Burt Jones, Georgia’s lieutenant governor, will not face criminal charges over his involvement in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, a special prosecutor announced on Friday.
Jones, a Republican state senator in 2020, served as one of the 16 fake electors for Trump – all of whom signed a document, submitted to the National Archives, claiming Trump won Georgia. Trump lost the state to Joe Biden by 11,779 votes.
Jones was elected Georgia’s lieutenant governor in 2022.
Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, had originally investigated Jones as part of her broader inquiry into Trump’s effort that ultimately resulted in criminal charges against Trump, some of the electors and other allies. But a Fulton county judge removed Willis in 2022 from investigating Jones specifically after she appeared at a fundraiser for Jones’s opponent. Robert CI McBurney, the judge overseeing the case at the time, called Willis’s decision a “‘what are you thinking’ moment”,at the time.
Peter Skandalakis, the head of the prosecuting attorneys’ council in Georgia, took over the investigation in April after other local prosecutors in the state were reluctant to take it on. On Friday, he said that he had concluded that Jones’s conduct did not merit “further investigation or further actions” and considered the case closed.
“I find the conduct and involvement of Senator Jones as an elected representative to be reasonable and not criminal in nature,” he wrote in a statement announcing his decision. “Senator Jones’s involvement and actions during the times in question to be within the scope of his duties as a Senator to address the concerns of constituents and that his participation in voting as an alternate elector on Dec 14th, 2020, was a result of relying upon the advice of attorneys and legal scholars.”
In Georgia, only some of the fake electors have faced criminal charges from Willis over their actions in 2020. Several reportedly accepted immunity deals and assisted in the investigation.
Skandalakis’s decision comes as the criminal case against Trump and allies has been stalled over an effort to remove Willis from the case because of her romantic relationship with the former lead prosecutor in the case. An appeals court in the state is set to hear argument on the matter in December.
The judge overseeing the case also threw out some of the criminal charges against Trump on Friday, but the bulk of the case remains intact.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
