Georgia Prosecutor Steps In to Oversee Trump Election Case

The official, Pete Skandalakis, had been tasked by law with finding a new prosecutor for the election interference case after Fani T. Willis was removed from it.

The Georgia criminal election interference case against President Trump and a number of his allies entered a new phase on Friday, as the executive director of the state’s prosecutor council appointed himself to take over the case, replacing Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, who was disqualified from pursuing it.

What the change means for the future of the case was unclear. The new prosecutor, Pete Skandalakis, is a veteran Georgia lawyer who began his career as a Democrat and later switched to the Republican Party. As executive director of the nonpartisan Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, Mr. Skandalakis had been tasked by law with finding a new prosecutor to take on the complex Trump case after Ms. Willis was removed by the Georgia appellate court.

In a filing in Fulton County Superior Court on Friday, Mr. Skandalakis said he reached out to “several prosecutors” in the state, but that each of them declined the appointment. So he said he decided to take on the case himself.

In a statement, Mr. Skandalakis said that while it would have “been simple” to tell the court he could not find a replacement for Ms. Willis — a move that would have likely led to its prompt dismissal — he decided that would not be “the right course of action.”

“The public has a legitimate interest in the outcome of this case,” Mr. Skandalakis said. “Accordingly, it is important that someone make an informed and transparent determination about how best to proceed.”

As the new prosecutor, Mr. Skandalakis now has the authority to steer the case in a number of directions, including taking it to trial as it is, striking plea deals, dropping some charges, or striking the case altogether.

“He would have the same prosecutorial discretion afforded to any sitting prosecutor,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University. “He does have the obligation under Georgia law to review every individual case for which probable cause for prosecution exists, and to make a determination based on an analysis of the facts whether to proceed. And he has an ethical obligation to not pursue charges where he doesn’t believe he could secure a conviction.”

In a statement on Friday morning, Steve Sadow, Mr. Trump’s lead defense lawyer in Georgia, said, “This politically charged prosecution has to come to an end. We remain confident that a fair and impartial review will lead to a dismissal of the case against President Trump.”

Norm Eisen, a critic of Mr. Trump and executive chairman of the Democracy Defenders Fund, said in an interview that Mr. Skandalakis’ decision to appoint himself was “a welcome development for our democracy.

“If we don’t have accountability for what happened in the aftermath of the 2020 election,” Mr. Eisen said, “we’re at risk of it happening again.”

The Georgia criminal charges leveled against the president and an eclectic group of his supporters — including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and lawyer for Mr. Trump, and Trevian Kutti, a onetime publicist for Kanye West — lie beyond the federal pardon power of presidents.

The case had been moving toward trial when late last year, Ms. Willis was disqualified from prosecuting it. Months earlier, defense lawyers exposed that Ms. Willis and Nathan Wade, an outside lawyer whom she hired to manage the prosecution, had been romantic partners. The defense accused Ms. Willis of “self-dealing” by going on vacations with Mr. Wade that he had paid for, at least in part.

Ms. Willis fought her removal, but in September, the Georgia Supreme Court declined to intervene, ending the appeals process.

The indictment, handed up in August 2023, accused Mr. Trump and 18 of his allies of organizing a criminal racketeering enterprise to reverse the 2020 election results in the state, which Mr. Trump narrowly lost that year. Part of the basis for the indictment was a phone call Mr. Trump made in January 2021 to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state. During the call, Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn the election results.

The call was part of a multistate strategy by the Trump campaign to keep Mr. Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election, resulting in criminal charges in five states. Mr. Trump faces state election interference charges only in Georgia, but some of those involved in efforts to keep him in office were charged in other states as well.

A Michigan case against fake electors acting on his behalf was dismissed this year. Similar cases in Nevada and Arizona are mired in legal challenges.

A federal criminal elections case against him, parallel to the Georgia case, was dropped after he won the 2024 election, and a separate federal criminal case related to Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents when he left office in 2021 was dismissed last year.

In a fourth criminal case against Mr. Trump, related to payments to cover up a sex scandal during the 2016 presidential campaign, a jury in New York found him guilty on 34 felony counts last year. The president has appealed that conviction.

Mr. Skandalakis is a well-known figure in Georgia legal and political circles. In 2022, he stepped in when a judge disqualified Ms. Willis from developing an election interference case against the state’s lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, a Trump ally who was recruited by Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign to serve as a bogus elector.

Mr. Jones had been told he was a target of the broader Trump investigation by Ms. Willis’s office. But Ms. Willis was ultimately prohibited from pursuing charges against Mr. Jones because she had hosted a fund-raiser for one of his political rivals. As with the current case, Mr. Skandalakis, because of his position on the state prosecutors’ council, was required by law to find a replacement prosecutor to determine whether Mr. Jones should be charged.

Mr. Skandalakis took nearly two years to do so, and ended up deciding that he would be the best person for the job. He took another five months to conclude that Mr. Jones should not be prosecuted, concluding that Mr. Jones “did not act with criminal intent.”

In another high-profile matter in 2022, the Georgia attorney general chose Mr. Skandalakis to determine whether criminal charges were warranted against two Atlanta police officers after one of them fatally shot a Black man, Rayshard Brooks, during an arrest attempt in 2020. Mr. Skandalakis eventually determined that charges against the officers were not warranted.

Since Mr. Trump took office this year, the Justice Department has embarked on a retribution campaign against those who prosecuted him and Democrats he perceives as enemies, shattering norms that had long kept a symbolic wall between presidents and federal prosecutors. In September, Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post that Ms. Willis was among those who “are now CRIMINALS who will hopefully pay serious consequences for their illegal actions.”

The Times reported in September that federal prosecutors had issued a subpoena for records related to Ms. Willis’s travel history, and reported last month that the prosecutors were scrutinizing a trip that she had taken to the Bahamas.

A private firm that develops management seminars for prosecutors has said that Ms. Willis attended one of its training sessions during the trip. The full scope of the Willis inquiry, which is being led by the Justice Department’s Atlanta office, is unclear.

The Justice Department has already brought charges against Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, over the objection of career prosecutors who found insufficient evidence. Mr. Trump has also called for charges against an array of others, including Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two federal criminal indictments against him.

Ms. Willis became a hero to some on the left as she investigated, and then began prosecuting, Mr. Trump. A succession of Trump allies were subpoenaed to testify in Atlanta ahead of the indictment, including Senator Lindsey Graham and Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff.

But the case was quickly swamped by legal challenges from a brigade of defense lawyers, including the disqualification effort. Ms. Willis pushed back in fiery testimony during a February 2024 court hearing, saying, “I’m not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial.”

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