The stakes might be excessive on Thursday when a decide in Atlanta seeks to find out whether or not the Fulton County district lawyer, Fani T. Willis, needs to be disqualified from main the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump on election interference fees.
If Judge Scott McAfee determines that Ms. Willis has a battle of curiosity due to her romantic relationship with the prosecutor she employed to handle the case, and that it deserves disqualification, his determination would, by extension, disqualify her whole workplace.
The case would then be reassigned to a different Georgia prosecutor, who would have the power to proceed with the case precisely as it’s, make main adjustments — reminiscent of including or dropping fees or defendants — or to even drop the case altogether. The latter determination would finish the prosecution of Mr. Trump and his allies for his or her actions in Georgia after the 2020 election, when the previous president sought to overturn his loss within the state.
It could be as much as a state entity known as the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia to search out another person to take up the case. More particularly, the choice would fall to the council’s government director, Pete Skandalakis, an skilled former prosecutor.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Skandalakis mentioned that he may ask a prosecutor to tackle the Trump case voluntarily. But he may additionally appoint a prosecutor to do the job — whether or not they wished to or not.
Mr. Skandalakis mentioned he may additionally attempt to discover a lawyer in non-public apply to switch Ms. Willis. But that’s an unlikely situation, he mentioned, as a result of he may solely pay such a lawyer roughly $70 per hour.
Mr. Skandalakis’s choices could also be restricted, as a result of few prosecutors’ workplaces in Georgia have the scale, or the budgets, to attempt a posh racketeering case that targets 15 defendants, amongst them a former president of the United States and his former chief of workers.
Picking a alternative would even be a politically sophisticated determination certain to lift the hackles of partisans in a single occasion or one other. Two of the bigger district lawyer’s workplaces within the state — with staffs and budgets which may be capable to deal with the Trump case — are these in DeKalb and Cobb counties, which cowl populous swathes of the Atlanta suburbs. Those workplaces are presently headed by Democrats.
Mr. Skandalakis, a Republican, may additionally theoretically select to nominate himself as the brand new prosecutor.
Mr. Skandalakis is taken into account to be fair-minded by various outstanding Georgia Democrats. But he has additionally been criticized for transferring slowly within the effort to discover a prosecutor to contemplate whether or not Georgia’s lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, ought to face fees associated to the Trump case.
A decide in July 2022 blocked Ms. Willis from creating a case in opposition to Mr. Jones, who served as a pretend pro-Trump elector, as a result of Ms. Willis had hosted a fundraiser for considered one of Mr. Jones’s political rivals. No alternative prosecutor has been named.
This week, Mr. Skandalakis declined to say how shortly he would be capable to discover a alternative for Ms. Willis within the Trump case, if it have been needed.
Source: www.nytimes.com