ATLANTA — The criminal investigation into the efforts of former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to overturn his election defeat in Georgia has begun to entangle, in one way or another, an expanding cast of characters:
A United States Senator. A congressman A local Cadillac dealer. Secondary school economics teacher. The chairman of the state Republican Party. The Republican candidate for lieutenant governor. Six lawyers helping Mr. Trump, including a former New York City mayor. The former president himself. And a woman who has identified herself as a publicist for rapper Kanye West.
Fani T. Willis, the district attorney for the Atlanta area, has led the investigation since early last year. But only this month, with a flurry of subpoenas and destination letters, as well as court documents shedding light on some of the closed proceedings of a special grand jury, have the expansive contours of the investigation emerged.
For legal experts, this dispersion is a sign that Ms. Willis is doing what he has indicated all along: building the framework for a broad case that could target several defendants with conspiracy to commit voter fraud or racketeering-related charges for participating. in a coordinated scheme to undermine the elections.
“These people are all from very different walks of life,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a professor of constitutional law at Georgia State University, said of the witnesses and known targets. “The fact that they’re all brought together really suggests that he’s building this larger case of conspiracy.”
What happened in Georgia was not entirely unique. The House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol has shown how Mr. Trump and his allies tried to subvert the election results in several crucial states, including by creating fake pro-Trump electoral rolls. But while many Democrats lament that the Justice Department is moving too slowly in its investigation, the local Georgia prosecutor has been pursuing a fast-track case that could pose the most immediate legal danger to the former president and their associates.
It is not yet clear whether Mr. Trump will be the main target of the impeachment. But the David-before-Goliath dynamic may in part reflect that Ms. Willis’s legal decision-making is less complicated than that of federal officials in Washington by the political and social weight of prosecuting a former president, especially in a bitterly fractured country.
But some key differences in Georgia law may also make the path to prosecution easier than in federal court. And there was the signal event that drew attention to Mr. Trump’s conduct in Georgia: his call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whose office, in Ms. Willis’s Fulton County, recorded the president imploring him to “find” the 11,780 votes. he needed to reverse his defeat.
The staff of Mr. Trump had no comment, nor did his local attorney. When Ms Willis opened the investigation in February 2021, a Trump spokesman described it as “simply the latest attempt by Democrats to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump”. The lawyers for 11 of Trump’s 16 voters, Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow and Holly A. Pierson, accused Ms. Willis of “misusing the grand jury process to harass, embarrass and attempt to intimidate candidate voters, not to investigate the his conduct”.
Last year, Ms. Willis told The New York Times that racketeering charges could be on the cards. Whenever people “hear the word ‘racketeering,’ they think ‘The Godfather,'” he said, before explaining that the charges under Georgia’s version of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act they could be applied in any number of areas where corrupt companies operate. . “If you have multiple open acts for an illegal purpose, I think you can get there,” he said.
The Trump investigations
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Numerous queries. Since Donald J. Trump left office, the former president has faced civil and criminal investigations across the country into his business and political activities. Here’s a look at the featured queries:
Trump’s social media meltdown. A federal grand jury in Manhattan has issued subpoenas over the merger of Mr. Trump, Truth Social, with Digital World Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Federal authorities are also investigating an increase in trading that preceded the announcement of the $300 million deal.
Westchester County Criminal Investigation. The Westchester County, N.Y., district attorney’s office appears to be focused at least in part on whether the Trump Organization misled local officials about the value of a golf course, the Trump National Golf Club Westchester, to reduce your taxes
Ms. Willis, 51, a first-term Democrat, has long made use of racketeering charges and hired a leading expert on the state’s exhibition laws. In 2014, as a member of the bureau, she prosecuted public school teachers involved in a cheating scandal, and in May, she secured an indictment charging rapper Young Thug and 27 associates with conspiracy to commit racketeering. identifying them as criminals. street gang
Observers believe a similar fate awaits some of the countless Trump loyalists inside and outside Georgia who may have contributed to trying to subvert the legitimate election results. He has already informed the head of the Georgia Republican Party that he is the target of the investigation, along with the party’s treasurer and 14 other Georgians who were on Trump’s list of fake voters, including the car dealer and the economics professor
Several people closer to Mr. Trump have also been implicated in the case. His personal attorney, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, has been ordered by a judge to testify on August 9. Attorneys for Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina are fighting her subpoena to testify, as are attorneys for Rep. Jody Hice. a staunch Trump ally who led efforts in the House in January 2021 to stop vote certification. Ms Willis is also seeking to compel the testimony of John Eastman, an architect of the legal strategy to keep Mr Trump in power, as well as other lawyers (Kenneth Chesebro, Jacki Pick Deason, Jenna Ellis and Cleta Mitchell) who practiced critical papers in the effort
Ms. Willis’ office has focused on several aspects of research:
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Calls made by Mr. Trump and his allies to apply direct pressure on state officials. The pressure campaign began in the days following the election, when Mr. Graham called Mr. Raffensperger to ask how Mr. Trump invalidating certain mail-in votes. And it culminated with the call of Mr. Trump to Mr. Raffensperger four days before the attack on the Capitol.
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The Secret Plot to Send a Fake Georgia Electoral Roll to Washington. While both parties draw up the lists of presidential electors in case their candidate wins, four of those Republican electors in Georgia dropped out after the election. However, top Republican operatives in the state assembled a new list of Trump voters to disrupt the transfer of power during the congressional vote certification.
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Numerous inaccuracies made by Mr. Giuliani and others before the state legislature during two hearings in December 2020. The conduct of Mr. Giuliani in Georgia was already exposed by a New York state appeals court last year when it suspended his law license. The court’s 33-page report mentioned Georgia 35 times and described “numerous false and misleading statements about the results of Georgia’s presidential election,” including false claims that tens of thousands of underage teenagers had voted il ·legally in Georgia and that the voting machines had altered the result.
Three witnesses who have appeared before the grand jury told The Times that the Giuliani hearings were of particular interest. “There was a seven-hour video,” state Sen. Jennifer Jordan, a Democrat and one of the witnesses, said of Giuliani’s hearing before a Georgia Senate committee, adding: “I’m sure the grand jury has seen everything. in its entirety”.
Prosecutors have even subpoenaed the testimony of Trevian Kutti, a Chicago-based publicist who says he worked for Mr. West, the rapper and Trump admirer who briefly ran his own 2020 presidential campaign. Ms Kutti, a former celebrity stylist and cannabis lobbyist from Illinois, traveled to the Illinois area Atlanta a few weeks after the vote and visited Ruby Freeman, an election worker obscures the account of how Mr. Trump had falsely accused him of cheating. the ballots were presented at one of the House committee’s public hearings.
Ms Kutti, in an incident first reported by Reuters, initially introduced herself to Ms Freeman as a “crisis manager” connected to unnamed powerful people and offered vague assurances of help. But in a court filing, prosecutors said he then warned Ms. Freeman that “her freedom was in danger” and tried to “pressure Freeman into falsely confessing to her involvement in the voter fraud.”
The case accelerated dramatically this month, first with news that Ms. Willis sought to compel seven of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and advisers to testify in the case, including Mr. Eastman, Ms. Ellis, Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Graham. Court documents then revealed that the 16 bogus voters had been told they were targets of the investigation and could face charges, a step many observers saw as an initial gesture that could lead to similar actions against Trump’s most prominent allies.
Ms. Debrow and Ms. Pierson, in a filing, said a local prosecutor had no jurisdiction to determine which federal voters were fake and which were real. But Gwendolyn Keyes Fleming, a former district attorney in neighboring DeKalb County, noted that Trump voters had gathered at the state Capitol, which is in Fulton, adding…