Former President Donald Trump's White House chief of staff pleaded on Tuesday for a new hearing in front of a full slate of a dozen federal judges in his bid to get his portion of Georgia's election racketeering case moved into federal court.
The petition for a rehearing en banc was expected from Mark Meadows, one of the original 18 co-defendants charged alongside Trump in Fulton County over alleged efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
Earlier Tuesday, Meadows filed notice with the 11th Circuit that he'd hired former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, who represented the United States in matters before the Supreme Court from 2004 to 2008, onto his legal team.
Meadows lost last month in a unanimous 3-0 ruling from the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on his bid to move his part of the Fulton County election racketeering case to federal court.
Tuesday's 17-page petition doubles down with the same arguments that to date haven't been successful, namely that as a White House chief of staff Meadows can't be charged in state court for alleged crimes tied to his official federal government duties.
"This case belongs in federal court. Indeed, the raison d’etre of the federal-officer removal statute is to provide a federal forum to consider federal immunity defenses to such state-court suits," Clement and the rest of Meadows' legal team wrote, citing precedents from both the 11th Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court that back up their case.
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U.S. District Judge Steve Jones rejected Meadows in September, and the former Trump aide appealed that ruling to the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit. A three-judge panel heard oral arguments on the matter in mid-December before upholding Jones' decision on the very next business day.
Notably, the 11th Circuit's judges upheld Jones’ ruling that Meadows failed to provide a “colorable” defense and did not prove that the alleged acts supporting the charges against him were carried out under the official responsibilities of his office. That's the requirement under the federal statute that would have allowed him to move his case out of state court.
The 11th Circuit panel in their opinion also tackled a second question: whether the statute applied to former federal officers, a question which no court has squarely addressed in nearly two centuries of jurisprudence.
“We acknowledge that, in the 190-year history of the federal-officer removal statute, no court has ruled that former officers are excluded from removal,” the court wrote in its ruling. The court said that the federal removal application in Trump’s New York case “fails to persuade us.”
Pressing on Tuesday for a rehearing, Meadows' lawyers cited that historic finding, calling it "so novel and expectation-defying that it did not even occur to Georgia to advance it until it was prompted by a supplemental briefing order."
"The panel’s decision is profoundly wrong—it defies text, precedent, and common sense—and profoundly consequential," Meadows' attorneys added.
Meadows' earlier legal defeat came from a three-judge panel that included Chief Judge William H. Pryor, an appointee of President George W. Bush; Judge Robin Rosenbaum, an appointee of President Barack Obama; and Judge Nancy Abudu, an appointee of President Joe Biden.
A full "en banc" review by the 11th Circuit panel would put Meadows' case before a dozen federal judges. The roster of active members of the Atlanta-based appellate court includes seven lifetime appointees from Republican presidents (Pryor, plus six more whom Trump nominated) and five from Democratic presidents.
Several other co-defendants in the Fulton County indictment have also tried without success to get their parts of the Georgia case moved to federal court. All have also appealed to the 11th Circuit, though those hearings have yet to be scheduled. They include ex-Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, and ‘fake’ electors David Shafer, Cathy Latham and Shawn Still.