Trump just pardoned a key architect of the 2020 election scheme, and the state cases are now hanging by a thread

President Trump gave pardons to his former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and many other people who faced charges for trying to change the results of the 2020 election. Ed Martin, who works as the government’s pardon attorney, shared a document late Sunday night that named dozens of people getting pardons for things they did related to the 2020 presidential election.

According to The Hill, the list has many famous names who worked on the plan to reverse the election results. This includes Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, and Boris Epshteyn. According to the document, these pardons will end what it calls an unfair treatment of Americans after the 2020 election and help bring the country back together.

Rudy Giuliani was one of the main people who created and pushed the plans to challenge the 2020 election results. He lost his law license in both New York and Washington DC because he kept making false statements about the election. He also had to give away most of the things he owned to two election workers after a court found he had lied about them and damaged their reputations.

These pardons probably won’t stop the state cases

The president can only pardon people for breaking federal laws, and none of these people were actually charged with federal crimes. This means the pardons are more about making a statement than changing anything real.

But there’s more to the story because state prosecutors in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada have brought their own criminal charges against many of these same people. The state cases focus on what people call the fake electors plan, where groups of people signed papers falsely saying Trump won their states in 2020.

The state cases have run into big problems lately. In Georgia, where prosecutors also charged Trump along with his helpers, the district attorney Fani Willis and her office were kicked off the case. Now a state council has to pick someone new to handle the prosecution or let the whole case go away by Friday.

The top lawyers in Arizona and Michigan are thinking about whether they should appeal court decisions that might kill their cases.

In Nevada, the attorney general is dealing with an appeal in one county while also pushing forward with charges in a different county just to be safe. The case in Wisconsin looks like it will keep going. Someone speaking for Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said the pardons won’t change anything about their state prosecution.

Ed Martin wrote later on X that Trump told his team to find cases where people were treated unfairly by the Biden administration, and they quickly identified the fake electors situation.

The fake electors plan was designed to get former Vice President Mike Pence to accept electoral votes from Trump supporters in important states instead of counting the real votes that went to former President Biden. Pence said no to this on January 6, 2021, and after that, a crowd of Trump supporters broke into the Capitol building.

Karoline Leavitt, who speaks for the White House, defended giving out these pardons. She said “These great Americans were persecuted and put through hell by the Biden Administration for challenging an election, which is the cornerstone of democracy.”