Former President Donald Trump is facing a potential fourth indictment, this time in Georgia, where state prosecutors may soon bring charges over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results there.
Former President Donald Trump is facing a potential fourth indictment, this time in Georgia, where state prosecutors may soon bring charges over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results there.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, launched the probe in early 2021 and has investigated Trump’s attempts to pressure Georgia officials into interfering with the vote tally, the “fake electors” scheme to subvert the Electoral College and other efforts to undo the will of the voters.
Many of these incidents also factored into Trump’s federal indictment on charges related to the 2020 election aftermath. (Trump pleaded not guilty last week to four federal charges in that case.) That probe, led by special counsel Jack Smith, is separate from the state-level inquiry in Georgia.
Willis is expected to spend one or two days presenting her case before a grand jury next week, likely starting Monday. At least two witnesses have publicly confirmed that they were called to testify in front of the grand jury Tuesday.
Trump has vehemently denied wrongdoing, as have his allies who are also under scrutiny in the probe. The former president has lashed out at Willis, who is Black, calling her “racist” and a “lunatic Marxist.”
Here’s what to know about the investigation.
What is being investigated?
Candidate Joe Biden beat Trump in Georgia by 11,779 votes, or about 0.23% of nearly 5 million ballots cast. Biden’s razor-thin victory was confirmed by two recounts and certified by Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both Republicans.
Instead of conceding, Trump launched a multi-pronged effort to overturn the results, including a pressure campaign targeting key state officials. Trump wanted them to abuse their powers to “find” enough votes to flip the results, or to block Biden’s victory from being certified. They refused.
“So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state,” Trump said in a phone call to Raffensperger on January 2, 2021.
When these efforts failed, Trump urged Georgia lawmakers to convene a special session of the GOP-run legislature so they could overturn Biden’s victory. Trump allies, including his attorney Rudy Giuliani, presented bogus fraud claims to the state House and Senate at hearings in December 2020. The Trump campaign, with outside lawyers who supported their cause, filed meritless lawsuits that tried to overturn the Georgia results.
Trump’s campaign also recruited a group of GOP activists in Georgia to serve as fake electors, who were part of a seven-state scheme to undermine the Electoral College. These fake slates of electors played a key role in Trump’s ill-fated plot to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s victory on January 6, 2021.
At the same time, Trump tried to weaponize the Justice Department to help him intervene in Georgia and elsewhere. He tried to cajole top Justice Department officials and federal prosecutors in Atlanta into falsely announcing that the election was “corrupt” and that Biden’s win was tainted by massive fraud.
