President Donald Trump . Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder
When the Georgia Supreme Court handed Pete Skandalakis a steaming pile of horse manure, he did what any reasonable person would do in such a situation: He disposed of it as quickly and efficiently as possible, recommending that all remaining state criminal charges against President Trump be dropped.
He was right to do so.
The job had landed in Skandalakis’s lap after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who had initially filed those cases, was disqualified from handling them. The duty of deciding how to proceed thus devolved to Skandalakis as head of the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia. His decision means that all criminal cases filed against Trump for his conduct after the 2020 election, state or federal, have now become moot. No jury will ever hear the evidence and pass judgment on what occurred, leaving the final verdict to history.
According to some, however, the decision by Skandalakis means that Trump has been vindicated of the charges against him, and that is emphatically false.
In a letter explaining his decision, Skandalakis does conclude that the evidence against some of Trump’s 18 co-defendants in the case was too weak to justify prosecution. In his judgment, for example, there was no evidence that the “false electors” indicted by Willis had acted with criminal intent, a conclusion that seems correct. Skandalakis suggests instead that those electors had been honestly misled by Trump attorneys and advisors, and that if any criminality is involved, they are to blame.
However, in discussing his decision not to pursue charges against Trump, he makes no suggestion of innocence or weak evidence. Instead, his argument is grounded in sheer practicality.
“Never before, and hopefully never again, will our country face circumstances such as these,” Skandalakis writes. “The case is now nearly five years removed from President Trump’s phone call with the secretary of state, and two years have passed since the grand jury returned charges against President Trump and the 18 other defendants. There is no realistic prospect that a sitting president will be compelled to appear in Georgia to stand trial on the allegations in this indictment.”
“And even if, by some extraordinary circumstance, President Donald J. Trump were to appear in Georgia on Jan. 21, 2029 — the day after his term concludes — an immediate jury trial would be impossible.”
In fact, given the inevitable appeals and delays, “bringing this case before a jury in 2029, 2030, or even 2031 would be nothing short of a remarkable feat.”
Skandalakis also makes clear his belief that a conspiracy to overturn the election may very well have been underway, but it was a conspiracy hatched and carried out in Washington, D.C., not in Georgia, and thus any prosecution of those responsible is a federal, not a state, responsibility.
“Contesting an election is not unlawful,” he writes. “Both Congress and state legislatures have long recognized this principle and have enacted detailed procedures to permit such challenges. 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.”
That campaign, he writes, bore evil fruit:
“But for this plan to use the fraudulent elector certificates to disrupt the congressional certification on Jan. 6, 2021, law-abiding citizens in Georgia, misled by campaign attorneys, some of whom were themselves misled, would not have served as Republican electors or cast electoral votes for the Republican candidate…
“But for the plan to stop the electoral count, President Trump’s phone call to the secretary of state would have been merely the conversation of a losing candidate struggling to accept defeat…
“And but for the plan driven by select individuals meeting in Washington, D.C., we would not have Fulton County grand juries selectively determining who should be charged with providing false statements to legislative committees convening on state Capitol grounds. Nor would we have had individuals encouraged by the false cries of voter fraud to harass and threaten an innocent poll worker,” a clear reference to Ruby Freeman.
As I said, that is not a vindication.
Some of our fellow Americans are trying to rewrite history, trying to convince us that we did not see what we all saw happen, that those who perpetrated a conspiracy against our democracy are in fact the victims of a conspiracy. Fifty years from now, I’m afraid, Americans will still be debating the events surrounding Jan. 6, much like some today still debate the JFK assassination or even the moon landing. It’s important to remember and pass down the truth.