Donald Trump won’t stand trial related to his allegedly criminal efforts to overturn the 2020 election results — at least not anytime soon. With his presidential victory, the federal election interference case’s demise is inevitable, and the Georgia state election interference case won’t proceed against him while he’s in office.
But state criminal charges — which presidents can’t get dismissed or pardon — are still set to proceed against Trump allies. That is, while the main defendant runs the country, others still face possible criminal consequences in connection with their alleged efforts to ensure that Trump held power despite losing the 2020 election. (Trump pleaded not guilty in all four of his criminal cases.)
We got two recent reminders of these ongoing state cases.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi on Sunday that she has no intention of dropping the case against Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows and others who have also pleaded not guilty. “A grand jury in the state of Arizona decided that these individuals who engaged in an attempt to overthrow our democracy in 2020 should be held accountable, so we won’t be cowed, we won’t be intimidated,” she said. (I previously explored the somewhat odd situation of Trump not being charged in Arizona despite the grand jury’s apparent interest in him as a defendant.)
In the state case in which Trump has been charged, one of his co-defendants, Meadows, got some bad news from the Supreme Court on Tuesday. It declined to consider his attempt to shift his Georgia charges to federal court, removing a potential complication in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ racketeering case. Of course, complications remain in the case that’s currently tied up on a pretrial appeal in the defense effort to disqualify Willis.
We don’t know how either case will turn out against these other defendants. But a feature of Trump’s second term will be charges proceeding against people who allegedly worked to keep him in power illegally in 2020, all while he wields the power he won at the ballot box in 2024.
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