New York: A local court in Georgia has dismissed a case, plagued by a prosecutorial scandal, against US President Donald Trump, charging him with conspiracy to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, which he lost.
Judge Scott McAfee dismissed the case on Wednesday (local time) after the prosecutor who took over the case, Peter Skandalakis, acknowledged he could not proceed with the case filed in 2023.
The case suffered a setback when local prosecutor Fani Willis, who brought the case in a Fulton County court, was removed from the case amid allegations involving her affair with a lawyer she appointed to help with the case.
Skandalakis, who is the executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, took over the case himself when no other prosecutor agreed to the task.
Trump would have faced prison terms of at least five years if he had been convicted.
This was the third case against him to be dropped after he returned to the White House.
Federal Special Prosecutor Jack Smith dropped a case against Trump, accusing him of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election and another charging him with illegally keeping top secret documents after leaving the White House in 2021.
The Georgia cases were also dropped against his codefendants, including Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor and Trump’s lawyer, and Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff.
Besides the complications of getting a sitting president to testify in a Georgia court, Skandalakis said that there may be problems with trying to prove his actions were driven by criminal intent.
When the case was filed in 2023, Trump surrendered in an Atlanta jail with a media circus and was released on $200,000 bond.
He was treated like anyone accused in a criminal case, and the sheriff’s booking photograph of him staring angrily into the camera was widely circulated.
The case centred around Trump and his associates claiming the 2020 election results were rigged to give Joe Biden the victory and trying to get the election results changed in Georgia so that he would get the electors from the state in the electoral college and win the election.
He allegedly pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who oversaw elections in the state, to change the results, the prosecution had contended.
He was quoted as telling him, “What 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.”
Trump’s lawyer in the case, Steve Sadow, said, “A fair and impartial prosecutor has put an end to this lawfare.”
“The political persecution of President Trump by disqualified DA (district attorney) Fani Willis is finally over,” he said.
Fani appointed Nathan Wade, a lawyer with no criminal experience, as a special prosecutor in the case.
During a divorce case brought by his wife, details of Wade’s affair with Willis emerged, including alleged financial improprieties and a conflict of interest involving vacations they took together.
A state appeals court ordered Willis off the case.
(IANS)
