The Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday dealt another blow to the moribund election interference case against President Trump, declining to intervene after an appeals court ruling last year disqualified Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, from prosecuting the case.
The 4-3 ruling means that the criminal case — once considered one of the most serious legal threats to Mr. Trump after he sought to overturn his 2020 election loss — will not move forward anytime soon, if ever. The Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, a state entity, will now decide whether to reassign the case, and to whom.
The head of the council, Pete Skandalakis, is a Republican. A new prosecutor could decide to press on with the case — now against a sitting president — drop it or bring a modified version. If charges remain against Mr. Trump, he would most likely not face trial until after his term ends in 2029. But if a new prosecutor wanted to proceed with the case against some or all of the 14 other defendants, they could be tried sooner.
Mr. Skandalakis ended up personally handling a piece of the investigation after Ms. Willis was disqualified from developing a case against Georgia’s lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, who acted as a fake elector for Mr. Trump in 2020. Ms. Willis was disqualified from weighing charges against Mr. Jones after headlining a fund-raiser for one of his political rivals. Mr. Skandalakis ultimately declined to bring any charges against Mr. Jones.
Mr. Trump’s co-defendants in the case include Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff; Rudy Giuliani, the president’s onetime personal lawyer; and David Shafer, the former head of the Republican Party in Georgia.
The original multi-count indictment, which was handed up in August 2023, accused Mr. Trump and a number of his allies of organizing a criminal racketeering enterprise to reverse the election results in Georgia, which Mr. Trump narrowly lost in 2020. 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, asking Mr. Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn the election results.
The majority opinion released Tuesday, written by Justice Andrew A. Pinson, a Republican appointee, said that while “the public may well be interested in the case underlying this petition,” the court’s focus was on the narrow question of whether it should intervene in the disqualification of a local district attorney because of an “appearance of impropriety” —which, in this case, stemmed from the fact that Ms. Willis had engaged in a romantic affair with the lawyer she had hired to manage the prosecution.
The justices decided that the matter did “not raise the kind of legal question that warrants further review.”
A trial judge had allowed Ms. Willis to keep the case despite revelations about her romantic relationship. The appeals court reversed the judge’s decision.
Tuesday’s ruling included a dissenting opinion by Justice Carla Wong McMillian, another Republican appointee, who wrote that the legal question of “whether an attorney can be disqualified based on the appearance of impropriety alone” affects “every single active lawyer in the State of Georgia.” She added that prior court rulings were in conflict on the matter and needed to be resolved.
The ruling is the latest in a series of blows to Ms. Willis, a Democrat who rocketed to national prominence by taking the remarkable step of indicting a former president in a state criminal court. Months after the indictment, defense lawyers brought to light her romantic relationship with her fellow prosecutor, Nathan Wade, arguing that it constituted a conflict of interest.
Defense attorneys accused Ms. Willis of “self-dealing” because she took a number of vacations with Mr. Wade after hiring him, while using public funds to pay him more than $650,000 for his work on the case.
“While I disagree with the decision of the Georgia Court of Appeals and the Georgia Supreme Court’s divided decision not to review it, I respect the legal process and the courts,” Ms. Willis said in an emailed statement on Tuesday. “Accordingly, my office will make the case file and evidence available to the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council for use in the ongoing litigation. I hope that whoever is assigned to handle the case will have the courage to do what the evidence and the law demand.”
Steve Sadow, the lead counsel for Mr. Trump in the case, said that the court had ruled correctly, echoing the president’s position that he had been unjustly targeted in an act of politically motivated “lawfare.”
“Willis’ misconduct during the investigation and prosecution of President Trump was egregious and she deserved nothing less than disqualification,” Mr. Sadow said in a statement. “This proper decision should bring an end to the wrongful political, lawfare persecutions of the President.”
Mr. Skandalakis, the lawyer tasked with reassigning the case, declined to comment on Tuesday.
Richard Fausset, a Times reporter based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice.
Danny Hakim is a reporter on the Investigations team at The Times, focused primarily on politics.
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