Trump's team had fake electors forge and submit fraudulent documents to Congress and the National Archives dishonestly claiming to be the official Georgia results. This was straight up fraud.
Kenneth Chesebro, a Trump lawyer, pleaded guilty to felony fraud for the fake elector scheme.
Jenna Ellis, another Trump lawyer, pleaded guilty to felony perjury for making false statements about election fraud at a Georgia legislative hearing
Sidney Powell and Scott Graham Hall, more Trump lawyers, pleaded guilty to tampering with voting machines in Georgia
Trump didn't just tell Raffensperger to find 11,780 votes. He threatened to have Raffensperger prosecuted if he didn't find the votes. Raffensperger, who is a Republican and was a Trump supporter, has maintained that Trump was demanding that he illegally manufacture votes for Trump.
This lawsuit clearly was a viable RICO prosecution. The evidence of Trump crime is solid. If convicted, Trump probably could have easily gone to prison for a number of years.
Now Trump supporters are claiming that the prosecution was weaponized and bogus. That further erodes faith in both the rule of law and trust in government generally. For example, Fox News reports that Trump and allies describe the Georgia election case as a “witch hunt” and part of broader “lawfare” against him.
Once the statute of limitations for those crimes ends, apparently by January 2029, no further prosecution will be possible.
The core reason for the dismissal boils down to a purely subjective judgment by prosecutors. Did Trump, without explicitly stating it, instruct Georgia's Secretary of State to fictitiously or fraudulently produce enough votes to secure a victory in Georgia,” Or, did Trump genuinely believe that fraud had occurred, and was asking the Secretary of State to investigate to determine whether sufficient irregularities exist to change the election outcome. When multiple interpretations are equally plausible, the accused is entitled to the benefit of the doubt and should not be presumed to have acted criminally.
The ultimate question for whether the criminal prosecution against Trump should have been filed in the first place is simple: Are both interpretations equally plausible, or was Trump's track record sufficient to given him the benefit of a doubt about his own clearly false stolen election claims?
In his 2021 book, Integrity Counts, Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, was unequivocal about his interpretation of Trump's phone call asking him to "find" 11,080 votes. Raffensperger wrote: "the president was asking me to do something that I knew was wrong, and I was not going to do that.”
Given Trump’s documented pattern of anti‑democratic conduct and the one‑sided benefits of this dismissal, it is reasonable to treat dismissing the prosecution as a partisan accommodation unless and until the people involved can clearly and convincingly show a nonpolitical justification that truly matches the gravity of the case. Whatever self‑described motives drove the decision to drop the prosecution here, the effect is indistinguishable from a partisan decision to shield a president from accountability for attempting to subvert a free and fair election.
Discussion
By the time the Georgia RICO indictment was filed in August 2023, the public evidentiary record that the 2020 election was not stolen was already massive, multi‑layered, and years old. In view of Trump's solid track record of chronic lying, coupled with the evidence of a free and fair 2020 election, did all the evidence warrant giving Trump the benefit of a doubt that he really believed the 2020 election was stolen?
Was dismissal of this criminal prosecution unwarranted, unjustifiable and completely partisan, or were there legitimate concerns that dictated dismissing a criminal case of such enormous gravity?
Has the rule of law been vindicated here, or subverted?
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