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In article <svrikf$233ck$9@news.freedyn.de>
<governor.swill@gmail.com> wrote:

The Atlanta-area prosecutor who is probing the effort by former
President Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election
result in Georgia was disqualified by a judge Monday from
criminally investigating one of the 16 Republicans who served on
a phony slate of pro-Trump electors.

The ruling, a stunning rebuke to Fulton County District Attorney
Fani Willis, came after a judge found that a conflict of
interest barred Willis and her office from investigating state
Sen. Burt Jones, one of the sham electors.

The district attorney last month hosted a fundraiser for a
Democratic candidate who went on to win his party’s nomination
and will now face off against Jones, whom Willis had identified
as a target of the grand jury’s investigation.

“This scenario creates a plain — and actual and untenable –
conflict,” Judge Robert McBurney of the Superior Court of Fulton
County wrote in his Monday order disqualifying Willis from
pursuing Jones. “Any decision the District Attorney makes about
Senator Jones in connection with the grand jury investigation is
necessarily infected by it.”

“An investigation of this significance, garnering the public
attention it necessarily does and touching so many political
nerves in our society, cannot be burdened by legitimate doubts
about the District Attorney’s motives,” he wrote.

The order Monday rejected similar disqualification requests from
11 other phony electors who were subpoenaed by Willis’s office,
meaning the Fulton County District Attorney’s probe of those
targets may continue, and the investigation of Jones is expected
to be handed off to another prosecutor’s office.

Still, the development represented a significant unforced error
by a prosecutor handling one the nation’s most sensitive and
high-profile criminal investigations, one which poses perhaps
the most significant legal threat to Trump as the former
president eyes a 2024 bid for the White House.

The issue arose after Jones and 11 other pro-Trump electors
filed a court motion to disqualify Willis, arguing in part that
her role in hosting and headlining a mid-June fundraiser for
Charlie Bailey, a Democratic candidate vying against Jones for
lieutenant governor of Georgia, represented a conflict of
interest.

Willis, in court papers, had urged the judge to reject Jones’s
request to disqualify her. She argued that Bailey was still
locked in a runoff with a fellow Democratic contender at the
time of the event.

But McBurney was unpersuaded, noting that whoever won the runoff
would go on to face Jones.

“Thus, the District Attorney pledged her name, likeness, and
office to Bailey as her candidate of choice at a time when, if
Bailey were successful (which he was), he would face Senator
Jones,” he wrote. “This choice — which the District Attorney was
within her rights as an elected official to make — has
consequences.”

The Georgia investigation has intensified recently as Trump
considers whether to launch a White House campaign as early this
summer.

The grand jury recently issued subpoenas to several high-profile
figures, including Trump allies Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and
former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, as well as conservative
lawyers John Eastman, Jenna Ellis and Cleta Mitchell. Willis’s
office recently informed 12 of the 16 Republicans who served as
fake Trump electors that they could face criminal charges.

Georgia has figured prominently into investigations of Trump’s
effort to overturn his defeat by President Biden. In the weeks
after the election, a telephone recording shows, Trump told
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the
number of votes required to overturn Biden’s margin of victory,
which Raffensperger refused to do.

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3573521-atlanta-area-da- disqualified-from-investigating-fake-trump-elector/

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