Who Will Investigate One of Georgia’s Most Ambitious Politicians in the Trump

Since the indictment of former President Donald J. Trump and 18 of his allies last summer on election interference charges in Georgia, a delicate question has gone unanswered: Would criminal charges also be coming for Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a longtime Trump supporter and one of the most ambitious politicians in the Southern swing state?

Mr. Jones was one of the 16 Republicans who acted as fake electors for Mr. Trump in Georgia in an effort to overturn his 2020 defeat. Three of them are charged with felonies, including violating the state racketeering law.

But in 2022, a judge blocked the Fulton County district attorney who led the investigation, Fani T. Willis, from developing a case against Mr. Jones, citing a conflict of interest because she had headlined a fund-raiser for his Democratic rival in the lieutenant governor’s race.

It is now up to a state agency called the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia to find a special prosecutor to investigate Mr. Jones, who has denied any wrongdoing. The head of the agency, Peter J. Skandalakis, has for months said little about the selection process.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Skandalakis, a Republican and former district attorney, confirmed that he would unilaterally choose the prosecutor for the Jones case. He said he had already ruled out some district attorneys, either because their staffs were too small to take on the extra work or because choosing them might seem overly partisan.

This week, the district attorney in Augusta, Ga., became the first to publicly declare an interest in the job. Jared T. Williams, a Democrat, said in an interview on Tuesday that he was willing to investigate Mr. Jones’s actions after the 2020 election “if called upon.”

Mr. Williams’s announcement underscored the conundrum facing Mr. Skandalakis. Georgia Republicans are likely to howl if he chooses a Democrat for the job. But Democrats are likely to do the same if he chooses a Republican.

“I don’t deny that it’s a tough position to be in,” Mr. Skandalakis said, “but it doesn’t bother me. I’ve been in similar positions before on difficult cases throughout my entire career.” He added, however, that few of those cases packed such potential for partisan furor. Mr. Jones has said that he may run for governor in 2026.

Mr. Skandalakis said that he thought highly of Mr. Williams, a first-term district attorney who ran on a criminal justice reform platform, and would talk to him about the job.

But he also said he was concerned that Mr. Williams had been a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the creation of an oversight commission for local prosecutors. Mr. Jones, who presides over the State Senate, had supported the new commission. The suit was recently withdrawn by the plaintiffs after a Georgia Supreme Court decision effectively stymied the commission from operating.

Mr. Skandalakis said he had already ruled out some other prosecutors because they were plaintiffs in the lawsuit. He declined to identify them by name, but the plaintiffs included a Republican district attorney from a central Georgia judicial district, Jonathan Adams, and two Democrats from more populous suburban districts near…