The effort to punish Donald Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election ended last week with a whimper. While most Americans were focusing on Thanksgiving with their families, Trump’s political allies were completing the greatest escape from criminal justice in the nation’s history.

Last Wednesday, a Georgia prosecutor filed a motion to end the final election-interference case against the president, and a judge obliged by promptly dismissing it—thus killing what may have been the final chance that Trump will face a criminal jury for the gravest assault on American democracy since the Civil War. The prosecutor’s timing was no coincidence. Like the dismissal of the federal criminal cases against the president and like his pardons of thousands of January 6 rioters, Trump and his political allies aim to quietly kill the cases against them so the American people will forget the crimes they committed against our country.

Pete Skandalakis, a state official standing in for the disqualified Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, blended political polemic and practical considerations in his motion rationalizing an end to the case. What he did not do is suggest that the plot perpetrated by Trump and his co-defendants was legal.

Skandalakis wrote that “it is not illegal to question or challenge election results.” But the defendants in the case—who also included Trump’s former lawyer Rudolph Giuliani and his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, as well as three so-called false electors—were not prosecuted for expressing their political opinions, or for seeking to challenge the results of the election through lawful means like lawsuits or recounts.........

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