Arizona's Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes refuses to let go. After the Arizona Supreme Court rejected her office's bid to salvage a criminal indictment against eighteen Republicans, including former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, and attorney John Eastman, Mayes plans to haul the entire case back before a new grand jury, the Daily Caller reported.
The state's highest court made its ruling public Thursday, denying Mayes' appeal and leaving the original indictment dead. A Phoenix judge had ruled in May that the first grand jury was never provided the language of the Electoral Count Act, a 19th-century federal statute at the center of the case, rendering the indictment fatally flawed.
Rather than accept the loss, Mayes' spokesman Richie Taylor told Politico that her office will bring the matter back before a grand jury. The Arizona Mirror separately confirmed the same plan. In other words: the case failed on the merits of its own process, and the attorney general's answer is to simply try again.
The original indictment, announced in April 2024, charged eighteen Republicans with forgery, fraud, and conspiracy. Eleven of those charged were accused of trying to act as alternate electors following the 2020 presidential election. The case also swept in high-profile Trump associates Meadows, Giuliani, and Eastman.
But the prosecution stumbled almost immediately. The Phoenix judge's finding, that prosecutors failed to present the grand jury with the actual statutory language at the heart of the alleged crime, was a basic procedural failure. It wasn't a technicality. It went to whether the grand jurors understood what law had supposedly been broken.
Mayes' office appealed that dismissal to the Arizona Supreme Court. The justices said no. The ruling, filed under case reference CV250271, shut the door on the original indictment for good.
Now Mayes wants a do-over. Defense attorneys see it differently.
Mark L. Williams, Giuliani's attorney, welcomed the Arizona Supreme Court's decision and cast doubt on whether Mayes would actually follow through on a second grand jury attempt. The Associated Press reported his blunt assessment:
"In my mind, the whole thing is meritless. Mr. Giuliani has done nothing wrong."
Dennis Wilenchik, the lawyer for 2020 elector Jim Lamon, went further. He told Axios that the case "will ultimately fail" and accused Mayes of planning to "string it out" past the 2026 election "to appease her voters."
That accusation, that the prosecution serves a political calendar rather than the interests of justice, is worth examining against the broader pattern of similar cases across the country.
Arizona's twice-stalled prosecution is not an isolated episode. It fits a wider trend of post-2020 legal actions against Trump allies that have collapsed, stalled, or been abandoned under their own weight.
Special counsel Jack Smith's federal case against Trump ended shortly after Trump won the 2024 presidential election. In Georgia, prosecutor Fani Willis was disqualified from her sprawling racketeering case in December 2024, and that prosecution has unraveled. A Michigan judge dismissed charges against alleged alternate electors in September 2025. Courts and procedural failures have done what political rhetoric could not: forced a reckoning with the actual legal foundations of these cases.
Nevada and Wisconsin still have pending cases, Politico reported. But the trajectory is clear. One by one, the prosecutions built on the "fake electors" theory have hit walls, not because judges are sympathetic to the defendants, but because the cases themselves have been poorly constructed, procedurally deficient, or legally overreaching.
The recent federal court dismissal of a DOJ lawsuit over Arizona voter registration data underscores a broader pattern: courts are willing to reject politically charged legal actions when the legal basis doesn't hold up.
Consider what Mayes' office is actually doing. The original grand jury indictment failed because prosecutors did not present the grand jurors with the text of the law they were being asked to apply. That is not a close call. That is a fundamental error in how the case was assembled and presented.
The Arizona Supreme Court reviewed the situation and declined to rescue the indictment. Two separate judicial bodies, a trial court and the state's highest court, found the prosecution's work insufficient.
And Mayes' response is to start over. Not to drop the case. Not to acknowledge the error and move on. To empanel a new grand jury and try to get a fresh indictment against the same defendants.
This approach raises fair questions about prosecutorial discretion and priorities. When a case has been dismissed for a procedural failure of the prosecution's own making, and the state supreme court has refused to intervene, at what point does persistence become something else entirely?
Wilenchik's accusation, that Mayes intends to drag the case past the 2026 election for political benefit, is a claim, not a proven fact. But the timeline lends it plausibility. Mayes is a Democrat. The defendants are Republicans closely associated with President Trump. And the case, now entering its third year, has produced no convictions, no trials, and no surviving indictment.
The broader political environment makes the timing even more notable. Democrats have faced accusations of using institutional tools for election-year advantage in other contexts as well, and voters are increasingly skeptical of legal actions that seem timed to political calendars rather than driven by evidence.
Lost in the procedural back-and-forth are the eighteen people who have lived under the shadow of forgery, fraud, and conspiracy charges since April 2024. More than two years later, not one of them has been convicted. The indictment itself no longer exists. And yet Mayes' office signals it will force them through the process again.
For defendants like Giuliani, Meadows, and Eastman, public figures with legal teams, the burden is substantial but survivable. For the eleven lesser-known individuals accused of acting as alternate electors, the financial and personal toll of years of criminal exposure is harder to measure and easier to ignore.
The recent Supreme Court leak controversy involving Chief Justice Roberts has reminded the public how much institutional credibility depends on process and restraint. When prosecutors lose on process and respond by simply restarting the clock, they test the limits of that credibility.
The facts here are not complicated. Mayes' office brought an indictment. A judge found the grand jury was not given the relevant statutory language. The indictment was dismissed. The Arizona Supreme Court refused to reverse that dismissal. And now the attorney general plans to try again with a new grand jury.
Defense attorneys say the case lacks merit. The prosecution's own procedural failures support that assessment, at least in terms of competence. And the broader national landscape, where similar cases have been dismissed, abandoned, or disqualified, suggests that the legal theory underpinning these prosecutions is far weaker than the political energy behind them.
Meanwhile, courts elsewhere have shown willingness to uphold bold legal actions when the legal foundation is sound. The contrast with Mayes' stumbling prosecution is hard to miss.
None of this means the defendants are necessarily innocent. Grand juries exist to evaluate evidence, and a new panel may or may not return a new indictment. But the question isn't whether Mayes has the legal authority to try again. She likely does. The question is whether doing so, after this record of failure, serves justice, or serves something else.
When a prosecution collapses because the prosecutors themselves botched the process, the answer to that failure is accountability, not a mulligan.
