Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 largely shattered the efforts to prosecute him for his efforts to subvert the 2020 election.
But dozens of his allies still face state-level criminal charges for their roles in the plot. The five cases against them have plodded along for years, mired in procedural gridlock, prosecutorial bungles and appellate review.
None of those cases is anywhere near a trial, yet they all remain pending — a state of legal limbo that exemplifies the nation’s halting struggle to reckon with, and achieve accountability for, Trump’s failed bid to seize a second term despite Joe Biden’s victory nearly five years ago.
On Wednesday, one of the cases will be at the Nevada Supreme Court for arguments on a key procedural issue. Two others, after long stretches of dormancy, could be revitalized in the next several months. The upcoming developments could determine whether any of the defendants ever have to face a jury for meddling in the election — even as Trump uses his office to perpetuate the bogus claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
At the core of all the cases is the effort, in December 2020, to assemble false slates of Trump electors in states he narrowly lost. Dozens of the Republicans activists who posed as electors remain under indictment. But some of the cases also sweep in more prominent Trump allies, like his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and conservative attorneys John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani.
Technically, Trump himself is even still a defendant in one of the cases: the racketeering conspiracy case in Georgia brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. But it is extremely unlikely that Trump will ever have to face those charges. For the next three and a half years, he is protected by the office of the presidency, and after that, he’ll retain broad immunity from prosecution.
But there is one legal tool that Trump doesn’t have in his arsenal. The five pending cases are all in state courts, so Trump has no power to pardon his allies like he can in federal cases or order his Justice Department to drop the charges.
Here’s a look at where all of the 2020 election prosecutions stand.
Arizona: A new grand jury?
Last year, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, indicted 18 Trump allies with efforts to fraudulently overturn the state’s 2020 election results. Grand jurors wanted to charge Trump himself but were talked down by reluctant prosecutors. Instead, the indictment labeled Trump an unindicted co-conspirator and mastermind of the alleged plot.
The case once represented one of the starkest threats to Trump’s orbit. Meadows, Eastman, and Giuliani were all indicted. So were Trump aide Boris Epshteyn and former state GOP chairwoman Kelli Ward.
But now the case is a mess. Last fall, the presiding judgerecused himself after defendants criticized him for sending an internal email urging male colleagues to speak out against sexist attacks on Kamala Harris. His replacement, Sam Myers, ruled last month that the entire case was flawed because grand jurors were never shown the full text of the Electoral Count Act, the 1887 law at the heart of some of the charges.
Mayes has appealed the ruling, which put the case on hold pending review by higher courts. That pause is likely to continue into the fall. If Mayes loses, her office would have to assemble a new grand jury to consider reissuing the charges — one that could take a sharply different direction than the last one.
Even if Mayes prevails and preserves her case, the earliest it will resume is late 2025. And if it does, a long list of motions by defendants to dismiss the charges, citing a complex array of constitutional principles, awaits. Those could take months to resolve.
Among them: Defendant Christina Bobb, a Trump ally now serving as an attorney for the conservative public records group Judicial Watch, has moved for Mayes’ disqualification from the case altogether. And Meadows is asking Myers to dismiss the charges against him, saying federal law and the Constitution shield him from the charges.
Georgia: Willis fights to save her case
This is the only case in which Trump remains a defendant, but it is also the most dysfunctional.
Willis, the Atlanta-area district attorney, brought the ambitious racketeering case in August 2023, but it has been mired in two years of controversy and drama. Trump and other defendants claimed that Willis, a Democrat, had a conflict of interest stemming from her romantic relationship with one of her handpicked top prosecutors. In December 2024, an appeals court agreed, ruling that Willis and her entire office must be removed from the case.
Willis is appealing that decision at the Georgia Supreme Court. Her appeal has been pending for seven months.
A state Supreme Court ruling that upholds Willis’ disqualification would trigger a process to transfer the matter to a different district attorney, who could drop the case altogether or revisit her charging decisions. That would mean months, or even years, of further delays.
And even if Willis remains in charge, the trial judge overseeing the case must resolve a flood of motions from more than a dozen defendants who are trying to gut the charges or get them dismissed.
Maintaining the charges against Trump himself will be a Herculean task. Most legal experts believe that it would be unconstitutional for a state-level prosecutor to pursue criminal charges against a sitting president.
In theory, Willis could keep the charges on ice with the goal of reviving them against Trump after he leaves office in 2029. But at that point, the evidence would be nearly a decade old. And in his capacity as a former president, Trump would have strong claims of immunity under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2024 landmark decision that declared him broadly immune from similar federal charges stemming from his 2020 election subversion.
Michigan: A long slog with little action
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, was the first state prosecutor to bring a case over the effort to upend the 2020 results. In July 2023, she unsealed charges against the 16 Republican activists who cast false electoral votes for Trump in Michigan.
The case against one of those defendants was dropped, but the other 15 defendants remain. The case has grinded along slowly, with the charges facing review from Kristen Simmons, a state judge appointed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat.
Simmons has scheduled a hearing for Sept. 9. The slow pace of the proceedings has reportedly frustrated both pro-democracy groups and some defendants.
It’s unclear if or when the matter will go to trial. It briefly rose to the federal courts this year when one of the defendants, Clifford Frost Jr., asked a federal judge to intervene and prevent the prosecution from advancing, claiming it was politically motivated. But U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker, a George W. Bush appointee, declined to step in, citing precedents that frown upon federal courts disrupting state proceedings. An appeals court backed him up in April.
Nevada: A volley over venue
Like the Michigan case, this case is limited to fake electors. Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat, brought charges in December 2023 against the six Republicans who cast false electoral votes in the state in 2020.
But the case has been bogged down by a technical issue: the proper “venue” for the case to proceed. Ford filed the charges in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas. The defendants argue that he should’ve filed them in the state capital, Carson City.
That dispute has reached the Nevada Supreme Court, which will hear arguments on Wednesday. Even if Ford wins and reinstates his case in Clark County — and wins a lengthy series of pretrial fights over the evidence in the case — a trial is unlikely to occur until well into 2026. (Ford has since become a candidate in the Nevada governor’s race next year.)
Wednesday’s argument will be the first significant courtroom action for any of the 2020 election cases in months.
Wisconsin: Pending motions to dismiss
The youngest of the five cases — and the one with the fewest number of defendants — is in Wisconsin. Though it has not been waylaid by process disputes like other cases, it too has plodded along slowly.
The state’s attorney general, Democrat Josh Kaul, filed the charges in June 2024 against three key Trump allies: Ken Chesebro, an architect of Trump’s strategy to deploy false electors to stoke controversy on Jan. 6, 2021; James Troupis, a Wisconsin-based attorney who helped craft the Trump campaign’s strategy in that state; and Mike Roman, a Trump political operative who helped implement the elector strategy across the country.
They’re awaiting a ruling on their efforts to dismiss the case, which have been pending for several months.
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