District Attorney Fani Willis and presiding judge in Trump election case win elections in Georgia

ATLANTA — Two of the most prominent figures in the Georgia criminal case against former president Donald Trump easily won their respective elections Tuesday in their first appearance on the ballot since the inception of the high-profile election interference case.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis defeated challenger Christian Wise Smith in Georgia’s Democratic primary as she seeks another four-year term as the Atlanta-area’s top prosecutor, according to an Associated Press projection.

Meanwhile, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding over the election case, was elected to his first full term since being appointed to the court last year, defeating challenger Robert Patillo, according to the Associated Press.

McAfee, a former state and federal prosecutor who was appointed to the bench by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), was elected to a four-year term in the nonpartisan judicial race. That is Atlanta-area voters’ final word on that election.

Willis now proceeds to November’s general election, where she will face Courtney Kramer, a Republican lawyer who interned in the Trump White House and was involved in Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 loss in Georgia.

Kramer, who ran unopposed in Tuesday’s primary, faces long odds of winning in heavily Democratic Fulton County, but her campaign is likely to amplify criticism of Willis and the Trump case at a time of mounting Republican attacks and investigations aimed at the incumbent district attorney and her handling of the Trump case.

Willis’s leadership and judgment has faced intense scrutiny in recent months amid allegations that she hired a romantic partner to lead the criminal case against Trump. In March, McAfee ruled Willis could continue prosecuting the Trump case, as long as Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she had appointed and had a romantic relationship with, resigned.

The Georgia Court of Appeals this month agreed to review an appeal from Trump and several of his co-defendants seeking to overturn the order keeping Willis on the case. That review makes it unlikely the case will go trial before the November election and has raised fresh questions about whether Willis will be able to continue prosecuting it.

At the same time, Republicans in Washington and Georgia have launched multiple investigations into Willis and her office — efforts she has decried as attempts to interfere with ongoing criminal cases, including the Trump case.

In her bid for reelection, Willis has largely avoided directly talking about the Trump case — a position that went unchallenged by her primary opponent.

Wise Smith, a former Fulton County prosecutor who previously challenged Willis for district attorney in 2020, did not make the case a focal point of his campaign — though he was critical of Willis’s handling of the matter. In a recent interview with Atlanta’s WXIA, he suggested Willis’s focus on the Trump case had left other cases neglected by “so much focus and energy and time and resources and manpower really going into one case.”

But on Monday night, Willis appeared on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” where she cast her 2024 election as a referendum on whether elected prosecutors will be allowed to be “free of interference” in how they pursue criminal cases.

Willis pointed to the influx of national Republican donations and support already going to Kramer, whom she described as “unqualified” for the role of district attorney, citing her lack of experience including never having tried a criminal case.

“I need people around the country to support me big and small, to think that we are going to be a country that still believes in the rule of law,” Willis declared. “We are not going to allow people to be attacked while they do their job.”