A Georgia judge dismissed the 2020 election interference case against President Trump and more than a dozen of his allies and supporters Wednesday after the case’s new prosecutor moved for all charges to be dropped — saying pursuing the matter would be “unproductive.”
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee threw out the case less than an hour after Peter Skandalakis – who appointed himself as prosecutor after he failed to find anyone else willing to take the job following the ouster of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis – filed a motion to dismiss the case against Trump and 14 other co-defendants.
“This case is hereby dismissed in its entirety,” McAfee wrote in a one-paragraph ruling.
Skandalakis, the executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, acknowledged in his 23-page filing that the case “is on life support and the decision [on] what to do with it falls on me and me alone” before concluding that the appropriate authority to bring charges was former special counsel Jack Smith — who dropped his federal version of the Georgia indictment following Trump’s election in 2024, citing longstanding Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president.
“[I]f Special Counsel Jack Smith, with all the resources of the federal government at his disposal, after reviewing the evidence in this case and considering the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States, along with the years of litigation such a case would inevitably entail, concluded that prosecution would be fruitless,” Skandalakis wrote, “then I too find that, despite the available evidence, pursuing the prosecution of all those involved in State of Georgia v. Donald Trump, et al. on essentially federal grounds would be equally unproductive.”
Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, Steve Sadow, lauded the decision from Skandalakis, whom he called “a fair and impartial prosecutor.”
“The political persecution of President Trump by disqualified DA Fani Willis is finally over,” Sadow said. “This case should never have been brought. A fair and impartial prosecutor has put an end to this lawfare.”
Earlier this month, Skandalakis announced he was taking over the case because of his “inability to secure another conflict prosecutor” and the fact that a deadline to find someone to handle the high-profile case was fast-approaching, risking dismissal by default.
Willis brought state racketeering conspiracy charges against Trump and 18 of his associates in August 2023. By January 2024, the case was secondary to a scandal tied to Willis’ affair with Nathan Wade, whom she appointed as special prosecutor.
Wade was booted from the case in March 2024 after the pair were forced to admit during courtroom testimony they’d been in a romantic relationship, which has since ended.
Willis and her office were then barred from prosecuting the case by the Georgia Court of Appeals on June 3. In September 2025, Willis lost her fight to remain on the case when the Georgia Supreme Court declined to take up her appeal.
In his motion, Skandalakis listed a series of reasons to dismiss the case — including that it could take upwards of a decade to get to trial with Trump not set to leave office until January 2029, that the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia doesn’t have the resources to handle such a sweeping indictment, and that the racketeering conspiracy theory of the prosecution isn’t “viable.”
“Overt acts such as arranging a phone call, issuing a public statement, tweeting to the public to watch the Georgia Senate subcommittee hearings, texting someone to attend those hearings, or answering a 63-minute phone call without providing the context of that conversation, just to name a few examples, are not acts I would consider sufficient to sustain a RICO case,” Skandalakis wrote.
Wednesday’s dismissal means Trump no longer faces any open criminal cases.
However, he is appealing a Manhattan conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, for which he received no penalty at sentencing.
