Ga. official faces inquiry over role as Trump elector
Georgia Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones will be investigated for his role as a fake elector for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, a state official said Thursday.
Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, has already brought racketeering and other charges against Trump and several top allies in a sweeping election case. But she was disqualified in 2022 from continuing to investigate Jones, a Republican, because she had hosted a fund-raiser for his political rival.
On Thursday, Pete Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, said he would take up the Jones inquiry, after facing criticism for not moving more quickly to find a new prosecutor to substitute for Willis. Skandalakis is a former district attorney. His decision was previously reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“I will be handling Burt Jones,” Skandalakis, a Republican, said in a text message Thursday. He declined to elaborate on the matter. By law, it falls to the head of the prosecuting attorneys council, a state government entity, to choose a replacement when a prosecutor on a case is found to have a conflict of interest.
Jones did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Trump campaign enlisted fake presidential electors in 2020 in a number of swing states where Trump was defeated, as part of an effort to circumvent the outcome of the voting. Twenty-four of those electors are facing charges in three states.
Willis, a Democrat, chose to reach cooperation deals with most of the fake Georgia electors, but she did charge three who had prominent political roles in the state, including David Shafer, the former head of the state Republican Party. At the time of the 2020 election, Jones was a state senator.
Jones was an early backer of Trump’s in Georgia. He is widely considered now to be laying the groundwork for a campaign for governor in 2026, when Governor Brian Kemp cannot run for reelection because of term limits.
Kemp has had a fraught relationship with Trump. Kemp declined when Trump asked him look for more votes to overturn his narrow loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. But Kemp has said he would support Trump in the 2024 race.