A Georgia judge has dismissed the sprawling 2020 election interference case against Donald Trump, ending the final effort to prosecute the president for allegedly trying to overturn his loss to Joe Biden.
Peter Skandalakis, who took over the case after the prosecutor’s initial dismissal, asked Judge Scott McAfee to dismiss the charges on Wednesday.
Trump’s lawyer, Steve Sadow, praised the decision to end the “political persecution” against the president.
The dismissal concludes the last of Trump’s four criminal cases, only one of which was tried and resulted in a conviction.
A Georgia appeals court booted Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the case after determining that a romantic relationship with a special prosecutor created an “appearance of impropriety.”
Skandalakis, executive director of the nonpartisan Georgia Prosecutors Council, appointed himself to the case after Willis’ disqualification and when other state prosecutors refused to take the case.
In Wednesday’s motion before a Fulton County judge, he said he would stay the case “to serve the interests of justice and promote judicial finality.”
“As a former elected official who ran as a Democrat and a Republican and is now 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,” Skandalakis added.
About five million votes for president were cast in Georgia in 2020, and Biden won the swing state by just under 12,000 votes.
Trump and some of his allies refused to accept the result and the state quickly became a focal point of efforts to overturn the election.
In January 2021, The Washington Post published a recording of Trump speaking with Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state,” Trump said in the recording.
Willis began investigating Trump’s activities soon after the report and convened a special grand jury to weigh the facts.
Willis filed an indictment in August 2023 alleging that Trump conspired with 18 other defendants to interfere in the outcome of the election. The charges included extortion and other state crimes.
The group “refused to accept that Trump lost and knowingly and willingly joined in a conspiracy to illegally change the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor.”
Four co-defendants reached deals with prosecutors that primarily resulted in fines, suspended sentences and community service, including attorneys Sidney Powell, Kenneth Cheseboro and Jenna Ellis.
Wednesday’s dismissal also applies to the other defendants, including former New York mayor and Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, chief of staff during Trump’s first presidency.
Sadow, President Trump’s lead attorney in the case, praised the decision to drop the charges.
“President Trump’s political persecution by disqualified District Attorney Fani Willis is finally over,” he said. “This case should never have been brought. A fair and impartial prosecutor has put an end to this legal war.”
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.
Prosecutors took Trump to the Fulton County Jail, where his mugshot was taken.
Legal experts who followed the case closely were not surprised by its dismissal. A judge dismissed several of the charges in 2024, and Willis was disqualified a few months later.
Willis’s ouster raised questions about whether a replacement could take on such a complicated process. Trump’s election in 2024 essentially put his case on hold until his term ends in 2029.
“It was incredibly unlikely that it would go forward anyway, because the amount of financial resources and man hours required to take on this case didn’t seem to be within the scope of what Peter Skandalakis had,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a professor at Georgia State College of Law.
However, Mr. Kries was surprised by some of Skandalakis’s arguments for dropping the case.
“I think the report itself is a little more surprising to me because it seems to give the president and some of his allies a lot of benefit of the doubt, given the look of the evidence presented,” he said.
Trump has also faced a number of other criminal prosecutions.
These include a 2024 conviction in a hush money case in New York, and he is appealing against it.
Two additional federal cases, one alleging he conspired to overturn the 2020 election and another accusing him of illegally withholding classified documents, were dropped upon his return to the White House.
He also faces several high-profile civil lawsuits that are moving forward in appeals courts.
Earlier this month, Trump asked the US Supreme Court to review the $5m (£3.6m) civil case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, after a federal appeals court upheld the award and refused to rehear the matter. The court said he defamed and sexually abused Carroll, allegations he denies.
In August, a New York appeals court dismissed a $500 million civil fraud fine against Trump that resulted from a separate civil fraud lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
