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.”
Time will tell if and when Jones runs into legal trouble — the Georgian has said publicly he doesn’t believe he’s done anything wrong — but if he’s ultimately indicted, the lieutenant governor will have plenty of company: It was last summer when Donald Trump was among the 19 people charged with felony counts in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia. As for those specifically interested in the fake-electors plot, that there are still plenty of ongoing investigations unfolding at the state level. In Michigan, for example, state Attorney General Dana Nessel filed charges against a group of fake electors from the 2020 election last summer. Months later, there were related developments in Nevada. Around the same time, Kris Mayes, Arizona’s Democratic state attorney general, told CNN that her office was still overseeing a “robust” investigation related to related alleged crimes — and it appears she wasn’t kidding. We can apparently now add Georgia to the same list.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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