ATLANTA — With the future of the Georgia 2020 election interference case now in his hands, Pete Skandalakis will soon make one of the weightiest decisions of his career.

The veteran state prosecutor, who appointed himself to take over the case this month after he couldn’t find another district attorney willing to do so, could:

•Decide to resume the full racketeering probe against President Donald Trump and 14 of his political allies as envisioned by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who was previously removed from the case

•Take the prosecution in a new direction by seeking out new charges via a so-called superseding indictment

•Slim the original case down by moving forward with parts of it while shelving or killing others

•Decline to move forward, likely triggering an order from the judge dismissing the last of the remaining criminal cases against Trump

Many close observers believe it will be exceedingly difficult for Skandalakis, the head of the nonpartisan Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, to pursue any of the first three possibilities given the legal, practical and political realities surrounding the case.

“This case seems to me for a prosecutor like climbing Mount Everest with an elephant strapped to your back,” said former Gwinnett County DA Danny Porter, a Republican who previously reviewed another high-profile case on behalf of Skandalakis.

“Just absorbing the information and trying to come up with a manageable trial strategy is not impossible, but it’s pretty close.”

Untangling legal knots

Should he opt to move forward, Skandalakis would need to contend with a thicket of thorny legal issues.

The first: working his way through a stack of leftover pretrial motions filed by co-defendants before Willis was removed from the case. Those could take months to resolve.

If he opts to pursue Trump, Skandalakis would have an even bigger problem to untangle: determining how much of Fulton’s case against the president still stands under the U.S. Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision from 2024. It would be up to Skandalakis to determine what, from Trump’s alleged criminal conduct, could be considered part of his “official” duties as president, and thus immune from prosecution, and what’s “unofficial” and fair game for prosecutors.

Any legal action against Trump would almost certainly be appealed through state and then federal courts, which could take years to resolve.

Then there are the policy memos from the U.S. Justice Department saying presidents can’t be charged while in office. Even though Trump was indicted in Fulton between his terms in office, Skandalakis previously made public comments suggesting he doesn’t think Trump could be prosecuted until 2029.

Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University law professor who specializes in constitutional law, said he suspects the part of the case against Trump will “probably just go away.”

“And so then the question is, what do you do with everybody else?” he said. “There might be truly meaningful justice in just pursuing the co-defendants.”

Among them are former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; Rudy Giuliani, the ex-New York City mayor who was Trump’s personal attorney ; and John Eastman, who also served as one of Trump’s attorneys following the 2020 election and argued there was evidence of widespread fraud in swing states like Georgia.

Statute of limitations

If Skandalakis wants to pursue any new charges, he’d need to take time to build a case he could present to a grand jury to secure a superseding indictment. Importantly, he’d be contending with rapidly approaching deadlines under Georgia’s statute of limitations, which are four years for most felonies and five years under the state’s racketeering statute. Those are tight deadlines given that most of the alleged crimes in the case occurred in late 2020 and early 2021.

Then there are Skandalakis’ limited resources.

Willis had assigned roughly a dozen prosecutors, investigators and support staff to help build her case, including three outside attorneys she hired as special prosecutors.

While Skandalakis could pull in staff attorneys at the Council to help him, he’s unlikely to receive any additional resources from the Republican-controlled Legislature to pursue a case, especially given the scrutiny Willis received for the pay she gave her special prosecutors.

Regardless, former DeKalb County DA Robert James said Skandalakis should take the time now to closely scrutinize Willis’s work before making any decisions.

“The first thing you would do if you’re responsible is you start from scratch, you start looking through every line of that indictment and you turn every page of evidence that you have and you compare the evidence that you have with the indictment and you make a decision of what’s valid,” he said.

Skandalakis previously said he had been given 101 banker boxes of documents and a 8-terabyte hard drive of evidence by the Fulton DA’s office.

James, a Democrat who now runs his own firm, noted that there could be a domino effect if Skandalakis decides to pursue some but not all parts of Willis’ case.

“This is such a tangled spider web,” he said. “It would be interesting to see how the removal of one person would affect the validity of another charge, because some of the charges are connected.”

If Skandalakis decides not to pursue the racketeering charge, James noted, some of the defendants who allegedly committed crimes outside of Fulton County, including in Washington, D.C., and Coffee County in South Georgia, may need to be removed from the case entirely.

Political dynamics

Then there are the political realities of the case.

Prosecutors typically do not like to bring cases they don’t believe they can win in front of a jury. The election interference case has become politically radioactive.

“The fact that a case is hard shouldn’t deter a prosecutor, but you’re always going to have that in the back of your mind,” said Porter, the former Gwinnett DA.

Willis frequently received death threats for her work on the case and for years has traveled with around-the-clock security. Even though politics is not supposed to play into the decision-making of prosecutors, those facts could be hard to ignore.

Kreis, the GSU law professor, said Skandalakis also shouldn’t ignore the fact that a grand jury of Fulton County residents heard Willis’ evidence in August 2023 and decided there was probable cause to suspect crimes occurred.

“I think fundamentally, he has to do some considerable self-reflection,” Kreis said. “He’s now stepping in for the people of Fulton County. And our grand jury said that there is wrongdoing here, and I think to ignore that is not something prosecutors should do unless they believe that they could not ever secure convictions in good faith.”

Kreis added, “I think there’s a really good case for narrowing, paring back and focusing resources where you can respect the work done by the grand jury, and you can acknowledge the decision by the Fulton County DA as an elected official without giving yourself a quagmire that will never end.”

Skandalakis may be forced to reveal his decision soon.

Scott McAfee, the Fulton Superior Court judge overseeing the case, scheduled a meeting with stakeholders on Dec. 1, during which Skandalakis must announce whether he plans to pursue new charges via a superseding indictment.

Skandalakis has not publicly disclosed how he plans to approach the case, beyond his overall objective of ensuring it’s “handled properly, fairly, and with full transparency discharging my duties without fear, favor or affection.”

Close observers believe that given Skandalakis’ previous comments about Trump, along with a past decision not to pursue charges against GOP elector and current Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, he’s likely at a minimum to eliminate large swaths of the case — if he doesn’t decline to pursue the case outright.

Griffin Judicial Circuit DA Marie Broder, a Republican who is retiring in January, said she doesn’t envy Skandalakis’s position.

“I feel bad honestly for Pete and what he’s inherited,” she said. “He’s inherited quite a lot.”

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—Staff writer Jozsef Papp contributed to this article.

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