Fact: No Law Protects a President from State Criminal Charges. So What Stopped Georgia?
In August 2023, a grand jury in Georgia handed down racketeering charges against Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and seventeen others. The same statute they use to prosecute organized crime. Four of the defendants already pleaded guilty. The case was built, the evidence was assembled, and it was moving. Then, over the 18 months that followed, piece by piece, it came apart. I started pulling on the story because something felt wrong. The more I pulled, the more unraveled.
Before we get into that story, we need to set the stage. The Justice Department has two internal policy memos stating that a sitting president can’t face federal prosecution. The first dates to 1973, written during Watergate. The second came in 2000 during the Clinton administration. Neither has ever been tested in court. Together they’ve functioned as settled policy for over fifty years, a self-written rule that has protected every president since Nixon despite no law and no court ever validating it.
Congress has never passed a law saying a president can’t be held accountable for criminal activity. The Constitution doesn’t say a president can’t be held accountable when they commit a crime the same way anyone else is. Mueller investigated, found conduct, and couldn’t prosecute. Smith investigated, found conduct, and couldn’t prosecute.1 The Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity ruling in Trump v. United States gave presidents broad protection for what the court called “official acts” in federal court, though it left so much undefined that courts are still untangling what qualifies.2 The dual sovereignty doctrine means states retain independent authority to prosecute crimes that fall under their jurisdiction. It’s been established since the founding and upheld by consistent precedent throughout the existence of the United States. No justice argued the immunity ruling should reach it. No Congress has passed a law touching it.
Now back to Georgia. In 2023, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had jurisdiction, a grand jury, and a racketeering statute. She built a case on all three and it
was already running.
Charging a president with a crime they committed is the law working as designed. The moment you suspend that because of who they are, you’ve created a class of people the law doesn’t touch. We fought a revolution to get away from that. Prince Andrew lost his royal titles over his conduct. The United States Justice Department decided the president of a republic deserves more protection than a British royal. That’s where we are.
Then it stopped.
In January 2024, Michael Roman (Trump co-defendant and former Trump 2020 campaign election day operations director) filed a motion through his attorney Ashleigh Merchant (Roman’s attorney).3 The motion ran 127 pages. It contained no direct evidence. It cited anonymous sources described as “close to both the special prosecutor and the district attorney.” It claimed Willis and her special prosecutor Nathan Wade, the outside attorney she hired to lead the investigation, were in a romantic relationship that created a conflict of interest. Roman, facing serious criminal exposure, filed a motion with no direct evidence, sourced entirely to unnamed people, targeting the prosecutor building the case against him.
Someone with a grudge and inside knowledge spent months secretly feeding information to a defense attorney for a Trump co-defendant and helped write the motion that blew the case up. To be clear about what that motion actually alleged: two people working on the same prosecution had a personal romantic relationship. That was it. That was the pressure point. Rather than contesting the racketeering charges on their merits, the defense spent months building a case around the personal lives of the prosecutors. That person was Terrence Bradley (Nathan Wade’s former law partner and divorce attorney), who had left their firm in 2022 under serious allegations he denied.4 Over 413 documented text messages he fed Merchant information, suggested who to subpoena, and helped shape the motion to disqualify Willis herself from the prosecution. The goal wasn’t to win the case on the merits. It was to disqualify the prosecutor building it. Defense attorneys investigate facts. They don’t typically spend months cultivating sources inside the prosecution’s personal life. That’s a different kind of operation entirely.
Where did the information about the relationship come from? Trump’s attorneys filed an affidavit from a private investigator named Charles Mittelstadt, who analyzed phone metadata between Willis and Wade and documented over 2,000 calls and nearly 12,000 text messages between them before Wade was hired as special prosecutor.5 Someone commissioned that analysis, someone covered the cost, and the public record has never identified who. But you could ask yourself who had the most to gain from what it found.
Bradley was the source who made the motion possible. Over 413 text messages he confirmed details, suggested witnesses, and helped shape the filing. When he took the stand under oath, he said he couldn’t remember anything. The judge noted from the bench that Merchant had apparently been led to believe Bradley knew far more than he actually did.6
Judge Scott McAfee looked at the situation and applied a straightforward remedy. Willis and Wade had a personal relationship. One of them needed to step down. Wade resigned within hours of the ruling. The case had its prosecutor. The conflict was resolved. By any standard reading of Georgia law, that should have been the end of it. The defense appealed anyway. And the appeals court, rather than affirming the remedy that had already been applied, created a brand new legal standard that had never existed in Georgia to remove Willis entirely. The dissenting judge on that same panel, also a Republican appointee, said so explicitly in his published opinion: no Georgia court had ever disqualified a prosecutor for the mere appearance of impropriety without an actual conflict of interest.7 The remedy worked. They appealed the remedy. And they won on a standard nobody had ever used before.
The case passed to Peter Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’
Council of Georgia. He wasn’t new to the investigation. When Willis was recused from the case involving Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, a fake elector, that went to Skandalakis. He took nearly two years to act and declined to pursue charges.8 When Willis recused her office from the Rayshard Brooks shooting prosecution, that went to Skandalakis too. He declined to charge the officers.9 Now the main case landed on his desk. He reviewed the evidence. In his own court filing, he wrote that the indictment described a compelling set of acts that, if proven beyond a reasonable doubt, would establish a conspiracy undertaken by multiple individuals to overturn the 2020 presidential election.10 Then he filed a motion to dismiss every charge against every defendant. Judge Scott McAfee signed it. The case ceased to exist.
What the documented record shows is this. Someone identified the pressure point inside the prosecution, a personal relationship between the district attorney and her special prosecutor. Someone found the man with access and a grievance, Wade’s former law partner, who’d left the firm under serious allegations and spent months feeding information to a defense attorney for a Trump co-defendant. Someone commissioned a private investigator to analyze phone metadata before the motion was filed, which means someone decided in advance that those records would show what they were looking for. The legal motion filed in January 2024 generated the record the appeals court needed, and the appeals court used it to build a legal standard that hadn’t existed in Georgia before that moment. The case then landed on the one man whose desk it had already visited twice, with the same result both times.
There are important lessons to learn by examining what happened with Georgia RICO case. First, that Trump and his allies are not above the law. No court has said so. No Congress has passed a law saying so. The Constitution doesn’t say so. If the Trump shot someone on 5th avenue then the correct recourse would be the NYPD arresting him immediately, not saying “well it’ll be tough to prosecute the case and we don’t want to look political.”
Second, we see how they build intelligence dockets on anyone coming after them. They target people personally. They route cases toward people they know will bury them. Those are the steps we can see because they played out in court and left a paper trail. The more serious question is how many prosecutors, investigators, and officials never made it to court at all. How many quietly stepped aside. How many declined to open a case. How many were already compromised before anyone filed a motion. We don’t know. We may never know. But the cases we can document are almost certainly not all of them.
Most importantly, states and counties could be investigating right now. Your county prosecutor, your state attorney general, your governor could be ordering investigations into the criminal conduct of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, and many more, including the people at the Justice Department who helped bury cases and the people at the FBI who helped redact the things in those files that needed to stay hidden. The Epstein files are the spiders web that, if investigated in the many jurisdictions potentially impacted, could bring the whole house of cards down. There’s also DOGE, which although it operated out of D.C., involves digital crimes that fall under the jurisdiction of every state where victims live. That’s every jurisdiction. Every County Prosecutor and State AG has sufficient evidence for further investigation. You can even file police reports on this, just click anywhere on this sentence for more information on that.
The authority to investigate already exists. Nobody needs permission from the federal government to use it. And the investigating alone scares them. A hundred criminal investigations opened simultaneously across this country is a different problem than one.
I started pulling a thread on a story I thought I already knew. What came out was 413 text messages, a private investigator with no named client, a legal standard invented for one case by judges who shared a political patron, and a prosecutor who read the evidence, called it a real conspiracy, and made it disappear anyway. That’s the pile of thread on the floor. You can decide what it looks like. I know what it looks like to me.
Racketeering. That’s what it looks like.
Check out the article below for information on how you personally can make criminal referrals for DOGE, or click on this text for The Child Sex Trafficking Justice Act which would create State level investigative task forces dedicated to determining where the files intersect with State criminal codes, you can also look at further links below that cover information on organizing, activism, and how you can get your cities and states to take power from the GOP without waiting for the next election.
Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download
Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download
Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download
Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download
Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download
More Free downloads:
Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative
Soft Secession: Policies That Pass
All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills
The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare
Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure
Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross
Find any official in any state at openstates.org. Find your state attorney general at usa.gov/state-attorney-general. Find mutual aid near you at mutualaidhub.org.
Democracy merch and the full library at The Existentialist Republic.
Works Cited
1 Newsweek. (2019, July 25). OLC opinion explained: Why Robert Mueller couldn’t indict Trump, despite 10 obstruction incidents. https://www.newsweek.com/olc-opinion-mueller-doj-memo-indict-trump-sitting-president-1450896
2 Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. ___ (2024). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
3 Atlanta News First. (2024, January 9). Trump co-defendant accuses Fulton County district attorney of misconduct. https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2024/01/09/da-fani-willis-accused-having-inappropriate-relations-with-prosecutor-trumps-election-case/
4 Associated Press. (2024, February 29). Texts show prosecutor’s ex-law partner gave info for effort to remove Fani Willis from election case. The Hill. https://thehill.com/homenews/ap/ap-u-s-news/ap-texts-show-prosecutors-ex-law-partner-gave-info-for-effort-to-remove-fani-willis-from-election-case/
5 Atlanta News First. (2024, February 23). 2,000 calls, 12,000 texts alleged between DA Fani Willis, special prosecutor. https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2024/02/23/2000-calls-12000-texts-alleged-between-da-fani-willis-special-prosecutor/
6 Atlanta News First. (2024, February 27). ‘I don’t know when’ DA Willis, Nathan Wade’s relationship began, ex-law partner says. https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2024/02/27/ex-law-partner-i-dont-know-when-fani-willis-nathan-wade-began-dating/
7 NPR. (2024, December 19). Fulton DA Fani Willis is blocked from Trump Georgia case. https://www.npr.org/2024/12/19/nx-s1-5234059/georgia-trump-case-fani-willis-dismissal/
8 Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia. (2024, September 13). Statement and findings of Executive Director Peter J. Skandalakis regarding Senator Burt Jones’s involvement in matters surrounding the presidential election of 2020 in Georgia. https://pacga.org/2024/09/13/statement-and-findings-of-executive-director-peter-j-skandalakis-regarding-senator-burt-joness-involvement-in-matters-surrounding-the-presidential-election-of-2020-in-georgia/
9 Fortune. (2025, November 14). Meet Pete Skandalakis, the new prosecutor taking over for Fani Willis on the Georgia election case. https://fortune.com/2025/11/14/pete-skandalakis-trump-georgia-election-interference-case-fani-willis-rudy-giuliani-mark-meadows/
10 PBS NewsHour. (2025, November 26). New prosecutor won’t pursue charges against Trump, Giuliani and others in Georgia election interference case. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/new-prosecutor-wont-pursue-charges-against-trump-giuliani-and-others-in-georgia-election-interference-case/
They have a long and painful intimate knowledge of being bullied. The problem is many whites shrug and do nothing. Do something, your life depends upon it.
State attorneys general absolutely have the authority to prosecute violations of state law — so the real question is not whether they can, but why many have chosen not to pursue charges against Doge, Trump and others for potential state crimes.
First, prosecuting a former or sitting president is legally complex and politically explosive. State AGs must weigh evidence thresholds, jurisdictional limits, and the likelihood of successful conviction against claims of political retaliation. Even when misconduct appears obvious to the public, prosecutors are bound by strict standards requiring proof beyond a reasonable doubt — not political outrage.
Second, many alleged actions overlap with federal investigations or involve conduct spanning multiple states, creating uncertainty about which authority should proceed first.
Some AGs defer to federal prosecutions to avoid conflicting cases or claims of double jeopardy complications.
Third, political pressure is real.
Attorneys general are elected officials.
Bringing charges against a nationally polarizing figure invites intense backlash, security risks, legislative retaliation, and accusations of partisan weaponization — factors that can discourage even legally justified prosecutions.
Fourth, resource and evidentiary barriers matter.
Complex financial crimes, election interference allegations, or multi-state conspiracies require years of investigation, massive funding, and cooperative witnesses.
Without airtight cases, prosecutors risk acquittals that could strengthen the defendant politically and legally.
But none of these explanations eliminate the central concern: the rule of law depends on equal accountability.
If ordinary citizens would face investigation or prosecution for the same conduct, failure to act risks creating the perception that political power places someone above state law.
Ultimately, the question facing state attorneys general is not merely legal — it is institutional: whether caution protects justice, or whether inaction undermines public confidence that laws apply equally to everyone
The rule of law requires backbone, and the will to do the job. Without it, laws become suggestions, not safeguards.