by Ty Tagami | Dec 2, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A federal appeals court has restored a state ban on giving food and drink to people waiting in line to vote.
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta on Monday cancelled a preliminary injunction issued by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia two years ago that stopped the state from enforcing its ban on giving “gifts” near polling places.
The three-judge appellate panel decided that a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in another case last year had changed the legal landscape for such decisions. The high court ruled in that case that lower courts had failed to fully analyze whether state content-moderation restrictions on social media companies violated the First Amendment.
The defendant in that case — Moody v. NetChoice, LLC — was an industry association for internet companies, but the same analysis applies in a case about regulating elections, the appeals court in Atlanta decided.
“The district court didn’t conduct the facial-challenge analysis now required by Moody,” the Eleventh Circuit Court opinion said. It said the district court had “failed to systematically assess the full sweep of the regulation and weigh the constitutional against the unconstitutional applications.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican running for governor, applauded the decision, issuing a statement that said it “reinforces a simple truth: Georgia has the right and the responsibility to shield voters from influence and interference at the polls.”
The GOP-controlled General Assembly passed the gifts ban in 2021, as part of an elections overhaul in the wake of claims by Donald Trump that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.
Senate Bill 202 affected absentee voting and other election procedures, but one element in particular gained national attention: the ban on giving voters “any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink” while in line at polling places.
Civil rights groups sued, calling the ban a barrier to voting. The U.S. Department of Justice under President Joe Biden sued, asserting the law violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by intentionally discriminating against Black voters.
Then, President Donald Trump started his second term and named Pam Bondi U.S. Attorney General. In March, she ordered the Justice Department to drop the lawsuit.
The appeals court order on Monday returns the case to the district court in Atlanta, where U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee has been overseeing the lawsuits and motions related to the 2021 law.
by Ty Tagami | Dec 1, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Drones powerful enough to lift a human have become a routine tool for delivering contraband in Georgia prisons.
At a hearing Monday about the budget for prisons, Tyrone Oliver, the commissioner for the state Department of Corrections, said drones have been used to drop drugs laced with fentanyl and other goods, including power saws made by the company Dremel.
“We’ve confiscated drones that are large enough to lift 225 pounds,” he said. “We had one earlier today that can lift about 80 pounds or 90 pounds.”
He said the pilots pay people who live near prisons thousands of dollars to borrow their driveways to stage the flights.
Other methods for delivering contraband were more time-honored, such as moving it with the help of prison staff or through the mail, delivering it during inmate visitations or tossing product over fences and walls.
Matthew Wolfe, who leads the agency’s Office of Professional Standards, said couriers wrap tape around bundles, forming them into football-sized packages shaped for throwing.
He said enforcement against contraband had led to the arrests of 48 prison staff in fiscal year 2025, which ended in July. There were also 120 inmates charged and 362 civilians arrested, many in connection with drone flights, he said.
“Civilian involvement remains the most common threat vector, with throwovers and drone drops continuing to be the primary method used to infiltrate our institutions,” Wolfe said.
The prisons have tried defensive measures, such as retrofitting windows so that drones can no longer deliver to outstretched hands. But Oliver said that has not stopped rooftop drops from high in the sky.
The prisons have tried to track offenders, but they must capture them on the ground, in person. They cannot just shoot the drones out of the sky, or disable them in some other way, even when they fly over a prison.
That is because the aircraft are protected by federal law.
“The technology is out there. We just don’t have the authority, the legal authority, to be able to do it,” Oliver told Rep. Danny Mathis, R-Cochran, a member of the House panel.
“I hate that your hands are tied,” Mathis said. “That’s what bothers me the most. This is just insane.”
by Ty Tagami | Nov 28, 2025 | 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.
by Ty Tagami | Nov 26, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Nearly half a decade after it started, the election fraud case against Donald Trump and his fellow indicted allies has ended, with a Fulton County judge on Wednesday granting a special prosecutor’s request for dismissal of the conspiracy case against the president and his 14 remaining co-defendants.
Peter Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, wound up in charge of the case after the Georgia courts removed Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis over ethical concerns.
Skandalakis, who formally took over as the prosecutor less than two weeks ago, concluded that many of the charges would not stand up under free speech grounds. But he also offered pragmatic reasons, such as the fact that Trump would not be exposed to criminal prosecution again until after leaving office in 2029.
Realistically speaking, a trial could not begin for a decade until after the 2021 events that led to the indictments against Trump and 18 alleged co-conspirators, and it would likely take many years to conduct, Skandalakis observed.
“Continuing this litigation under these circumstances would neither serve the citizens of Georgia nor fulfill our statutory obligations,” Skandalakis wrote in his motion to dismiss the case Wednesday morning. “Our agency is simply not equipped to carry out this case while meeting the essential duties required under the current budget—or under any realistically conceivable budget the State could provide.”
He added that he did not think Georgia citizens would be served by pursuing the prosecution for another five to 10 years.
Fulton County superior Court Judge Scott McAfee immediately issued an order granting the motion to dismiss, ending a case that started in February 2021 when Willis announced her investigation.
Her case was grounded in two main events: Trump’s phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asking him to find enough votes so he could be declared the winner in Georgia, and the convening of Trump allies who positioned themselves as alternative electors to those who cast their votes for Joe Biden.
Skandalakis detailed his reasoning in each of the charges. In some cases, free speech was a core issue. For instance, he wrote that Rudy Giuliani had told lawmakers “wrong and baseless” things about the election during unsworn testimony, but he did not think the cirumstances merited prosecution.
“Criminalizing such unsworn testimony would have a chilling effect on witnesses appearing before the Legislature on important issues,” Skandalakis reasoned.
In the case of David Shafer, accused of false statements to a prosecutor working for Willis, Skandalakis determined that Shafer had not said anything false or misleading.
In the events surrounding the breach of election equipment in Coffee County, Skandalakis noted that two participants had already pleaded guilty to misdemeanor counts. One of them, Sidney Powell, an attorney, had advised others under indictment that it was legal to access the election machines to gather evidence for a lawsuit. Another who pleaded guilty, Scott Hall, had arrived by chartered plan to supervise the work, conveying “the appearance of acting under the color of law,” Skandalakis wrote.
He decided it would be an “inefficient” use of state resources to prosecute the others after those two had already resolved their cases “favorably” through negotiations with Willis.
Then, there was incident at the center of everything that unfolded in Georgia: Trump’s call to Raffensperger.
Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff at the end of his first term, was also among those charged due to his involvement in arranging that call and in observing election verification processes.
“The White House Chief of Staff’s job duties are varied and fluid. We could have a debate if arranging phone calls, observing the signature-verification audit, or messaging an investigator to expedite the vote audit process falls within Mark Meadows’s duties,” Skandalakis wrote.
“While the call is concerning, reasonable minds could differ as to how to interpret the call,” he concluded. Trump could have been trying to get Raffensperger to commit fraud or he could have believed he was a victim and was just asking Raffensperger to investigate.
“When multiple interpretations are equally plausible, the accused is entitled to the benefit of the doubt and should not be presumed to have acted criminally,” Skandalakis wrote.
He wrote that he was persuaded by events outside Georgia, writing that the alleged criminal conduct in Georgia “was conceived in Washington, D.C.” and that Special Counsel Jack Smith had been in the best position to prosecute Trump.
Smith, a federal prosecutor, had pursued criminal charges against Trump related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity led Smith to move for dismissal.
If Smith, with all the resources of the federal government behind him, “concluded that prosecution would be fruitless, then I too find that, despite the available evidence, pursuing the prosecution of all those involved in State of Georgia v. Donald Trump, et al. on essentially federal grounds would be equally unproductive,” Skandalakis concluded.
by Ty Tagami | Nov 25, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Electric vehicle owners will eventually have another 26 places to recharge when motoring through Georgia after the state awarded $24.4 million in federal funding to build chargers along highways and interstates.
“This investment will help further secure our status as a national leader in innovation and infrastructure for years to come,” Gov. Brian Kemp said of the money from the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
The Act, which took effect in 2021 during the administration of President Joe Biden, allocated $5 billion nationwide over five years to foster a network of electric vehicle charging stations.
Georgia’s share was $135 million.
The money is awarded in public-private partnerships and covers up to 80% of project costs.
Six winning bidders were announced last week by the Georgia Department of Transportation. This was the second round of contracts, with the first issued last year.
The chargers — four at each site — must be installed and maintained for around the clock operation for at least five years. They must be equipped with Direct Current Fast Charging ports, which can fully recharge a vehicle battery in as few as 20 minutes.
