(CNN) — Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis will lay out the first details of her sprawling anti-racketeering case against former President Donald Trump, his White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and 17 other co-defendants at a federal court hearing on Monday morning.
This will be the first time that substantive arguments will be made in court about the four criminal cases brought against Trump this year.
The subject of the hearing, set to begin at 10 a.m., is Meadows’ motion to move his case to federal court and possibly have it thrown out, but it’s much more than that – it could end up acting as a mini-trial that determines the future of Fulton County’s case against the former president.
Willis is expected to preview the case that she is planning to bring against the 19 co-defendants, getting on the public record some of her evidence and legal arguments for why Trump and his allies broke the law when pressuring Georgia election officials to meddle with the 2020 results.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who received the January 2021 call from Trump to “find” the votes that would reverse his loss, has been subpoenaed to testify, along with an investigator in his office and two other lawyers who were present on the call.
Here’s what to watch for:
‘Opening salvo’ in bids to move to federal court
Meadows is one of several defendants who have filed to move their cases from Georgia state court to federal court, and Trump is expected to file a similar motion.
Several defendants who have filed similar removal notices, including ex-Georgia Republican Party chair David Shafer and Cathy Latham, who served as a fake elector, have argued they were acting at Trump’s direction.
Meadows is arguing that the charges against him in Georgia should be dismissed under a federal immunity claim extended, in certain contexts, to individuals who are prosecuted or sued for alleged conduct that was done on…
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