Brian Anderson/AP
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney speaks at the Fulton County Courthouse, Tuesday, July 11, 2023, in Atlanta.
Washington
CNN
—
A Fulton County Superior Court judge who presided over key parts of the Georgia trial Former President Donald Trump Efforts to reverse the 2020 election results in the Beach State have demonstrated a willingness to speak out on both sides of the controversial measure.
It is unclear whether Judge Robert McBurney will preside over the trial if Trump is indicted. But last month, McBurney presided over the selection process for the grand jury investigating the Trump case.
His judgments and attitude have had a profound effect on a subject already closely observed Accusations It is expected to be handed down from a grand jury this week.
McBurney, a Harvard-educated attorney appointed by then-Georgia Republican Nathan Deal in 2012, oversaw a special grand jury gathering evidence in the investigation.
Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis, a Democrat, is expected to seek indictments against more than a dozen people when he takes his case before a grand jury, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Charges may include fraud, conspiracy and more.
In a landmark ruling last month, McBurney rejected Trump’s request to disqualify Willis from overseeing the criminal investigation because of public opinion about the case, throwing out evidence gathered by a special grand jury.
“The district attorney’s drumbeat is neither a partisan (in the political sense) nor an individual, specific and refreshing, as opposed to a stream of individual innovation flowing from a movement,” McBurney wrote, taking an apparent swipe at the Trump team. Barbed wire filings related to Willis.
He continued: “To put it differently, the district attorney’s office is doing a very routine and legally unobjectionable public relations job in a case, but it’s a routine one.”
However, a Key judgment in trial, McBurney prevented Willis from investigating Republican state senator Burt Jones, one of the fraudulent voters who signed a fraudulent Electoral College certificate. (Jones is now the lieutenant governor of Georgia.)
Willis hosted a campaign fundraiser for Jones’ Democratic opponent in the Georgia lieutenant governor race, Charlie Bailey, for which McBurney criticized Willis. “It was a ‘what are you thinking’ moment,” he said at the time. “The optics are terrible.”
In his latest ruling rejecting Trump’s bid to close the investigation, McBurney referenced the Jones controversy, saying Willis “directed bias in a criminal investigation that should be as politically neutral as possible” when it came to Jones. But McBurney decided Willis didn’t cross that line with Trump.
McBurney was previously a former federal prosecutor in the Northern District of Georgia and state’s attorney in Fulton County, according to the Fulton County District Court. Website.
In some other notable cases, McBurney overturned Georgia’s six-week abortion ban was reinstated by the Supreme Court last year. In his view, when Georgia lawmakers passed the bill and Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed it in 2019, “the supreme law in this country was unequivocally — and had been for nearly half a century — laws unduly restricting abortion. The validity is unconstitutional.”
In 2014, he Presiding Judge in Family Disputes Civil rights icon Dr. Regarding control over the Bible and the Nobel Peace Prize among Martin Luther King Jr.’s children.
Bernice, the king’s daughter, did not want to give the goods to her brothers, arguing that she wanted to sell them. Bernice King’s attorney said she was not interested in selling “important, sacred things.”
The judge compared Bernice King’s stance against selling her father’s assets to Coca-Cola’s reluctance to sell its cola recipe. McBurney later noted that he had not compared the value of King’s possessions. The dispute was resolved by McBurney signing a consent decree that transferred the items to Bernice King’s brothers. Atlanta Journal-Constitution Reported in 2016.
