Donald Trump has a lot to be thankful for this week. On Wednesday, a Georgia prosecutor decided to drop criminal charges accusing the president of conspiring to overturn his 2020 defeat in the state. While good news for Trump, it was bad news for the rule of law and history itself.
Peter Skandalakis’ decision not only lets the president get away with his outrageous effort at election interference in a critical swing state, but his rendition of what Trump did and why he did it muddies the historical record. As the New York Times noted, Skandalakis, who is the executive director of the state’s nonpartisan prosecutor council, “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 did so in the face of a mountain of evidence that Trump’s conduct in the Peach State was particularly egregious. Not only did the president enlist a rogue’s gallery of co-conspirators to threaten state election officials, but early in January 2021, he also asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes that would reverse his defeat.
As Trump put it in an hour-long conference call to the secretary, “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state… 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.”
“There’s no way I lost Georgia,” Trump added. “There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
When Raffensperger resisted his entreaties, Trump threatened him. If he didn’t determine that thousands of ballots in Fulton County were cast illegally or destroyed, the secretary would be subject to criminal liability.
When Raffensperger refused, Trump warned, “You have a big election coming up, and because of what you’ve done to the president — you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam. Because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t going out to vote, and a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative because they hate what you did to the president.”
Surely, this was one of the most infamous exchanges in which a person serving as president of the United States had ever participated. It was also criminal.
Surely, this was one of the most infamous exchanges in which a person serving as president of the United States had ever participated. It was also criminal.
That’s what a grand jury found when it indicted the president and his accomplices on racketeering charges in August 2023. As the Times observed, Trump’s indictment “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…would soon embrace his scowling mug shot as a symbol of defiance [that] his campaign [marketed] on coffee mugs, posters and pins.”
When the indictment was handed down, the case against Trump appeared strong and the evidence compelling. In the event of a conviction, he could not have pardoned himself because the indictment was brought at the state level, and he would not have been saved by the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision, which applies only to prosecutions brought by the federal government.
But the case soon got caught up in a soap opera involving Willis, who was accused of violating professional ethics for having an affair with a lawyer whom she had hired as the case’s lead prosecutor.
Although she denied any wrongdoing, Willis was removed from the case in December 2024. As a result, the council that Skandalakis heads was left with the unenviable task of finding someone to lead the prosecution of a criminal defendant who, even after his indictment in Georgia, once again resided at the White House.
Earlier this month, apparently after looking in the mirror, Skandalakis announced he had found the man for the job. He assured everyone that he had no agenda and assumed responsibility for the case against Trump “only after careful and deliberate consideration.”
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In his Wednesday motion seeking the dismissal of the case, which was quickly approved by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, Skandalakis sounded that theme again. The case against the president, as well as the others, was, as he put it, already “on life support.”
“But unlike family members who must make the emotional decision to withdraw loved ones from life-sustaining treatment, I have no emotional connection to this case,” he claimed. “As a former elected official who ran as both a Democrat and a Republican and now is the Executive Director of a non-partisan 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 even quoted former U.S. Attorney General Robert Jackson, whose views about the power and responsibility of prosecutors are widely admired. If ever the Shakespearean warning about those who “doth protest too much” seemed apt, Skandalakis’ overly long preface to his motion surely qualifies.
Nevertheless, it didn’t take him too long to show his hand. “It is not illegal,” he said, “to question or challenge election results. Our nation’s foundational principles of free speech and electoral scrutiny are rooted in this very freedom.”
Then, in a strange moment of “whataboutism” he added, “The State of Georgia is no stranger to such challenges. In 2018, Ms. Stacey Abrams questioned the legitimacy of Brian Kemp’s victory in the gubernatorial race. Likewise, in 2020, many Republicans struggled to accept the reality that President Donald J. Trump did not win the popular vote in Georgia or in other key states and therefore lost the presidential race.”
After this, Skandalakis went through the indictment point by point. He poked holes in everything Willis had done and, as if writing lines provided by the president himself, Skandalakis concluded that “at no point did Meadows or [Trump] explicitly solicit the Secretary of State to violate his oath of office.”
Then, having reached that judgment, he doubled back to offer alternative interpretations of what Trump said and did. In one, he suggested that Trump was “instructing the Secretary of State to fictitiously or fraudulently produce enough votes to secure a victory in Georgia.”
But in another, Trump, “genuinely believing fraud had occurred,” merely asked the Raffensperger “to investigate and determine whether sufficient irregularities exist to change the election outcome.”
How the statement “I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break,” can reasonably be interpreted as a request “to investigate and determine whether sufficient irregularities exist to change the election outcome” is beyond me.
If there were indeed different plausible interpretations of what the president did and why he did it, resolving those differences should have been left for a jury to decide following a full adversarial trial. Instead of letting that process play out, Skandalakis has whitewashed history and deprived all of us, and future generations, of the chance to make up our own minds about what did — and could have — happened in Georgia in 2020 and 2021.
