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. The Georgia election interference case was once considered the most threatening of Trump’s four criminal indictments, because he could not pardon himself from state-level charges if he returned to office.
The US Supreme Court granted a broad immunity to Trump against federal prosecution for what it described as official acts, but that ruling did not cover state-level cases.Prosecutors brought Trump to the Fulton County Jail, where they took his mugshot. (The president’s supporters embraced the image, later using on campaign merchandise.)Yet legal experts who closely followed the case were not surprised by its dismissal. The sprawling racketeering case suffered a death by a thousand cuts – ajudge tossed out several of the chargesin 2024, and Willis was disqualified a few months later.Willis’ removal raised doubts about whether a replacement would take up such a complicated prosecution. Trump’s election essentially put it on ice until his term ends in 2029.”It was incredibly unlikely it was going to go forward anyway, because the amount of financial resources and man hours necessary to take on this case didn’t seem to be within the scope of what Peter Skandalakis had,” said Anthony Michael Kries, a professor at the Georgia State College of Law.However, Mr Kries was surprised by some of Mr Skandalakis’ reasoning for dropping the case.”I think the report itself to me is a little more surprising because it seems to give the president and some of his allies a lot of benefit of the doubt, given what the evidence brought forth looked like,” he said.
