Donald Trump expected to face 2020 election charges in Georgia this week
The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia is expected early this week to seek multiple charges against more than a dozen defendants that could include the former president, according to two people briefed on the matter.
The timeline for when the district attorney, Fani Willis, would present evidence to a grand jury came into sharper relief over the weekend after prosecutors summoned the former Georgia lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan and reporter George Chidi to testify on Tuesday.
The notifications are the clearest indication that the prosecutors intend to charge the former president this week. The presentation is expected to take two days, to a grand jury that meets Mondays and Tuesdays. In Georgia,
it is typical for prosecutors to ask a grand jury to return indictments the same day.
For weeks, the prosecutors have identified roughly seven statutes of the Georgia state criminal code – including a racketeering charge, election law crimes as well as other non-election law crimes – with which to charge more than a dozen defendants in a sprawling indictment, the sources said.
The expansive Rico statute, for the purposes of the Trump case, would require only that prosecutors show an “interrelated pattern of activity by and through the [public] office” predicated on at least two “qualifying” or predicate crimes drawn from a list of specific statutes.
The prosecutors on the Trump case have developed evidence of a pattern of racketeering activity that could lead to a Rico charge based on predicates of influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the Guardian has previously reported.
Among the election law charges that prosecutors were examining: criminal solicitation to commit election fraud through seeking a public or political officer to fail to perform duties and seeking to destroy, deface or delay the delivery of ballots; and conspiracy to commit election fraud.
The prosecutors have also developed evidence for the previously unreported state election law charges of intentional interference with performance of election duties, the people said, as well as general criminal solicitation, which is not part of the Georgia election law statutes.
In anticipation of charges against Trump and his allies, local law enforcement last week started to increase
security around the building that contains the Fulton county district attorney’s office and Georgia superior court, closing off roads and installing temporary barricades.
The district attorney had instructed most of her staff to work remotely through the first weeks of August as a safety precaution, and the public area inside the building for days has been taken over by deputies from the Fulton county sheriff’s office.
From his Bedminster club in New Jersey, where Trump spends his summers, the former president unleashed a wave of personal attacks against Willis ahead of what would be his fourth indictment after most recently being charged by special counsel Jack Smith with conspiring to subvert the 2020 election.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Willis was “racist” and treated gang members with “kid gloves” – two accusations without any merit, especially given her office last week prosecuted members of the PDE gang in Atlanta with a Rico charge and street gang terrorism.
The district attorney’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, including impaneling a special grand jury that made it more straightforward to compel evidence from recalcitrant witnesses.
Unlike in the federal system, grand juries in the state of Georgia need to already be considering an indictment when they subpoena documents and testimony. By using a special grand jury, prosecutors can collect evidence without the pressure of having to file charges.
The special grand jury in the Trump investigation heard evidence for roughly seven months and recommended indictments of more than a dozen people including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews with multiple news outlets.
Trump’s legal team sought last month to invalidate the work of the special grand jury and have Willis disqualified from proceedings, but the Georgia supreme court rejected the motion, ruling that Trump lacked “either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Ms Willis’s disqualification”.