A Georgia prosecutor has dropped the 2020 election-interference case against President Donald Trump.
Pete Skandalakis filed a motion to dismiss the case that initially accused Trump and others of plotting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in the state in his favour of Joe Biden.
The state charges were the last remaining criminal legal case against the US president stemming from the 2020 election. It was first brought by district attorney Fani Willis, but she was removed from the case by the state’s supreme court after a personal scandal.
“A fair and impartial prosecutor has put an end to this lawfare,” an attorney for Trump said in response to the dismissal.
Willis was removed from the case after the court determined a romantic relationship with a special prosecutor assigned to the case created an “appearance of impropriety.”
Skandalakis, executive director of the nonpartisan agency Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, appointed himself to the case after Willis’ disqualification and when other state prosecutors declined to take the case.
In Wednesday’s motion to a Fulton County judge, Skandalakis said he was discontinuing the case “to serve the interests of justice and promote judicial finality.”
“As a former elected official who ran as both a Democrat and a Republican and now is the Executive Director of a non-partisan agency, this decision is not guided by a desire to advance an agenda but is based on my beliefs and understanding of the law,” Skandalakis added.
Willis began investigating the case in February 2021 after The Washington Post published a recording of Trump speaking with the state’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” Trump is heard saying in the 2 January, 2021, call. That was margin by which he lost the state to Joe Biden.
Willis filed an indictment in August 2023 alleging that Trump conspired with 18 other defendants to interfere in the election result. The charges included racketeering and other state offences.
The group “refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump”.
The dismissal of the case also includes charges against Trumps’s 18 co-defendants, including former New York mayor and Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, chief of staff during Trump’s first presidency.
