A Georgia judge has agreed with prosecutors to drop a sweeping racketeering case against Donald Trump and his allies for their efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in the state, marking the end of a historic series of criminal cases against the president.
The case accused Trump and his co-defendants of leading a “criminal enterprise” to overturn his loss in the state, using a so-called “fake elector” scheme to falsely assert his victory while seeking to seize control of voting machines, intimidate election workers and push the state’s top election official to “find” votes Trump would need to win.
Trump and more than a dozen co-defendants — including allies Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman — were charged under the state’s RICO Act, typically used to break up organized crime, and faced a lengthy list of other charges tied to the alleged conspiracy to subvert the state’s election results.
The case was initially brought by the office of Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis, who failed to keep herself on the case after a lengthy court battle over allegations of conflicts of interest involving a former romantic partner who was brought on as a special prosecutor.
Peter Skandalakis, director of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Council of Georgia, had assigned the case to himself earlier this month after no other prosecutors had stepped forward.
Skandalakis ripped the case apart in a 22-page filing Wednesday, arguing that the case should be tried in federal court instead. Untangling the various “immunity” issues and other legal arguments from Trump and his allies in Georgia would take “months, if not years,” he argued.
“Given the complexity of the legal issues at hand — ranging from constitutional questions and the Supremacy Clause to immunity, jurisdiction, venue, speedy-trial concerns, and access to federal records — and even assuming each of these issues were resolved in the state’s favor, bringing this case before a jury in 2029, 2030 or even 2031 would be nothing short of a remarkable feat,” Skandalakis wrote.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee quickly approved the motion, dealing a fatal blow to the last remaining criminal case against the president.
Skandalakis had considered removing Trump from the case to try the remaining defendants in state court, but that move “would be both illogical and unduly burdensome and costly for the state and for Fulton County,” he said.
Four of Trump’s original co-defendants — including attorneys Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell — already pleaded guilty to some charges in 2023 after reaching plea deals with prosecutors.
The end of the case effectively ensures the president will continue to evade criminal consequences for his efforts to reverse his loss in 2020 against Joe Biden, after special counsel Jack Smith dropped a federal indictment placing the president at the center of the alleged conspiracy.
Trump was separately charged with mishandling documents and obstructing law enforcement efforts to retrieve them, but that case was also dismissed before he returned to the White House. The president’s only criminal convictions stemmed from a case in Manhattan, where a jury found the president guilty of fraud in his efforts to cover up an alleged affair with an adult film star.
The president is also appealing that verdict in the hopes of the case landing in federal court, where his Department of Justice is expected to drop the case.
Last year, following several days of hearings on allegations that Willis financially benefited from hiring Nathan Wade, with whom she was once romantically involved, Judge McAfee determined that either Willis or Wade should step aside for the case to continue. Wade then submitted his resignation.
Trump and his co-defendants then appealed in the hopes of disqualifying Willis, and a state appellate court removed the district attorney from the case — a decision that ultimately doomed Trump’s criminal prosecution just weeks before he returned to the White House.
The investigation followed Trump’s infamous phone call to Georgia’s Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, days before Congress convened to certify the nation’s election results, an event that was upended by a violent mob fueled by Trump’s bogus claims of victory and baseless allegations that the election was stolen and rigged against him.
“All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said during that call.
A sprawling grand jury indictment in 2023 accused Trump and his allies of making false statements in an effort to fraudulently persuade state officials, the Department of Justice and then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject lawful votes and select a slate of electors loyal to the former president despite Biden’s victory in the state.
They were also accused of traveling to the state to harass an election worker, “intimidate her, and solicit her to falsely confess to election crimes that she did not commit.”
Defendants also “corruptly conspired” to illegally access data from voting machines in the state, some of which was removed — “including ballot images, voting equipment software, and personal voter information” — and then “distributed to other members of the enterprise, including members in other states,” prosecutors alleged.
“Never before, and hopefully never again, will our country face circumstances such as these,” Skandalakis wrote Wednesday.
“The case is now nearly five years removed from President Trump’s phone call with the Secretary of State, and two years have passed since the grand jury returned charges against President Trump and the eighteen other defendants. There is no realistic prospect that a sitting president will be compelled to appear in Georgia to stand trial on the allegations in this indictment,” he added.
Trump’s attorney Steve Sadow said the “political persecution” of his client “is finally over.”
“This case should never have been brought,” he said in a statement Wednesday. “A fair and impartial prosecutor has put an end to this lawfare.”
