(Washington) The Georgia state justice system on Wednesday quashed the proceedings against Donald Trump and 14 others for illegal attempts to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election, thus putting an end to the last criminal indictment of the American president.
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If a possible trial of Donald Trump seemed excluded while he was in the White House, this was not the case for his co-defendants, including his former lawyer Rudy Giuliani or his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
The prosecutor responsible for investigating the procedure recommended on Wednesday that all charges be dropped and Judge Scott McAfee immediately validated this request.
“It is not in the interest of the citizens of Georgia to pursue this case for another five to ten years,” prosecutor Peter Skandalakis said in his recommendation to drop the charges.
Mr. Skandalakis announced on November 14 that he had appointed himself to investigate this case after having contacted several prosecutors who all refused to take it on, without revealing their identity or the reasons given.
In December 2024, after the election of Donald Trump, the Georgia courts ordered the dismissal of prosecutor Fani Willis due to an intimate relationship with an investigator she had hired in this case. But she refused to cancel the procedure as requested by the defendants.
Trump’s “Mugshot” in 2023
Four of the 19 people initially targeted by the indictment issued on August 14, 2023, notably under a Georgia law on organized crime, had pleaded guilty and were sentenced to reduced sentences, without prison time, in exchange for their testimony at the future trial of the other accused.
It was this affair that led Donald Trump to go in August 2023 to the Fulton County jail, in Atlanta, the state capital, to take his famous “mugshot”, or judicial ID photo.
The investigation was triggered by a phone call in January 2021 from Donald Trump – the recording of which was made public – in which he asked a senior local official, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” the approximately 12,000 ballots in his name that he was missing to win the 16 electors of Georgia.
The sprawling indictment targeted a series of alleged illegal maneuvers during the 2020 election in seven crucial states, including Georgia.
The two federal proceedings against Donald Trump, for illegal attempts to reverse the results of the 2020 election, and for withholding classified documents after his departure from the White House, were dismissed after his election in November 2024.
The Department of Justice then concluded that its policy since the Watergate scandal in 1973, consisting of not prosecuting a sitting president, “applied to this unprecedented situation”.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, had been criminally convicted in New York State for hidden payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels but had obtained an exemption from sentence in January, ten days before taking office.
