Georgia’s Republican lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, won’t face criminal charges like the ones being pressed against Donald Trump and others by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. The news underscores how destabilizing it would be if Willis is disqualified from the state election interference case, an outcome that the defense is pressing for on a pretrial appeal.
Before Trump and his co-defendants were charged last year, the Democratic DA had been disqualified from investigating Jones after she hosted a fundraiser for a Democrat who would become Jones’ opponent in the 2022 election. That meant a new prosecutor or office needed to take over, which falls to a state prosecutor panel to decide. After nearly two years, the Republican head of the panel said in April that he would handle it himself. And on Friday, he announced he wouldn’t seek charges against the lieutenant governor.
While the episode is significant in its own right, it also highlights the possibly great complications that would follow if Trump and his co-defendants succeed in kicking Willis and her office off the case; we might not know whether they’ll succeed on that score until at least next year. Even though the Jones matter involved just one person, it took years to settle and perhaps in a manner quite different from how Willis would have handled it.
We were reminded this week of how complex the criminal case is against the Republican presidential nominee and others, when the trial judge dismissed some counts in the indictment while signaling potential further litigation stemming from the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling for Trump in the federal election interference case. The Georgia case — featuring many defendants, including several high-profile ones — would, like the Jones matter, expect to face difficulties in finding a new office or prosecutor to handle it — saying nothing of how it would be handled. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for updates and expert analysis on the top legal stories. The newsletter will return to its regular weekly schedule when the Supreme Court’s next term kicks off in October.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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