Georgia’s lieutenant governor will be investigated in Trump case. But by whom?
Since the indictment of former President Donald J. Trump and 18 of his allies last summer on allegations of election interference in Georgia, a delicate question has remained unanswered: Would there also be criminal charges against Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a longtime Trump supporter and one of the most ambitious politicians in the southern swing state?
Mr. Jones was one of 16 Republicans who acted as fake electors for Mr. Trump in Georgia in an effort to overturn his 2020 defeat. Three of them are charged with crimes, including violating the state’s racketeering law.
But in 2022, a judge blocked the Fulton County district attorney who led the investigation, Fani T. Willis, from developing a case against Mr. Jones, citing a conflict of interest because she had led a fundraising campaign for his Democratic rival in the United States. the race for lieutenant governor.
It is now up to a government agency called the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia to find a special prosecutor to investigate Mr. Jones, who has denied any wrongdoing. The agency’s head, Peter J. Skandalakis, has said little about the selection process for months.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Skandalakis, a Republican and former prosecutor, confirmed that he would unilaterally choose the prosecutor for the Jones case. He said he had already excluded some prosecutors because their staffs were too small to take on the extra work or because the choice for them might seem too biased.
This week, the district attorney in Augusta, Georgia, became the first to publicly announce his interest in the job. Jared T. Williams, a Democrat, said in an interview on Tuesday that he was willing to investigate Mr. Jones’ actions after the 2020 election “if called upon to do so.”
Mr. Williams’ announcement underscored the conundrum facing Mr. Skandalakis. Georgia Republicans will likely cry if he chooses a Democrat for the job. But Democrats will likely do the same if he chooses a Republican.
“I don’t deny that it’s a difficult position to be in,” Mr. Skandalakis said, “but that doesn’t bother me. I have been in similar positions before in difficult cases throughout my career.” However, he added that few of these cases had as much potential for partisan fury. Mr. Jones has said that he may run for governor in 2026.
Mr. Skandalakis said he had high regard for Mr. Williams, a first-term prosecutor who ran on a criminal justice reform platform, and would talk to him about the job.
But he also said he was concerned that Mr. Williams had been a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the creation of an oversight board for local prosecutors. Mr Jones, chairman of the Senate, had supported the new committee. The lawsuit was recently dropped by the plaintiffs following a decision by the Georgia Supreme Court effectively hindered the exploitation committee.
Mr Skandalakis said he had already excluded some other plaintiffs because they were plaintiffs in the lawsuit. He declined to name them, but prosecutors included a Republican prosecutor from a central Georgia judicial district, Jonathan Adams, and two Democrats from densely populated suburban districts near Atlanta, Sherry Boston of DeKalb County and Flynn D. .Broady Jr. from Cobb County.
On Wednesday, Clayton County District Attorney Tasha M. Mosley, a Democrat, told the New York Times that Mr. Skandalakis had recently asked if she would be interested in taking the case. Ms Mosley said she declined because her office did not have sufficient resources.
“I can’t fire any more prosecutors from the homicide cases we have here,” she said. “So I would have to hire an external consultant to handle that. And I don’t have the money.”
All fifty of Georgia’s district attorneys are elected through partisan elections. Mr. Skandalakis could try to find a private attorney to handle the case to ease partisan tensions. But the law, he said, would prevent him from paying an outside attorney more than $70 an hour.
“It’s almost insulting to find someone willing to do it for $70 an hour,” he said.
Mr. Skandalakis, 67, can also appoint himself special prosecutor. It would not be the first time that he has led a high-profile case. In 2021, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr appointed him to investigate the fatal police shooting of Rayshard Brooks, who fought with two Atlanta officers in 2020 and was shot in the back as he ran away.
Mr. Skandalakis announced in August 2022 that charges against the officers would be dropped.
Mr. Jones did not respond to a call for comment on Wednesday. But in the past he has called the Georgian investigation into election interference a “abuse of power,‘, arguing that people like him are not breaking any laws, but merely ‘asking questions about elections’.
Mr. Jones, 44, is the scion of a wealthy Georgian family who often reminds voters that he is a former captain of the University of Georgia football team. He belongs to the pro-Trump faction of the Republican Party, which has been damaged and dramatically divided by Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 loss.
In addition to serving as a fake elector for Mr. Trump in December 2020, Mr. Jones, then a senator, called for and signed a special session of the state legislature to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in Georgia he an unsuccessful lawsuit. try to do the same. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that Mr. Jones flew to Washington on January 5, 2021, to convince Vice President Mike Pence to delay the certification of the Electoral College votes, although Mr. Jones told the news station he ultimately did not.
In December 2022, a special grand jury investigating election interference in Georgia recommended indicting Mr. Jones on charges including forgery. The jurors also recommended charges against others who were ultimately indicted, including Mr. Trump.
Recent moves by Mr. Jones suggest he is serious about running for governor in 2026. The current governor, Brian Kemp, a Republican, is term-limited and has had a frosty relationship with Mr. Trump.
In November, Mr. Jones revealed an attack ad against a potential Republican primary rival, Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who pressured Mr. Trump in January 2021 to help “find” enough votes to overturn his election loss in Georgia.
Mr. Jones separately faces a civil suit brought by four Georgia voters who want to remove him from office on the grounds that he “participated in an insurrection and rebellion” when he filed documents falsely claiming a to be a Georgian voter.