It’s not every day that a sitting lieutenant governor faces a criminal investigation, which makes the latest developments in Georgia awfully interesting. The Associated Press reported:
A special prosecutor has been assigned to look into whether Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones should face criminal charges over efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the state. … Jones was one of 16 state Republicans who signed a certificate stating that Trump had won Georgia and declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors even though Democrat Joe Biden had been declared the winner in the state. As a state senator in the wake of the election, he also sought a special session of Georgia’s Legislature aimed at overturning Biden’s narrow win in the state.
If it seems as if this story has been percolating for a long while, it’s not your imagination. My MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones noted last summer, for example, that Georgia’s Republican lieutenant governor had reportedly been identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2020 fake electors scheme, but a state judge barred Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from pursuing Burt Jones because she’d hosted a fundraiser for the lieutenant governor’s opponent.
It led the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia — an agency that supports local district attorneys — to announce that it would name a special counsel to examine the allegations surrounding the Republican in light of Willis’ apparent conflict of interest.
Yesterday, the council’s executive director, Pete Skandalakis, said he would personally take on the matter. A New York Times report added that Skandalakis “spent more than a quarter-century as the elected district attorney in a five-county area southwest of Atlanta, and has had experience with other sensitive, high-profile cases.”








