subject to STATE law since a state's Legislature must somehow sign off on those documents. Once the legislative approval is provided, in essence that same document now gets submitted to the Electoral College under the jurisdiction of federal law.
McAfee's decision is being interpreted by some as saying Georgia's existing state law that references filing false documents to either state or federal authorities is unconstitutional because of his interpretation of the supremacy clause.
Trump's lawyers cited an 1890 case that reached the Supreme Court in which the court ruled that a state could not prosecute a perjury charge stemming from testimony in a disputed federal election. The problem with that example is the perjury involved occurred in a federal trial related to that contested election. So the alleged crime (perjury) occurred in a federal court room so it could be argued it was a federal responsibility to protect the integrity of its proceedings and that was not within the purview of a state to file that charge. In this Georgia case, before there could be a federal crime of submitting false documents to the Electoral College, there were crimes that occurred within the State of Georgia that conspired to falsify information and falsely submit that information to state officials BEFORE submitting to a federal process. It is totally within the State of Georgia's authority to protect the integrity of its state processes by prosecuting those acts, even if they served as inputs to federal crimes as well.
It seems McAfee might be as ignorant of basic law as Aileen Cannon. It isn't clear to me if his decision to dismiss charges can be appealed, but I am assuming it cannot. At the same time, the judge separately affirmed the felony racketeering charge against Trump and team, describing it as "facially sound and constitutionally sufficient."
WTH
