Former Trump Lawyer Emerges as Challenger to Atlanta District Attorney

A Republican lawyer who has worked both in the Trump White House and with the Trump campaign declared on Friday that she is running to unseat Fani T. Willis, the embattled Atlanta prosecutor leading the election interference case against the former president in Georgia.

The challenger, Courtney A. Kramer, 30, qualified on Friday to run for Fulton County district attorney. As a little-known candidate and a Republican, she faces long odds in the heavily Democratic county — former President Donald J. Trump won only 26 percent of its vote in 2020.

But she may be able to raise large sums of money from Trump supporters around the country, receive airtime on conservative media outlets and use the exposure to sow doubts about the prosecution of Mr. Trump in the run-up to the November election.

Ms. Kramer will also likely amplify the drumbeat of criticism of Ms. Willis, who is the subject of a disqualification effort backed by lawyers for Mr. Trump and his co-defendants.

The biography on Ms. Kramer’s LinkedIn page lists myriad MAGA credentials. She was an intern in the White House Counsel’s Office during the Trump administration and later a litigation consultant for the Trump campaign’s legal team in Georgia after the 2020 election, when it was trying to keep him in power despite his loss.

She has worked at a firm run by Ray Smith III, one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants in the elections case. She has also worked as a special counsel for the Georgia Republican Party, when it was run by David Shafer, another co-defendant in the Trump case. Her résumé also includes a year as executive director of True the Vote, an organization that spreads misinformation about the 2020 election.