Georgia election interference case against Trump dropped: NPR

The landmark criminal case in Georgia against President Trump and more than a dozen of his allies for their efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election has officially ended.

“The case is hereby dismissed in its entirety,” Fulton Superior Judge Scott McAfee ordered Wednesday.

Pete Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecutors’ Council of Georgia, decided to end the prosecution of the remaining defendants after taking over the case from Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis, who was disqualified by a court late last year.

“The criminal conduct alleged in the Atlanta Judicial Circuit proceedings was conceived in Washington, D.C., and not in the State of Georgia,” Skandalakis wrote in his motion to dismiss. “The federal government is the proper venue for these lawsuits, not the state of Georgia.”

The charges were the latest pending criminal case against Trump, after two federal lawsuits — one focused on efforts to overturn the 2020 election and another related to the handling of classified documents — were dropped following Trump’s return to the White House earlier this year.

“The political persecution of President Trump by disqualified prosecutor Fani Willis is finally over,” Trump’s Georgia lawyer Steve Sadow wrote on X. “This case should never have been brought. A fair and impartial prosecutor has ended this legal war.”

The Fulton County Prosecutor’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

The historical indictment

In Georgia, a Fulton County grand jury indicted Trump and 18 others, including former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, in August 2023 in a sweeping racketeering case alleging a conspiracy to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in Georgia.

The case was prompted in part by a recorded January 2021 phone call that Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he asked him to “find” 11,780 votes, one more than Trump’s losing margin in Georgia.

After the grand jury indictment, Trump and his co-defendants were booked into the Fulton County Jail. Most, including Trump, have pleaded not guilty to the charges. Four plea deals accepted – and these remain binding.

The sprawling case was about to go to trial when lawyers for one of Trump’s co-defendants filed a motion to dismiss the case based on a stunning claim: The prosecutor had an inappropriate personal relationship with a special prosecutor she hired for the case.

Willis acknowledged the relationship had existed, but claimed it had no bearing on the case.

Judge McAfee ultimately ruled that Willis could continue if the special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, resigned. But a few months later, the Georgia Court of Appeals overturned that decision, removing Willis and his office from the case. The Georgia Supreme Court subsequently declined to hear an appeal, letting the impeachment stand.

Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis attends a hearing in the Georgia election interference case at the Fulton County Courthouse March 1, 2024, in Atlanta.

Alex Slitz/Piscine/Getty Images

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Skandalakis, a nonpartisan official charged by Georgia law with appointing a special prosecutor, announced in November that he would take the case himself after being unable to recruit anyone else to take on the case.

“It’s important that someone makes a decision on this matter,” Skandalakis said in an interview in September. “It’s important to the public, frankly to the nation, to the defendants, to all interested parties.”

This does not mean that his decision would be to pursue charges. Even though the state charges were isolated in a way that the charges brought by the U.S. Department of Justice were not, Trump’s lawyers had argued that the case could not continue until he leaves office in 2029.

The decision now to drop the charges altogether means the case will not even be able to proceed.

“This decision will not be unanimous”

Skandalakis said that in making this decision, he would meticulously review the indictment, the law and the records, including 101 boxes of bank documents and an 8-terabyte hard drive containing the entire investigative file.

Options Skandalakis might have considered include dropping charges against Trump but continuing to prosecute some or all of his co-defendants, or returning to a grand jury for a superseded or updated indictment. The statute of limitations for most criminal charges in Georgia is four years, and five years for racketeering charges.

As lawsuits against some Trump allies involved in efforts to overturn the election continue in other state courts, the ruling ends one of the most high-profile and wide-ranging lawsuits.

The Georgia case focused on an alleged scheme to submit a slate of Trump electors despite Biden’s victory, to access sensitive voting machine data and an unsuccessful campaign to pressure state officials into interfering with the outcome of the election. Trump has long called the lawsuits a “political witch hunt.”

“I recognize that given the deep political divisions in our country, this decision will not be universally popular,” Skandalakis wrote, saying his family received threats after he took over the case.

“The role of a prosecutor is not to satisfy public opinion or obtain universal approval; such a goal is both unattainable and irrelevant to the proper exercise of prosecutorial discretion,” he continued. “My assessment of this case has been guided solely by the evidence, the law and the principles of justice.”