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Okay, let's get right into it.

We are focusing today on a well, a truly pivotal and frankly unexpected end to the whole legal saga surrounding the twenty twenty election, and the entire story, the final chapter is rooted in the state of Georgia.

It just reached a very abrupt conclusion this week.

It really did, and the finality of it is what's so striking.

On Wednesday, November twenty six, twenty twenty five, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee.

He granted a motion, a very simple motion, a.

Very simple motion to dismiss the entire election interference case against President Trump and you know, all his remaining co defendants.

And there was no long drawn out opinion, was there, No, not at.

All, just a concise order.

It basically said the charges would dropped.

The case is closed, full stop.

You know, when this all started, I think a lot of us in the legal world we really believe that this case, the Georgia ra Aco case, was the most robust one, oh absolutely, and more importantly, the one most likely to actually go to trial.

And that was because it was a state charge, not a federal one.

Why was that distinction so critical?

That distinction was it was everything in American law.

State charges they just operate completely independently of federal policies, so they aren't subject to that long standing DOJ policy that says you can't indict a sitting president.

So the thinking was, even if Trump won reelection, this case in Georgia would just keep going.

It was insulated.

It was supposed to be the firewall.

That was the word everyone used, and yet here we.

Are, here we are that firewall failed.

So this dismissal, it confirms this was the last remaining criminal case against the president from all those efforts in twenty twenty.

And it's gone not because of a jury, but because a new prosecutor just looked at it and made a completely different legal assessment.

It's a perfect example of how, you know, procedure and timing can sometimes completely overtake the actual substance of the law exactly.

The case was supposed to be immune to politics, but it was undone by well the internal politics, the conduct of the prosecutor's office itself.

So our mission today is to really unpack all of this.

We need to go through the timeline, which is just incredibly tangled, starting with that first indictment right.

And trace how it all fell apart procedurally.

We have to dissect the legal drama that got the prosecutor disqualified, analyzed the arguments the new prosecutor used, and then and I think this is the most important part.

We need to look forward.

Yes, what does this all mean for Georgia for its elections, especially with the twenty twenty six midterms coming up.

It's essential to remember just how big this thing was when it started back in twenty twenty three.

I think only by understanding the sheer scope of it can we really appreciate how big this reversal is.

It was a legal behemoth, no question.

Let's rewind then August twenty twenty three, the whole world is watching as a Fulton County grand jury files this just massive indictment nineteen defendants.

I mean that alone tells you the scale.

And the names are huge.

Donald Trump, of course, Mark Meadows's former chief of staff, Rudy Giuliani.

What made this case feel so much more sprawling than the other ones.

Well, the core allegation was the sweeping, months long conspiracy.

The goal was to unlawfully change the presidential election results, specifically in Georgia.

The state he lost by what less than twelve thousand votes?

Exactly?

It was razor thin, but What made it feel so sprawling was the legal tool they chose to use, Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Correct Organizations Act.

I am, And that's a word we hear all the time with you know, organized crime, the mafia, drug cartels.

Applying a state racketeering law to a political dispute that felt like a huge sleep.

It was an enormous sleep, and that was the genius.

But also, you know, the ultimate controversy of the whole case.

So how did the Folden County DA's office even argue that I CO applied here?

Well, I am.

Whether it's the state or federal version, it's designed to prosecute a sustained pattern of racketeering activity.

That pattern a pattern by people who are operating as a quote, criminal enterprise.

It lets prosecutors connect a whole bunch of seemingly separate illegal.

Acts like phone calls, meetings, documents.

Right, all these different overt acts, as they're called, committed by different people, but all under the umbrella of one single criminal goal, in this case, overturning the election.

So instead of nineteen different little cases, it was one giant case.

Everyone was a participant in this one big enterprise precisely.

The indictment had thirteen criminal counts against Trump alone, but that overarching icocount, that was the engine pulling everything together.

And they argue the enterprise started right after he lost the election.

Yes, that the defendants unlawfully conspired and endeavored to conduct and participate in a criminal enterprise with the single goal of keeping him in power.

It allowed them to bring in everything.

Let's talk about some of those key overt acts, because these are the specific things the new prosecutor, Pete Scandalacus later picked apart.

Okay, Yes, the most famous one, the one everyone knows, was that recorded phone call in January twenty twenty one, the Raffensberger call, the Raffensberger call, where Trump asked Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger too, and this is the quote fined eleven seven hundred and eighty votes.

Which was exactly one more vote than he needed to win the.

State, exactly one more.

So that call was cited as soliciting election fraud, a clear criminal act.

But it went way beyond just that one call, oh.

Way beyond.

There are several distinct parts to the conspiracy.

First, you had the whole scheme with the alternate.

Electors, right, the group that met in the Georgia State capitol.

They met in December twenty twenty, signed these documents that falsely claimed Trump had won the state, and then tried to send them to Congress, even though Biden's victory had already been certified, and.

The prosecution treated that not as some political stunt but as a criminal act forgery false statements exactly.

Then you had the whole effort to access sensitive voting equipment.

This was in Coffee County, right, a pretty rural part of the state.

That's right.

High profile allies allegedly told people to go gain unauthorized physical access to voting machines and data.

The idea was to copy everything, supposedly to find.

Fraud, but the prosecution called it what it was, computer trespass and theft.

So you had direct pressure on officials, the fake elector scheme, and a physical breach of voting systems.

It was that variety that made the RCO case feel so powerful, but.

It was also what made it so controversial.

Some legal scholars were really worried about this.

Weren't they about using RC in a political context.

The big concern was about free speech, about political advocacy.

I mean a lot of the alleged over acts were just conversations or meetings or even public statements, things that.

Normally would be protected political activity.

Right critics were saying the prosecution was trying to criminalize the act of advocating for overturning an election, not just clear crimes like bribery or hacking.

So the whole case rested on this very fine line between political speech and criminal conspiracy.

It did Kcustion had to prove that the pattern of all these acts showed a criminal enterprise, not just a bunch of people who were angry they lost and were trying every legal trick in the book.

It was a high bar.

And then there were the visuals of this case, which was just unprecedented.

Absolutely nothing more so than in August twenty twenty three when Trump actually surrendered at the Atlanta.

JL He was there for what twenty minutes.

Just over twenty minutes, but it led to something we'd never seen before.

A former president's official mugshot, a.

Photo that he immediately started putting on merchandise.

Which just shows you how this whole thing transcended the courtroom.

For one side, that photo was a symbol of accountability.

For the other, it was a symbol of political persecution.

And we should remember, before this all fell apart, the prosecution was actually getting some wins.

That's a crucial point.

Four of the co defendants had already taken plea.

Deals attorney Sidney Powell and Jenna.

Ellis right and Scott Hall, a bail bondsman, and Kenneth Cheesebrow, another lawyer.

They all please guilty and agreed to cooperate, which.

At the time seemed like a huge signal.

It suggested the state's evidence was strong enough to make people flip.

It added a lot of weight to the case against the remaining fourteen defendants.

It really looked like this thing was moving forward, until, of course, it wasn't.

So the drama shifts.

It goes from the substance of the indictment to the procedural disaster that unraveled the whole thing.

The disqualification of Funny Willis.

This part of the story reads like a legal thriller.

Where did the first cracks start to show?

The first cracks came from allegations about a romantic relationship between the DA Funny Willis and Nathan Wade.

Who was the special prosecutor she hired to lead this very case exactly.

The defense attorneys grabbed onto this and alleged it was a conflict of interest or at the very least an appearance of impropriety.

And the claim was that Willis had financially benefited from the prosecution.

That was the core of it.

The claim was that Wade was paid significant fees for his role and that he then used some of that money to pay for vacations he and Willison together.

Which led to this extraordinary courtroom testimony in early twenty twenty four.

Both Willis and Wade had to get on the stand under oath.

It was incredible to watch.

They admitted the relationship existed, but Willis was adamant that it started after she appointed Wade and.

That it had no bearing on the case right.

But the defense attorneys just hammered them on the timeline, on the finances, arguing it completely undermined public trust in the prosecution.

Initially, though, Judge McFee seemed like he wanted to find a middle ground.

His first ruling wasn't a full disqualification.

No, his first ruling in March twenty twenty four was conditional.

He said the relationship had created that appearance of impropriety, but he didn't find an actual disqualifying conflict.

So he said Willis could stay on the case, but only if Nathan Wade resigned.

Right, and Wade resigned almost immediately.

For a moment there it looked like the prosecution had dodged a bullet.

They had survived.

But the defense lawyers didn't stop there.

They appealed.

They put back hard.

They argued that the damage was done, that the appearance of impropriety was enough on its own to warrant removing Willis in her entire office from the case.

And that argument is what finally worked.

It's what prevailed.

In December twenty twenty four, the Georgia Court of Appeals reversed McAfee's ruling.

This is the key moment, and.

They focused on that specific legal standard, the appearance of impropriety.

That's right.

They said, the public's faith in the integrity of the whole proceeding had just been damaged beyond repair.

It wasn't about whether she was biased, It was about whether it looked like she could be.

So allowing her to stay even without Roe v.

Wade, it just wasn't enough to restore that public confidence exactly.

The Court of Appeals found that the only way to fix it, to restore trust, was to remove Willis and the entire Fulton County DA's office from the case.

It was a catastrophic blow to the prosecution.

Willis fought it, of course, she appealed her removal to the state's highest court.

She did, but in September twenty twenty five, the Georgia Supreme Court just declined to eat and hear her.

Appeal, and that made it final.

That made the Court of Appeals ruling final.

Finny Willis was officially permanently out, and suddenly this massive prosecution, two years in the making, was an orphan.

It had no prosecutor and the job of finding a replacement, which sounds like the worst job in American.

Law and truly poisoned chalice.

That job fell to the nonpartisan Prosecuting Attorney's Council of Georgia and its director, Pete Scandalacus, and he really struggled.

Struggled is putting it mildly.

He later described it as a near impossible task.

He called prosecutors all over the state, begging someone to take.

It on to inherit the political attacks, the media scrutiny a nineteen defendant Riqo.

Case, and his conclusion was blunt.

He said all were respectful and professional.

Each declined the appointment.

No one wanted it.

I mean, you can see why you take that case.

You immediately have a massive target on your back.

It could end your career, absolutely, But the clock was ticking.

Judge McAfee had set a hard deadline of November fourteen, twenty twenty five.

If there was no new prosecutor by then, the whole case could have just been dismissed by default.

So Scandalacus had to do something.

He was forced to act, so just before the deadline earlier in November, he appointed himself to the case.

Reluctantly.

It seems very reluctantly.

He said.

It was because of his inability to secure another conflict prosecutor.

He basically said he stepped in just to prevent the case from vanishing on a technicality, because the public had a legitimate interest in seeing it.

Through, and he immediately ran into a huge logistical problem, didn't.

They a staggering one?

He pointed out that Willis's office had only just delivered the case.

File to him, and it wasn't a small file.

It was a mountain of material, literally one hundred and one boxes of documents and an eight terabyte hard drive.

He'd barely even started to review the evidence when he had to make this monumental decision.

The time pressure was just extreme, which brings.

Us to the core of it all.

The motion to dismiss Pete scandalacus after just a few weeks on the job files twenty two page document.

What was his main reason for dropping a case that had been in the headlines for years.

His stated reason was to serve the interests of justice and promote judicial finality.

But the real heart of his argument the bombshell was a fundamental attack on the case's jurisdiction.

Okay, he argued, and this is the quote that changes everything, that the federal government is the appropriate venue for this prosecution, not the state of Georgia.

Wait, that turns the entire original premise of the case on.

Its head, completely on its head.

The whole reason they brought it in Georgia was to get away from federal jurisdiction and its limitations.

For the new prosecutor to say it should have been federal all along.

That is a stunning reversal.

It is the ultimate legal irony of this entire saga.

Skandalik Is basically argued that the original prosecutors had overreached, that they tried to apply a state law to what was, in his assessment, a fundamentally national political crisis.

He said, the whole thing was conceived in Washington, d c.

Not the state of Georgia.

That was his line.

Yes, So let's break down his legal reasoning.

Why did he think that all those over acts we talked about, the phone calls, the meetings, the tweets, why couldn't they support a state racketeering case.

He took a very a very granular look at where those acts actually happened.

The original indictment listed dozens of them, but Scandalacus pointed out that a lot of them, maybe most of them, Arranging phone calls from the White House, posting on social media, coordinating legal strategy, all of that happened outside of Georgia.

So he's saying Georgia's courts didn't have jurisdiction over those actions.

He was suggesting that those were not acts I would consider sufficient to build this incredibly complex, multi defendant state ari Eco case on.

So to succeed with the state Rkaco case, you need to show the criminal enterprise was really localized in Georgia.

Yes, cohesive and localized.

Scandalacus was implying that this enterprise was just too spread out, too rooted in DC and national politics to fit properly with within George's criminal law.

But what about the Raffensburger call or the voting machine breach in Coffee County.

Those things absolutely happen inside Georgia.

And that's a great point.

They were certainly enough to charge individual crimes in Georgia.

No question, but not enough for the whole Reicho enterprise charge.

In his view, No, for Reiko, you need that sustained, interconnected pattern.

His motion suggests that the federal nature of the core conspiracy, which was trying to stop the transfer of power in DC, it just overshadowed the few localized acts in Georgia.

He saw those Georgia acts as just you know, tributaries flowing from the main river in Washington.

And he used the fate of the federal case Jack Smith's case to really hammer this point home.

Ah, this was the masterful part of his legal strategy.

He pointed out that Jack Smith, with all the resources of the entire US government, had already dropped his federal election case after Trump won reelection.

Because of that DOJ policy against prosecuting as sitting president.

Right and Scandalacus drew a dire line between the two.

His argument was, look, if Jack Smith, who investigated the federal core of this conspiracy, concluded that prosecuting it would be fruitless, then why would I, a state prosecutor, think that pursuing a weaker state level version would be anything other than equally unproductive.

So he's basically saying the federal case was a stronger one, and since even that case was abandoned for political reasons, the state case had lost all its strategic value.

Exactly.

He wrapped his whole decision in this cloak of judicial efficiency and practicality.

Why waste George's money on this sprawling, complicated case when the main venue has already packed it in and.

The defensive course loved this.

Trump's lead attorney in Georgia, Steve Sadow, he immediately praised the decision.

He jumped on it.

He said, quote the political persecution of President Trump by disqualified DA Fannie Willis is finally over.

He used the term lawfair.

He did, A fair and impartial prosecutor has put an end to this law fair.

That language is important frames the dismissal not as a neutral legal decision, but as the correction of a political injustice.

It validates their narrative.

Did Scandalacus acknowledge the political firestorm his decision would create, the public outrage from people who saw this as the last chance for accountability.

He did directly in his motion, he wrote, I recognize that given the deep political divisions in our country, this decision will not be universally popular.

He even mentioned getting threats, yes, that he.

And his family had received threats after he took the case, But he insisted his role was not to satisfy a public opinion.

He said his decision was guided solely by the evidence, the law, and the principles of justice.

So he's positioning himself as the sober, non political actor cleaning up a.

Mess, a mess created by his predecessor, scandal and in his view, strategic overreach.

Let's pull back, then and look at the bigger picture.

With the Georgia case gone, the last criminal prosecution related to the twenty twenty election is over.

When you look at all foreign die he faced, how does the president emerge from all this?

He emerges well, remarkably unscathed, particularly from any legal fight related to his time in office.

This dismissal in Georgia is the final piece of that puzzle, and.

It reinforces a very clear pattern, a.

Very clear pattern that the institutional and constitutional shields around a sitting president are for the most part, insurmountable for prosecutors.

The two big federal cases from Jack Smith were the first to go.

Just remind us why those were.

Dropped, the two federal prosecutions, one on election interference and the other on the class by documents.

They were both dropped right after Trump one reelection.

It was a direct result of that DOJ policy we mentioned, the one that says you can indict a sitting president.

So years of investigation just poof rendered moot the moment he was back in the White House.

That's the legal reality of it.

If the case is federal, the election calendar can become the single most important legal factor.

And even the one case that did get a conviction, the New York case, yes, the Heish money case, even that ended with a very mitigated outcome.

That's a good way to put it.

He was convicted on thirty four felony counts in June of twenty twenty four, but when it came to sentencing, he received what's called an unconditional discharge.

And what does that mean in practice?

An unconditional discharge, it.

Means the conviction stands.

He is legally a convicted felon, but the court decided to impose zero penalty, no fine, no probation, no jail time, nothing.

So the coach just said, you're guilty, but we're not going to do anything about it.

Essentially, yes, it fell to many like a political resolution, not a typical criminal sentence.

It leaves him with the symbolic stain of a conviction, but with no practical limits on his freedom or his ability to govern.

So across the board, the cases are all functionally dead.

And the Georgia case, the one that was supposed to be the fail safe, the one immune to all this, it was undone by internal mistakes and a new prosecutor with a totally different legal theory.

It really reinforces the doubts that many people have from the very beginning.

The system's ability to prosecute a sitting president or a candidate who becomes president is just incredibly limited, and Georgia shows that even a state case can be torpedoed by scandal.

All right, now, we have to shift gears because the sources make it very clear that while the legal fight over twenty twenty is over, the political fight over the next election in Georgia is just heating up.

That's right.

With this legal cloud gone, Republican lawmakers in the state are turning their full attention to changing election laws before the twenty twenty six midterms.

And the language being used is pretty intense.

The reports say they're laying the groundwork to pass an avalanche of voter suppression laws.

An avalanche, Yes, that suggests a really broad, coordinated push, not just a few minor tweaks.

They're aiming to radically change how elections are run in the state.

So what specific parts of the voting system are they targeting.

They're going after pretty much every mechanism that expanded voting access in recent years, especially in the more urban democratic.

Areas, things like mail in voting gutting.

Vote by mail is number one on the list, but also scrapping the use of electronic voting machines entirely.

Wow, that would be a huge logistical.

Change, a massive change.

And they're also proposing this new very aggressive monetary reward system for mass voter purges.

A monetary reward system, how would that even work?

The proposal would basically pay private citizens to challenge the eligibility of other voters, So you.

Could get paid for getting people kicked off the voter.

Rolls if your challenges are successful.

Yes.

Pro voting groups are terrified of this.

They say it will deputize partisan activists to just weaponize challenges and try to purge voters in specific neighborhoods or districts.

And what's the logic behind scrapping the electronic voting machines.

It's all driven by those lingering unsubstantiated claims of fraud.

From twenty twenty, the demand from activists is to switch the entire state to hand marked paper ballots.

Proponents say that creates a paper trail, but what's the downside?

The downside is it would be a logistical nightmare.

Imagine hand counting millions of ballots in a statewide election.

The time it would take the potential for human error, It would be enormous.

The sources really highlight one person, Janis Johnston, the vice chair of the Georgia State Election Board.

She's described as a noted election denier.

And she's acting as a key advocate for these changes.

She presented a whole wish list to a state legislative committee back in October.

What was on her.

List Beyond the handmarked paper ballots, she wants to require handwritten, numbered voter lists instead of the electronic poll books they use now.

That would slow down lines at polling places significantly.

And she's going after absentee voting too.

Oh yeah, she wants to get rid of no excuse absentee voting entirely, and on dalla drop boxes.

She was very clear, she said ballot drop boxes were a pandemic response, They're no longer needed and should be removed.

So this is a clear effort to roll back all the expansions that were put in place around twenty twenty.

Complete rollback.

And what's interesting is a lot of these are the same rules the state Election Board tried to impose on their own before the twenty twenty four.

Election, and a judge blocked them.

A judge blocked them, calling them illegal, unconstitutional, and void.

So now they're trying to get the legislature to pass them into law to get around that judge's ruling.

So the state level fight is intense, but the sources also point to something else happening at the federal level.

The Department of Justice is reportedly looking into false claims of twenty twenty fraud in Fulton County.

This is deeply concerning to election officials because this federal activity, whatever it's real purpose, it just pours gasoline on the fire of distrust at the state level.

And this is the current administration's DOJ.

The reports say that Ed Martin, who is the DOJ parton attorney and also heads this vague weaponization task force, is one looking into it, and.

He's demanding access to ballots.

He allegedly sent a letter to a Fulton County judge demanding immediate access to one hundred and forty eight thousand absentee ballots from twenty twenty that are being stored in a warehouse.

So this gives a kind of official credibility to claims that have been debunked over and over again in court.

Precisely, it sustains the narrative that the twenty twenty election was fraudulent, which then becomes the justification for that avalanche of new restrictive voting laws at the state level.

It's a feedback loop.

What is the ultimate fear here among election integrity advocates if you have this federal activity and this state legislative push happening at the same time, The.

Fear is twofold.

First, as you said, it just sows more discord and distrust.

But second, and this is the bigger fear, is that this could give the federal administration an avenue to take control of elections in Georgia.

How so, well, if the DOJ were to issue a report, however flawed, saying there was massive fraud or systemic failure in Fulton County, it could be used as a pretext for some kind of federal intervention in how elections are run there, overwriting local officials.

So the end of the twenty twenty criminal cases hasn't brought closure.

It's just opened up a new front in the political battle over how future elections will be conducted.

That's the paradox exactly.

The legal drama is over, but the political war over the mechanics of voting is just beginning.

So let's try to summarize the whole arc of this story.

The Georgia case, which everyone saw as the most durable legal threat to the president, was ultimately brought down by a cascade of failures.

It started with that procedural scandal, the relationship between the prosecutor, Fenny Willis and Nathan Wade, which led to her disqualification based on that appearance of impropriety standard.

And that created a leadership vacuum that no one else wanted to fill, which forced Pete Scandalves to take over.

And after just a quick review, he came to the devastating conclusion that the whole case was built on the wrong legal theory, that the crimes were federal not.

State, which, as he said, is just profoundly ironic.

The case was designed to escape the federal system, but it died because the new prossecut Cokeuter, said it belonged in the federal system.

A system that had already abandoned its own case because of presidential immunity.

It raises a huge question about whether you can ever successfully prosecute a high level political figure for this kind of conduct.

For those who wanted accountability, this must feel like a total institutional failure where procedural mistakes and political timing provided the ultimate escape patch.

Absolutely, But for the other side, for the defense, this is proof that the whole thing was a politically motivated lawfare campaign that the system finally corrected.

It sets a really sobering precedent.

It shows that when you're prosecuting someone at that level, the conduct of the prosecutors has to be absolutely flawless.

There's no room for.

Error, none at all.

Accountability in this kind of high stakes context is just extraordinarily difficult to achieve.

So as you watch all of this evolve, here's a final thought to consider.

With all these detailed plans now being pushed in Georgia to overhaul the state's election systems before twenty twenty six, targeting everything from dropboxes to voting machines, the criminal cases might be over, but the debate over how we vote is only just beginning, And a question that leaves us with is this, how much power should the federal government have to investigate local election integrity claims, especially when some local politicians are the ones pushing the very restrictive laws that fuel that distrust, that balance between state control, federal oversight, and the right to vote.

That's the real legacy of this case, and it's what will shape Georgia's politics for years to come.