Judge Rejects Trump’s Effort to Short-Circuit Georgia Election Case

A Georgia judge forcefully rejected on Monday an effort by former President Donald J. Trump to derail an investigation into attempts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state — an investigation that is expected to yield indictments in mid-August.

Mr. Trump tried to get Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of the Fulton County Superior Court in Atlanta to throw out evidence collected by a special grand jury and disqualify the prosecutor overseeing the investigation, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney.

But in a nine-page order, Judge McBurney wrote that Mr. Trump did not have the legal standing to make such challenges before indictments were handed up. The judge said the “injuries” that Mr. Trump claimed to have suffered from the two-and-a-half-year investigation “are either insufficient or else speculative and unrealized.”

The office of Ms. Willis, a Democrat, is expected to present potential indictments in the matter to a regular grand jury in the next few weeks.

The Georgia investigation is part of a swirl of legal troubles surrounding Mr. Trump, who has already been indicted on state charges in New York connected with hush-money payments in 2016, and on federal charges over his retention and handling of classified documents after leaving office in 2021.

He has also received a target letter as part of a federal investigation into wider efforts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election, suggesting that he could be indicted again.

In Atlanta, law enforcement officials have been stepping up security in anticipation of the grand jury proceedings there.

Last week, officials put orange barriers around the Fulton County courthouse in downtown Atlanta. Ms. Willis has asked the F.B.I. for “protective resources” at the court complex, and has had some members of her staff outfitted with bulletproof vests. She has also announced remote-work days for many staff members during the first three weeks of August, and has asked judges not to schedule other trials for part of that time.

A “special purpose” grand jury, which did not have indictment power, interviewed dozens of witnesses and subpoenaed documents over the course of roughly seven months. The jury then issued an advisory report recommending that a number of people be indicted on charges of violating Georgia laws, according to the jury forewoman.

The specifics of those recommendations have not yet been made public, although the forewoman, in a February interview with The New York Times, strongly hinted that Mr. Trump was among the people recommended for indictment.

Judge McBurney, in Monday’s ruling, seemed to have little patience for the arguments from Mr. Trump’s legal team, and he suggested that Mr. Trump’s lawyers were gumming up the legal process with frivolous filings.

“In the future, counsel is encouraged to follow the professional standard of inquiring with chamber’s staff about timing and deadlines before burdening other courts with unnecessary and unfounded legal filings,” Judge McBurney wrote.

To the Trump team’s assertions that Mr. Trump would be injured by an indictment, Judge McBurney appeared to allude to the fund-raising that Mr. Trump’s campaign had done, highlighting the criminal cases against him.

“For some, being the subject of criminal investigation can, à la Rumpelstiltskin, be turned into golden political capital, making it seem more providential than problematic,” he wrote in a footnote. “Regardless, simply being the subject (or target) of an investigation does not yield standing to bring claim to halt that investigation in court.”

A representative for Ms. Willis’s office declined on Monday to comment on the judge’s ruling. Lawyers for Mr. Trump could not immediately be reached for comment.

Earlier this month, the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously rejected a filing with a similar aim from Mr. Trump’s Georgia legal team. That filing argued, among other things, that the special grand jury’s proceedings were “blatantly unconstitutional” and that Ms. Willis had made biased public statements.

Mr. Trump’s challenge in Superior Court was joined by Cathy Latham, one of 16 Republicans who tried to cast bogus Electoral College votes for Mr. Trump in December 2020, and who has been named as a target of the investigation by prosecutors. Judge McBurney also rejected Ms. Latham’s filing in his order on Monday.

In addition to finding that Mr. Trump’s and Ms. Latham’s challenges were premature, Judge McBurney pushed back against Mr. Trump’s contention that prosecutors had been improperly biased. The judge also appeared to criticize the former president for his attacks on Ms. Willis, who is Black and whom Mr. Trump has called a “local racist Democrat district attorney” who is seeking to harm him politically.

“The drumbeat from the district attorney has been neither partisan (in the political sense) nor political, in marked and refreshing contrast to the stream of personal invective flowing from one of the movants,” the judge wrote.

A third challenge from Mr. Trump’s lawyers is set to be considered by a judge in Cobb County, Ga., in a hearing scheduled for Aug. 10. The matter was moved to the county, which is an Atlanta suburb, after the chief judge in Fulton County Superior Court ruled that he and his fellow Fulton County judges were recused from ruling on that motion. Judge McBurney wrote on Monday that the challenge in Cobb County should now be considered moot.