Fani Willis’ Georgia election interference case against Trump will carry on for now with new prosecutor

By Jason Morris, CNN

(CNN) — The sprawling 2023 racketeering indictment case against President Donald Trump and several allies for their efforts to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat in Georgia will continue and is now in the hands of a new prosecutor.

The case was assigned in September to Peter Skandalakis, director of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Council of Georgia, a bipartisan collaboration of six district attorneys and three solicitors general from across the state.

Skandalakis previously said he could also take the case himself if he could not find another prosecutor willing to take it on.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had launched the case, but was removed after a legal fight over her authority.

“This morning, an Administrative Order appointing me to the case of State of Georgia v. Donald J. Trump, et al. was filed with the Clerk of the Superior Court of Fulton County,” Skandalakis wrote in a statement Friday morning.

“The filing of this appointment reflects my inability to secure another conflict prosecutor to assume responsibility for this case,” Skandalakis said.

“Several prosecutors were contacted and, while all were respectful and professional, each declined the appointment. Out of respect for their privacy and professional discretion, I will not identify those prosecutors or disclose their reasons for declining,” he wrote.

Even though the long-time veteran career prosecutor will now oversee the case, it is unclear if it will actually move forward.

The historic state racketeering charges were filed on August 14, 2023, by Willis, an elected Democrat who launched a lengthy investigation into Trump’s alleged interference in the Georgia election in early 2021. The investigation began shortly after a January phone call became public in which Trump pressured Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to “find” the votes necessary for him to win the state in the Presidential election.

“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,” Trump’s lead Georgia attorney Steve Sadow told CNN in a statement.

The high-profile case by the Fulton County prosecutor peaked in dramatic fashion when Trump surrendered in the Atlanta jail for a little over 20 minutes in August 2023, where he was forced to provide his mug shot for the first time. The case was seen as the most likely of the various criminal charges surrounding Trump to go to trial because it was a state case handled by a local Georgia prosecutor, rather than federal charges that could be pardoned.

Trump was charged alongside 18 co-defendants on sweeping charges using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the state law commonly referred to as RICO, similar to the federal version of the statute that was famously used to target criminal enterprises like the mafia.

After a long-running investigation, Willis accused Trump and his allies of breaking several laws by participating in a conspiracy to unlawfully change the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

Skandalakis said he just recently received the investigative file from Willis’ office, which includes 101 banker boxes of documents and an 8-terabyte hard drive. Willis’ office declined to comment.

Several Trump allies involved in case

Beyond the president, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was the highest-ranking official charged, along with former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who reached an agreement with two Georgia election officials this year to settle a nearly $150 million defamation lawsuit.

Trump and his accused co-defendants “joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome” of the election, prosecutors alleged in the indictment, which said they “unlawfully conspired and endeavored to conduct and participate in criminal enterprise” after Trump lost the election in Georgia to Joe Biden.

Sadow, Trump’s lead Georgia defense attorney on the case, vigorously maintained his client’s innocence during the ongoing legal process, along with attorneys who represented many of the co-defendants also charged in the unique racketeering conspiracy.

The defendants vehemently denied any wrongdoing, some arguing they were simply trying to rectify what they believed were serious irregularities that tainted the 2020 election results.

Four of the 19 defendants in Willis’ case, including three attorneys directly involved in Trump’s bid to overturn the election results in the Peach State, accepted plea deals, in some cases pleading guilty to felony charges in exchange for more lenient sentencing recommendations.

Thirty “unindicted co-conspirators” were also named in the high-profile case — a freight train that was barreling down the tracks simultaneously as Trump was campaigning for his second run at the White House.

Then in a wild unexpected twist in early 2024, Michael Roman, a campaign official for Trump in 2020, filed a motion that eventually got Willis disqualified from prosecuting the case because of a romantic relationship she had with Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she hired to help in the investigation. The defendants argued that Willis financially benefited from the relationship with Wade, who defense attorneys say covered several vacations for the pair.

In March 2024, after Willis’ dramatic televised testimony put her personal life in the spotlight, Superior Court of Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee found that there was not enough evidence to firmly prove that Willis financially benefited from the relationship, and allowed Willis to continue to helm the case if Wade stepped down, which he later did.

However, the legal proceedings against Trump and several co-defendants were officially paused in June 2024 when a Georgia appeals court reviewed potential misconduct by Willis.

In December 2024, the appeals court officially disqualified Willis over her romantic relationship with the special prosecutor.

Then the final dagger for Willis came in September, when The Georgia Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from the Fulton County district attorney on her removal.

This story and headline have been updated with additional information.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

CNN’s Zachary Cohen and Marshall Cohen contributed to this report.