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A Georgia state prosecutor who took over the election interference case regarding President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results has announced he is dropping all charges in the inquiry.
Georgia prosecutor Peter Skandalakis became the lead prosecutor on the case last month, after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who had originally initiated the proceedings, was disqualified from carrying it forward after a judge ruled she had an “appearance of impropriety” due to her romantic relationship with another prosecutor.
The racketeering case — which involves Trump, his former lawyer (and former New York City mayor) Rudy Giuliani, former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, and many others — focused on the group’s efforts to overturn former President Joe Biden’s win in Georgia during the 2020 presidential race.
The case was the last remaining criminal prosecution that Trump faced stemming from that election. Last year, a federal case against Trump, focusing on a scheme to upend the Electoral College results and his inciting a mob to attack the Capitol when that effort failed, was also dropped due to Trump winning the 2024 presidential race.
In his Wednesday motion to drop the Georgia-based case, Skandalakis didn’t appear to suggest that the facts of the case had changed, or that the defendants hadn’t done anything wrong. Rather, the prosecutor acknowledged that securing a prosecution in a timely fashion would be difficult.
“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 in his brief.
Skandalakis further noted that it wouldn’t make sense, in his opinion, to sever Trump from the case and proceed with prosecuting others, as doing so “would be illogical and unduly burdensome and costly for the State and for Fulton County.”
“In my professional judgment, the citizens of Georgia are not served by pursuing this case in full for another five to ten years,” he added.
Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the case, agreed to the dismissal shortly after.
While Skandalakis claimed there were legal ambiguities relating to a successful prosecution of Trump and others, many legal observers have said the case is pretty cut and dry.
In addition to numerous other actions taken by his surrogates in the state, Trump himself tried to influence Georgia elections officials through a phone call after the 2020 race in the state was called for Biden, telling the officials all they had to do was “find 11,780 votes” for him to win instead.
“So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break,” Trump said on that phone call.
Trump threatened those officials with legal repercussions if they failed to cooperate. According to Georgia state law, it is illegal to coerce, command, or otherwise try to get state election officials to engage in election fraud.
One year after the phone call came to light, former federal prosecutor Nick Akerman, who worked on the Watergate case against former President Richard Nixon, said Willis had a solid case against Trump.
“I think they have gotten a case beyond a reasonable doubt,” Akerman said, noting that Trump had “zero defense” given the evidence of the recorded phone call.
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