A progressive Democrat and a Republican who briefly worked in Donald Trump’s administration entered the Fulton County district attorney’s race Friday in an attempt to oust Fani Willis, who has been the subject of scrutiny and embarrassing public testimony and is awaiting a judge’s decision on whether she’ll be removed from the Georgia election interference case against the former president.
Attorney Christian Wise Smith, who ran against Willis four years ago, is challenging her in the May Democratic primary election. Courtney Kramer, who said she interned in the White House counsel’s office under Trump for three months in 2018, was the only Republican to qualify by the noon Friday deadline. The general election is in November.
Meanwhile, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who’s presiding over the election interference case, drew two challengers for his nonpartisan race in May: Robert Patillo, a civil rights attorney, and Tiffani Johnson, a staff attorney for another Fulton County judge.
While races like these rarely attract national attention, the intense scrutiny on the 2020 election interference case has pushed them into the spotlight. Willis obtained an indictment in August against Trump and 18 others, accusing them of illegally trying to overturn his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the state. But those charges have been overshadowed for the last two months by the focus on the romantic relationship Willis had with a special prosecutor in the case and whether that should disqualify her from pursuing the prosecution.
Willis and Wise Smith, who had both worked in the Fulton County district attorney’s office under then-District Attorney Paul Howard, challenged their former boss in the Democratic primary in 2020. Willis then beat Howard in a runoff and ran unopposed in the November general election that year.
Just a day after she took office, on Jan. 2, 2021, Trump made a rambling phone…
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