Willis was removed from the case after the court determined a romantic relationship with a special prosecutor assigned to the case created an “appearance of impropriety.”<\/p>\n
Skandalakis, executive director of the nonpartisan agency Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, appointed himself to the case after Willis’ disqualification and when other state prosecutors declined to take the case.<\/p>\n
In Wednesday’s motion to a Fulton County judge, Skandalakis said he was discontinuing the case “to serve the interests of justice and promote judicial finality.”<\/p>\n
“As a former elected official who ran as both a Democrat and a Republican and now is the Executive Director of a non-partisan agency, this decision is not guided by a desire to advance an agenda but is based on my beliefs and understanding of the law,” Skandalakis added.<\/p>\n
Willis began investigating the case in February 2021 after The Washington Post published a recording of Trump speaking with the state’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” Trump is heard saying in the 2 January, 2021, call. That was margin by which he lost the state to Joe Biden. <\/p>\n
Willis filed an indictment in August 2023 alleging that Trump conspired with 18 other defendants to interfere in the election result. The charges included racketeering and other state offences.<\/p>\n
The group “refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump”.<\/p>\n
The dismissal of the case also includes charges against Trumps’s 18 co-defendants, including former New York mayor and Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, chief of staff during Trump’s first presidency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Willis was removed from the case after the court determined a romantic relationship with a special prosecutor assigned…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":284741,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-284740","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}