Georgia RICO Case Against Donald Trump Dismissed

On Wednesday, a Georgia judge dismissed the  RICO election interference case brought against President Donald Trump by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. We can expect the entire MAGA world to celebrate this decision as a win against a political witch hunt. Trump’s legal team is already saying “fair and impartial prosecutor has put an end to this lawfare.”

In truth, there was no which hunt, there was no lawfare, and, essentially, the case was only dismissed outright because Trump became the president of the United States for a second time — after he inspired a domestic terrorist attack at the U.S. Capitol by spreading months of 2020 election fraud propaganda he pulled out of the same thin air that keeps his orange wig running away from his orange face.

According to NBC News, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee — who, in September 2024, tossed out two of the criminal counts against Trump and some of his co-defendants, while keeping the top charges intact —  ruled that the RICO case will be “dismissed in its entirety,” not because it didn’t have merit, but because of the impracticability of prosecuting a sitting president. The ruling was prompted by state prosecutor Peter Skandalakis, who moved to drop the case against Trump and his remaining co-defendants “to serve the interests of justice and promote judicial finality.”

“In my professional judgment, the citizens of Georgia are not served by pursuing this case in full for another five to ten years,” Skandalakis wrote.

From the New York Times:

Mr. Skandalakis concluded that the inquiry undertaken by Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department under President Biden, was the more appropriate venue for an investigation of Mr. Trump’s attempts to stay in power after the 2020 election. He added that the idea of pursuing a case against a sitting president in Georgia was impractical.

He noted that the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last year, which granted presidents “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for acts within their constitutional authority, meant that it would take “months, if not years” to litigate immunity issues in the Georgia courts — and that all of this would have to occur after Mr. Trump left office in 2029.

“Bringing this case before a jury in 2029, 2030 or even 2031 would be nothing short of a remarkable feat,” Mr. Skandalakis wrote, adding that “the citizens of Georgia are not served by pursuing this case in full for another five to ten years.”

During the 2024 presidential race, many people, namely, anti-Trump voters, speculated that Trump was only running for a second term to avoid criminal prosecutions. Many certainly believed that when Trump’s conservative friends in the Republican-controlled Supreme Court granted Trump presidential immunity last year, they had done so as a personal favor for the then-former president.

Skandalakis, on the other hand, suggests that his reasoning has nothing to do with any political agenda.

“As a former elected official who ran as both a Democrat and a Republican and now is 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,” he wrote in a statement.

Well, maybe. Although in his 22-page legal filing on the matter, Skandalakis made remarks that were eerily similar to those of your average Trump apologist, such as the argument that “it is not illegal to question or challenge election results.”

I actually addressed that stale talking point in a previous report:

Trump didn’t simply “challenge the election.” He, as the president of the United States, became a 24/7 lie-o-thon, claiming, based on nothing, that voting machines were rigged to change Trump votes to votes for President Joe Biden, that dead people’s names were being resurrected to cast ballots for Biden, that mail-in voting was being exploited for the purpose of cheating, and that election workers were stuffing ballots for Biden. These aren’t just challenges; they’re very specific allegations that Trump purported to be facts.

Trump pressured state officials to “find” votes in his favor. He threatened his own VP for not going along with his nonsense. He fired the head of election cybersecurity for not going along with his nonsense. He ignored the dozens of judges across lower courts, appellate courts and Supreme Courts that told him, unequivocally, that his legal team hadn’t provided evidence of a rigged election.

Giuliani has spent the last two years drowning in debt and legal woes due to his defamation campaign against  former Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea Arshaye “Shaye” Moss, whom the anti-Black bigot falsely claimed were caught on video exchanging USB drives “like they were vials of heroin or cocaine.” Even after Freeman testified before the Jan. 6 Committee about the violent threats and harassment she and her daughter received due to Trump falsely and repeatedly claiming they were involved in the election fraud that didn’t exist, the sitting president was still using his “Truth” Social platform to continue spreading lies about two civilians.

Even in his filing, Skandalakis appeared to jump back and forth between defending Trump by suggesting the case against him shouldn’t have been brought in the first place, as questioning the election isn’t illegal, to acknowledging that Trump’s “strategy” for overturning the election was legally problematic, and that a federal court might have ruled differently.

“As I have previously stated, contesting an election is not unlawful,” he wrote, according to NBC. “However, the strategy conceived in Washington, D.C., to contest the 2020 Presidential Election quickly shifted from a legitimate legal effort into a campaign that ultimately culminated in an attack on the Capitol, undertaken to prevent the Vice President from carrying out his ministerial duty of counting the electoral votes.”

Skandalakis said he believed the case would be “best pursued at the federal level.”

Skandalakis has dissected and criticized almost every decision made by Willis in pursuing the case, including allegations regarding the infamous phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, urging him to “find” votes in his favor in 2020. He argued that  “reasonable minds could differ” as to how to interpret that January 2021 call.

“One interpretation is that President Donald J. Trump, without explicitly stating it, is instructing the Secretary of State to fictitiously or fraudulently produce enough votes to secure a victory in Georgia,” Skandalakis wrote. “An alternative interpretation is that President Donald J. Trump, genuinely believing fraud had occurred, is asking the Secretary of State to investigate and determine whether sufficient irregularities exist to change the election outcome.”

That certainly is a lot of benefit of the doubt being granted to a president who is still presently lying about the election being stolen from him.

As for the more than a dozen additional defendants in the RICO case, it looks like they’re all off the hook as well.

“Some may argue that cases against the campaign attorneys and advisors should proceed even if President Trump is removed from the indictment,” Skandalakis wrote. “However, I am extremely reluctant to criminalize the act of attorneys providing flawed legal advice to the President of the United States under these circumstances.”

The Trump administration loves to repeat the words “no one is above the law” — as the president pressures the Department of Justice to bring transparently retaliatory cases against his political rivals — but, apparently, it’s the creation of this very administration that has placed Trump and his minions above the law. He’s president, so now, nothing he did was illegal, and if it was, there’s nothing that can be done about it now.

That’s the message being sent here.

But MAGA, amirite?

SEE ALSO:

Is Musk’s Sweepstakes Scheme Election Interference?

Trump MAGA Lawyer Pleads Guilty In RICO Case

Trump Lawyer: Fani Willis Playing The Race Card

Judge Dismisses RICO Election Interference Case Against Trump, But Not Because It Had No Merit. Let’s Talk About It was originally published on newsone.com