By Aryal Aglugub and Michele Chadwick
ATLANTA, GA –This week, New York Times writer Richard Fausset shed light on the ongoing criminal investigation of former President Donald J. Trump by Manhattan prosecutors.
Fausset said a separate investigation regarding whether or not the former president and his colleagues illegally rigged Georgia’s 2020 election results made major progress on Monday, and the jury has been picked to serve on a special investigative grand jury.
This panel will investigate “whether there were unlawful attempts to disrupt the administration of the 2020 elections here in Georgia,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert C.I. McBurney stated to the 200 possible jurors that had been called to the Atlanta courthouse, which had been filled with law enforcement agents.
The special grand jury will be able to subpoena witnesses as well as documents, and this will greatly help the prosecutors on the case who have had issues getting potential witnesses to testify voluntarily, according to the NY Times. The jurors will have up to a year to decide on whether or not District Attorney Fani T. Willis should pursue criminal charges against Trump and his allies.
Legal experts have said that this investigation could be treacherous for Trump, who in January 2021 made a phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find” enough votes to get him in the lead against his Democratic rival, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., in the tally of Georgia’s presidential election.
The seating regarding the Georgia grand jury has come to Manhattan as a criminal inquiry, and has come to a halt, said the Times. The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, reportedly has questions on the strength of the New York case, which entails if the former President lied about the value of assets in his annual financial statements. Close sources to the investigation have told the New York Times that this case may lose momentum if witnesses do not agree to testify. 
In regard to the Georgia case, legal experts published an analysis last year conducted by the Brookings Institution. In this analysis it stated Trump’s call to Raffensperger, and varying post-election moves, have put Trump at a “substantial risk” of criminal charges, including election fraud, racketeering, conspiracy to commit election fraud, and intentional interference in the performance of the 2020 election duties.
This investigation will purportedly look at the Trump allies who also took part in these allegations in Georgia, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, who is Trump’s personal lawyer, Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, as well as Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows.
This case will reside with the Fulton County District Attorney, seeing as the allegations of the phone calls happened in or included Fulton County officials. This also includes the many government offices as well as the State Capitol building located in downtown Atlanta.
There was also another call, in addition to the one with Raffensperger. Trump also has publicly described a call with Gov. Brian Kemp after the election where he asked Kempt to hold a special election to “get to the bottom” of “a big election-integrity problem in Georgia.”
The former President also called state Attorney General Chris Carr, and told him to expect a lawsuit that challenged the election results in multiple states, including Georgia; he also asked Raffensperger’s chief investigator to search for “dishonesty” in the election.
A judge stated in court on Monday, “But now it’s time for 26 members of our community to participate in that investigation,” acknowledging the jurors and their alternates.
Judge McBurney asked the potential jurors, according to the NY Times, to come forward if they felt a potential conflict if they became convinced that these allegations regarding the 2020 elections were true, or not true. About 25 of the potential jurors claimed that they had a conflict.
The special grand jurors will undergo the tasks of issuing subpoenas, hearing testimony and reviewing documents. While the meetings and proceedings outside of their meetings will be confidential, the judge allowed for the witnesses to speak about the proceedings publicly if they wanted to.
A majority of the judges in the Fulton County Superior Court accepted a request for the special grand jury in January. This allows for the jury to meet up for a year, starting this week. The panel will then make recommendations in regard to the criminal prosecutions that Trump is facing, and from there the responsibility will be on Willis, a Democrat, to go to a regular grand jury to seek out criminal indictments.
Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, said that impaneling the grand jury was a sign that prosecutors had acknowledged the complexity, sensitivity and unique nature of the case.
Willis has raised the possibility that Trump and his allies violated the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO.
Federal RICO law is often used to target organized crime networks. Similarly, Georgia’s state racketeering statute is a tool that can be used to go after a broad range of groups engaging in criminal conduct. However, proving that would require a deep investigation, said the NY Times.
A call, said the NY Times, from Graham to Raffensperger would be included in this investigation. During the call, Graham asked whether mail-in votes could be discarded in counties with high rates of questionable ballot signatures.
Other aspects of the investigation would include a visit Meadows made to suburban Atlanta to monitor an election audit there; and postelection appearances that Giuliani made before state legislative committees in which he asked for an alternative pro-Trump slate of electors to be appointed.
“There’s a lot more than just the phone call,” said Kreis, who added that the case involved areas of the law that were “underdeveloped.
“We don’t have a lot of claims or potential claims that someone violated Georgia law by soliciting election fraud, because you’d have to be pretty crazy to go to the secretary of state’s office to demand a change in vote tabulations,” he said. “These are things so brazen it’s almost beyond belief.”
Additionally, Trump faces civil suits as well.
A New York attorney general, Letitia James, is poised to bring a civil action in her investigation of fraudulent and misleading business practices by the Trump Organization, her staff has said in court. And a judge recently held Trump in contempt in that case for failing to fully comply with a subpoena and began fining him $10,000 a day.
In Westchester County, the district attorney’s office is investigating the financial matter of a golf course that Trump’s company owns. And a federal grand jury has been empaneled to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.
Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, called the Fulton County investigation a politically motivated “witch hunt,” according to the NY Times.
Willis said she would wait until after Georgia’s May 24 primary election to bring witnesses to testify before the special grand jury, in an effort to avoid the appearance of her seeking to influence state politics.
Trump planned to hold a call-in “tele-rally” on Monday for Senator David Purdue, who has falsely claimed that Kemp allowed “radical Democrats to steal our election.”
In January, Willis wrote to the FBI her office had received communications from “persons unhappy with our commitment to fulfill our duties,” and asked the FBI to provide “intelligence and federal agents” for the courthouse.
Willis said the security concerns had been “escalated” by comments Trump made at an event in Texas in which he called the prosecutors focusing on him “vicious, horrible people” who were “racist” and “mentally sick” and unfairly targeting him.
Additionally, Willis notes that Trump called for protests in Atlanta and elsewhere if prosecutors illegally pursued him, according to the NY Times.
