A Georgia prosecutor has dropped pending charges against Donald Trump over allegations of 2020 election interference by the United States president and his allies.
Judge Scott McAfee granted the request to terminate the prosecution on Wednesday, putting an end to the last set of criminal charges against Trump.
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“This case is hereby dismissed in its entirety,” McAfee wrote.
State prosecutor Peter Skandalakis had sought the dismissal after he decided that any alleged wrongdoing by Trump should be prosecuted at the federal level, not the state level.
The case in Georgia focused on whether Trump and his co-defendants led a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Skandalakis argued that, while contesting the election is not a crime, the push to disrupt the certification of Biden’s victory “quickly shifted from a legitimate legal effort into a campaign that ultimately culminated in an attack on the Capitol” by Trump’s supporters on January 6, 2021.
But he noted in his dismissal filing that the state indictment “includes a significant number of overt acts … many of which occurred outside the state of Georgia, further reinforcing my view that this case is best pursued at the federal level rather than by an individual state”.
Trump faced four indictments in 2024, while he was out of office. Only one of the cases, in New York, proceeded to a trial.
He was found guilty of falsifying business records in relation to a hush money payment to an adult film actress and sentenced to “unconditional discharge”, escaping any penalty like fines, probation or jail time.
Two sets of federal charges against him — one over allegations of election meddling and another containing accusations of mishandling secret government documents — were dropped after Trump was re-elected president in November of last year.
The prosecution in the Georgia case had already faced a setback when Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was disqualified from the case for having a romantic relationship with one of her top deputies.
The criminal case in Georgia is the only one that saw Trump get arrested: In August 2023, he was required to turn himself in at the Fulton County Jail, in order to complete the booking and bail process.
The Republican leader never spent time in a jail cell, but he had his mugshot taken — a photo that he subsequently used to sell merchandise during his 2024 presidential campaign.
Prosecutors in the case argued that Trump and his co-defendants had sought to illegally pressure state officials into changing the outcome of the vote and present false Electoral College certificates to stir confusion.
One of the key pieces of evidence was a leaked phone call between Trump and the state’s top election official Brad Raffensperger.
In the December 2020 recording, Trump can be heard telling Raffensperger wants to “find 11,780 votes”, the precise number needed to reverse Biden’s victory in the critical southern swing state.
Trump has continued to reject Biden’s 2020 victory, falsely alleging that widespread voter fraud was behind the results.
The charges made use of the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law, a statute often applied to gangs and other organised criminal networks.
The US president — who made a stunning comeback in the 2024 presidential race — has always denied any wrongdoing, calling the criminal cases against him a politically motivated “witch hunt”.
In his reasoning for dropping the charges, Skandalakis acknowledged that the move to dismiss the case may anger some of Trump’s opponents.
“The role of a prosecutor is not to satisfy public opinion or achieve universal approval; such a goal is both unattainable and irrelevant to the proper exercise of prosecutorial discretion,” he wrote.
“My assessment of this case has been guided solely by the evidence, the law, and the principles of justice.”