New prosecutor tapped to take over Georgia election interference case against Trump
by Ross Williams, Georgia Recorder
The Georgia election interference case against President Donald Trump appears to live on after the head of a nonpartisan state agency appointed himself the new prosecutor in the case.
Peter J. Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, will take over the case from embattled Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, Skandalakis announced Friday.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee had tasked Skandalakis with finding a replacement for Willis by Friday or he would allow the case to be dismissed.
Skandalakis said he contacted “several” other prosecutors who declined to take up the case.
“The decision to assume responsibility for this matter was reached only after careful and deliberate consideration,” Skandalakis wrote. “While it would have been simple to allow Judge McAfee’s deadline to lapse or to inform the Court that no conflict prosecutor could be secured—thereby allowing the case to be dismissed for want of prosecution—I did not believe that to be the right course of action.”
Skandalakis said he recently received 101 banker boxes of documents related to the Trump investigation and an 8-terabyte hard drive containing the complete investigative file.
“Since receiving these materials, I have diligently worked to familiarize myself with the record and the status of the proceedings,” he said. “Additionally, I have attempted to review the evidence gathered and the hours of interviews and proffers of witnesses and former codefendants. Unfortunately, I have not had sufficient time to complete my review. With Judge McAfee’s deadline now upon us and my review still ongoing, I have determined that the best course of action is to appoint myself to the case. This will allow me to complete a comprehensive review and make an informed decision regarding how best to proceed.”
McAfee has scheduled a conference with the parties to the case for Dec. 1.
Skandalakis previously intervened in the case in a similar manner after Willis was disqualified from prosecuting Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who, while a state senator, served as a so-called alternate elector after Trump lost the 2020 election. Willis had hosted a campaign event for Jones’ political opponent.
Skandalakis decided last year not to bring criminal charges against Jones, ruling that he acted within the scope of his office.
David Shafer, former chairman of the state GOP who was also one of the alternate electors and is a defendant in the Fulton County case, expressed confidence in Skandalakis in a statement authored by his attorney Craig Gillen in a since-deleted post on social media.
“We are relieved that Mr. Skandalakis, a competent, experienced and objective professional prosecutor, will be in charge of the case and will conduct a thorough review of the evidence.”
A Fulton County grand jury indicted Trump in 2023 when he was out of office along with 18 others who allegedly formed a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, which Trump narrowly lost to President Joe Biden.
Following the loss, Trump had famously called Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asked him to “find” the missing votes he would have needed to win. The alleged scheme also involved plans to submit a bogus slate of electors to falsely certify that Trump had won the election, a harassment campaign against Fulton County poll workers and a voting systems breach in Coffee County.
Four of the alleged co-conspirators pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Trump and the other defendants, who maintained their innocence.
But the beginning of the case’s end came when an attorney for defendant Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign aide, introduced evidence that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had been involved in a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor she hired for the case with a lucrative contract, creating a potential conflict of interest.
After dramatic testimony, including descriptions of vacations and cruises the two had taken together, a judge ordered that either Wade or Willis’ office needed to step aside from the case.
Wade resigned from the case, but Willis was ultimately disqualified from pursuing the charges against Trump by the Georgia Court of Appeals because of the “significant appearance of impropriety” stemming from their relationship. The Georgia Supreme Court declined to hear Willis’ appeal in September, leaving the case officially in need of a new prosecutor.
Georgia’s case is the last criminal case still pending against Trump.
Prosecution against Trump himself may stall while he is serving as president, but the cases against other alleged co-conspirators could move forward, says Georgia State University law professor Anthony Michael Kreis.
“Pete Skandalakis has two big bucket questions: the first one is, what does he want to do with the case more broadly as it goes for all of the co-defendants with the exception of Donald Trump, and then what does he want to do with the charges against Donald Trump?” Kreis said.
Skandalakis could proceed against the other co-defendants and sever Trump from the case until he leaves office, Kreis said, but that introduces new difficulties.
“There’s a lot of litigation that would have to be sorted through to figure out what kind of presidential immunity applies,” Kreis said. “Also, just as a practical matter, unlike Fani Willis, who is probably going to be around, or a sitting district attorney who might be around in 2029 after the president leaves office, given the fact that this is a temporary appointment, I really sincerely doubt that Pete Skandalakis is just going to hang around for years waiting to try Donald Trump. So my view is it’s incredibly unlikely that the charges against Donald Trump will ever see the light of day in a courtroom.”
“To me, the real question is what happens to all the other alleged co-conspirators and whether or not he decides to pursue those charges,” Kreis added.
Other legal threats previously hanging over the president’s head have also gone Trump’s way since he took office the second time in January.
U.S. Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith dropped a federal election interference case as well as a case alleging Trump mishandled classified documents after Trump’s 2024 election victory because it would be illegal to continue prosecuting him after taking office.
A New York state appeals court overturned a nearly $500 million civil penalty Trump was ordered to pay in a case involving fraudulent loan applications, though the judges left the fraud finding in place.
Trump is appealing a New York conviction involving hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, which gave him the status of being the only felon elected president, and he’s seeking Supreme Court intervention in a civil case over a claim that he sexually abused and defamed writer E. Jean Carroll.
Trump recently issued a pardon for people accused of breaking the law in connection with efforts to question or overturn the 2020 election, including those in Georgia, though a presidential pardon cannot protect a suspect from state charges.
This story is reprinted from the Georgia Recorder (https://georgiarecorder.com) under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Bottom line, he asked to dismiss the case and the judge did.