by Ty Tagami | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The only lawmaker among the group of co-indictees with President Donald Trump who were dismissed from the election fraud prosecution this week lashed out at the Fulton County district attorney who brought the charges more than two years ago.
“I genuinely believe that Fani Willis knew from the beginning that there was no evidence of any criminal intent on my part,” Sen. Shawn Still, R-Johns Creek, said in a statement after a judge in Fulton County dismissed all defendants Wednesday at the request of a special prosecutor.
Still was among three of 16 Republican electors whom Willis indicted in her election conspiracy case. Still said he got nothing out of joining with them and voting for Trump and never thought he was doing anything wrong.
He also said he never got an explanation for why 13 of the other electors were not indicted along with him and two others — former Republican state Sen. David Shafer and GOP activist Cathy Latham.
They had met at the state Capitol a month after the 2020 election and had cast electoral votes for Trump in an election that was decided for Joe Biden.
“I relied on the legal advice of a qualified elections attorney in the meeting, and did what he advised me and the other electors to do,” Still said. “I thought I was fulfilling my duties as an elector.”
Peter Skandalakis, who took over the prosecution this month after Georgia courts sidelined Willis on ethical grounds, used the same logic for recommending dismissal in the portion of the conspiracy case involving Still and the other two electors.
Skandalakis, who is the executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, wrote in his motion Wednesday that the trio voted on the advice of an attorney to “preserve” electoral votes for Trump, without intent to overturn the election.
He pointed to what he identified as a similar situation observed by U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith who had brought a different election-related case against Trump.
Skandalakis quoted Smith who wrote that co-conspirators deceived Trump’s elector nominees, deliberately withholding information about how their votes would be used. This “deception was crucial” to engaging the participants as “fraudulent electors,” Smith wrote.
Skandalakis wrote that it is not illegal to challenge election results and that he was “loath to use
the criminal justice system to pursue law-abiding citizens who, in good conscience and upon the advice of counsel, were asked to perform certain tasks in connection with the litigation of an election challenge.”
He wrote that Still, Shafer and Latham acted on the advice of an attorney they thought to be an expert in election law, adding that “they genuinely and sincerely believed that their actions were a lawful component of the election contest process.”
The decision to dismiss the charges left one Still colleague “deeply disappointed” though.
Sen. Harold Jones, II, of Augusta, the ranking Senate Democrat as the chamber’s minority leader, said in a statement that the dismissal let Trump “evade accountability for his clear violations of Georgia law,” enabling him “and his co-conspirators to avoid responsibility for their coordinated effort to overturn Georgia’s election results and steal the 2020 election.”
Jones called it a “setback for justice.”
Still said he was relieved that the case was no longer hanging over his head and said Willis had charged an innocent man.
