Key portions of the Georgia investigation into former President Donald Trump’s efforts to change 2020 election results in the Peach State have been presided over by a Fulton County Superior Court judge who has shown a willingness to speak candidly to both sides of the acrimonious case.
Trump’s trial, assuming there is one, may or may not be presided over by Judge Robert McBurney. On the other hand, McBurney presided over the selection of the grand jury that will hear the Trump case last month.
His decisions and demeanour have already had a significant impact on the highly publicised case, which is scheduled to conclude with grand jury indictments this week.
McBurney, a lawyer with a degree from Harvard, was nominated to lead the special grand jury that investigated the case by then-Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican.
Democratic Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is said to present her case before a grand jury seeking charges against more than a dozen people. This is according to AWN’s sources acquainted with the case. Racketeering, conspiracy, and other charges may be brought.
In a landmark ruling last month, McBurney denied Trump’s motion to have the special grand jury’s evidence thrown out and to remove Willis as head of the criminal investigation due to her comments in the media.
“The drumbeat from the District Attorney has been neither partisan (in the political sense) nor personal,” McBurney wrote, an apparent jab at the Trump team’s scathing papers targeting Willis.
His next statement was, “To put it another way, the District Attorney’s Office has been doing a fairly routine — and legally unobjectionable — job of public relations in a case that is anything but routine.”
An important judgement made by McBurney early in the investigation prevented Willis from looking into Republican state senator Burt Jones, who had signed an invalid Electoral College certificate. (Jones is presently the Lieutenant Governor of Georgia.)
Jones’ Democratic opponent in Georgia’s lieutenant governor’s race was Charley Bailey, and McBurney criticised Willis for hosting a campaign fundraiser for Bailey. In retrospect, he called it a “What are you thinking?” moment. The visuals are just awful.
Referencing the Jones disagreement, McBurney said that Willis “injected direct partisanship into a criminal investigation that should remain as politically neutral as possible” when it came to the investigation into Jones, which McBurney just ruled against, keeping open the possibility of criminal charges being brought against Trump. However, McBurney decided that Willis didn’t do anything inappropriate with Trump.
According to the Fulton County court website, McBurney is a former state prosecutor in Fulton County and a former federal prosecutor in the Northern District of Georgia.
McBurney also overturned a restriction on abortions beyond six weeks in Georgia, which was later upheld by the Supreme Court. When the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, signed the bill into law in 2019, he noted that in his opinion, “the supreme law of this land unequivocally was – and had been for nearly half a century that laws unduly restricting abortion before viability were unconstitutional.”
In 2014, he presided over a legal battle between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s children over who would inherit their father’s Bible and Nobel Peace Prize.
Bernice, King’s daughter, argued that her father wanted to sell the artefacts rather than give them to her brothers. A representative for Bernice King stated that her client has no intention of selling any “critical, sacred items,” regardless of the asking price.
The judge likened Bernice King’s opposition to selling her father’s belongings to Coca-Cola’s refusal to sell the formula for its signature soft drink. McBurney clarified later that he had no intention of diminishing King’s possessions with the analogy. According to a 2016 article published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the case was settled when McBurney signed a consent decree transferring ownership of the goods to Bernice King’s brothers.