Judge Dismisses Georgia Election Interference Case Against Trump

The president has now seen three criminal cases against him dissolve since he was re-elected last year.

A judge in Georgia dismissed the last pending criminal prosecution against President Trump on Wednesday, effectively ending efforts to hold him criminally responsible for attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

The president has now seen three criminal cases against him dissolve since he was re-elected last year. A number of his allies are also defendants in the Georgia racketeering case, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff.

A motion seeking to end the prosecution was filed Wednesday morning by Pete Skandalakis, the executive director of the state’s nonpartisan prosecutor council. The case was once seen as one of the most serious legal threats to Mr. Trump, because state criminal convictions are not subject to presidential pardons.

Mr. Skandalakis, a career prosecutor who ran for office early in his career as a Democrat but later as a Republican, shredded the case originally brought by Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, taking it apart charge by charge in a 22-page filing. He asserted that “it is not illegal to question or challenge election results.”

Mr. Skandalakis concluded that the inquiry undertaken by Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department under President Biden, was the more appropriate venue for an investigation of Mr. Trump’s attempts to stay in power after the 2020 election. He added that the idea of pursuing a case against a sitting president in Georgia was impractical.

He noted that the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last year, which granted presidents “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for acts within their constitutional authority, meant that it would take “months, if not years” to litigate immunity issues in the Georgia courts — and that all of this would have to occur after Mr. Trump left office in 2029.

“Bringing this case before a jury in 2029, 2030 or even 2031 would be nothing short of a remarkable feat,” Mr. Skandalakis wrote, adding that “the citizens of Georgia are not served by pursuing this case in full for another five to ten years.”

Mr. Trump’s indictment in August 2023 prompted a unique moment in the history of the American presidency, when he traveled to Atlanta to be booked at the county jail. Mr. Trump, who was out of office at the time, would soon embrace his scowling mug shot as a symbol of defiance; his campaign still markets the image on coffee mugs, posters and pins.

The circumstances leading to his prosecution began in January 2021, two months after Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election to Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Trump called Georgia’s secretary of state and pressured him to help “find” enough votes to reverse his loss in Georgia. Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, began investigating shortly thereafter.

More than two and a half years later, she brought a sprawling racketeering case against Mr. Trump and 18 of his allies, including several fake electors who tried to help keep him in power despite his loss at the polls. But Ms. Willis was removed from the case last December, after defense lawyers revealed that she had been in a romantic relationship with a lawyer she had hired to lead the prosecution.

In September, her office lost a final bid to keep the case when the Supreme Court of Georgia declined to intervene. Soon afterward, Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post that Ms. Willis and others who had brought cases against him were “CRIMINALS who will hopefully pay serious consequences for their illegal actions.”

The Justice Department under Mr. Trump has already been investigating Ms. Willis. The New York Times reported last month that federal investigators are scrutinizing a trip she took to the Bahamas, though the full scope of the investigation is unclear. But it comes as Mr. Trump has directed the Justice Department to pursue retribution against his perceived personal enemies.

Mr. Skandalakis was charged with seeking a replacement for Ms. Willis after her removal. But earlier this month, he told the court that he could not find another prosecutor willing to take on such a complex and fraught case.

Ms. Willis, an elected Democrat, has said she was the target of frequent threats from Trump supporters and had to temporarily stay away from her home as a result.

Mr. Skandalakis sought to portray his decision to drop the case as one untainted by politics. “As a former elected official who ran as both a Democrat and a Republican and now is the executive director of a nonpartisan agency, this decision is not guided by a desire to advance an agenda but is based on my beliefs and understanding of the law,” he wrote in a statement.

In his filing, he called into question almost every decision made by Ms. Willis in bringing her case against Mr. Trump. He even argued that “reasonable minds could differ” as to how to interpret the January 2021 call between Mr. Trump and Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state.

“One interpretation is that President Donald J. Trump, without explicitly stating it, is instructing the Secretary of State to fictitiously or fraudulently produce enough votes to secure a victory in Georgia,” Mr. Skandalakis wrote in his court filing. “An alternative interpretation is that President Donald J. Trump, genuinely believing fraud had occurred, is asking the Secretary of State to investigate and determine whether sufficient irregularities exist to change the election outcome.”

He added: “When multiple interpretations are equally plausible, the accused is entitled to the benefit of the doubt and should not be presumed to have acted criminally.”

Mr. Raffensperger, in his 2021 book, “Integrity Counts,” was unequivocal in interpreting the call. “The president was asking me to do something that I knew was wrong,” he wrote, “and I was not going to do that.”

Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon contributed reporting from Atlanta.

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