While the congressional committee investigating Jan. 6 has held public hearings and the Justice Department has steadily secured sentencing of hundreds of people who breached the Capitol, an Atlanta grand jury has met behind closed doors to consider the to focus efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia.
Those Georgia investigations intensified this summer, drawing closer to Trump’s inner circle, and potentially posing a clearer legal threat to Trump than the other investigations into his campaign to overthrow the 2020 presidential election, which culminated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
Here’s what you need to know about it.
How did this study come about and who is leading it?
The special grand jury was convened in May at the request of, and she chairs, Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, which includes Atlanta. It will support the ongoing probe into the behavior of Trump and his allies after the 2020 election, launched by Willis in February 2021.
“This is an investigative grand jury that’s a little different from a normal grand jury that would hear every crime under the sun,” Tamar Hallerman, a reporter who has focused on the investigation for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, told Vox earlier in July. “It focuses on this one exclusive case. The whole idea is that they can really become experts and dig into everything to overturn Georgia’s election results.”
Special grand juries are relatively rare in Georgia and are often used in intense, long-running investigations like this one into an attempt to overturn Georgia’s presidential election.
Willis is the first-term district attorney elected in 2020 as a Democrat in Georgia’s largest jurisdiction. She is a career prosecutor who was previously best known for prosecuting Atlanta public school educators for their role in a standardized test cheating program. Willis has also recently garnered national attention for indicting rapper Young Thug on a series of gang-related charges.
What is the Georgia grand jury investigating?
The grand jury is investigating whether Donald Trump and his allies violated Georgia state law in their efforts to reverse the former president’s 2020 loss in the state. Those efforts included his infamous Jan. 2, 2021, phone call to Georgia Foreign Minister Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump said he wanted to “find 11,780 votes.”
It also includes Trump campaign efforts to create a list of fake voters in Georgia to submit fraudulent electoral votes to Congress for certification. Last week, Willis sent a letter to all 16 bogus voters in the state to inform them that they are being considered “targets” of the investigation, meaning they will be viewed as potential charges and not just witnesses. She had previously subpoenaed them in June.
Who has the grand jury heard from so far?
In addition to subpoenaing the bogus voters, the grand jury has solicited testimony from a variety of figures, from a former publicist for Kanye West who allegedly tried to pressure a poll worker into making false allegations of voter fraud, to Brian Kemp , which the Republican governor of the state, who has been the subject of a relentless pressure campaign by Trump, to take action on his behalf.
Recently, she sought testimony from a variety of figures in Trump’s inner circle, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.
“That’s important,” Hallerman said at the time. “This is the first time prosecutors have entered Donald Trump’s inner orbit. Previously, she worked at the state and local level and was very focused on Georgia.”
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, right, speaks with a member of her team during the trial to establish a grand jury in Atlanta, Georgia May 2 to investigate the actions of former President Donald Trump and his supporters who attempted to overthrow the 2020 election results. Ben Gray/AP
Both Graham and Giuliani have tried to avoid testimony. Giuliani was ordered by a New York judge in August to testify in person after he failed to show up for a court hearing to contest his subpoena. Graham is in an ongoing legal battle over whether he can be forced to testify. As a result, he said Monday he had not yet been served a subpoena.
What if they discover Trump or someone else has committed a crime?
You can blame them for this crime – even if it’s Donald Trump.
“Georgia has a law prohibiting criminal solicitation of voter fraud [as well as] a racketeering statute in Georgia that is broader than the federal racketeering statute,” Hallerman said. This opens up opportunities for Georgian prosecutors to bring charges that would not be possible under federal law.
Trump’s infamous phone call to Raffensperger, in particular, could be seen as a call for fraud, and the state’s blackmail statute could broadly encompass Trump’s coordinated efforts to overthrow the 2020 election.
Is this more likely to cause problems for Donald Trump than the Justice Department’s investigation?
Possibly because Willis, as a district attorney with powers of prosecution only under state statutes, doesn’t have the same limitations that DOJ investigators have under federal statutes and guidelines.
She is not bound by DOJ policy to exercise caution when conducting investigations and prosecutions before an election. Nor does she carry the same political baggage as Attorney General Merrick Garland, who will ultimately decide whether to prosecute Trump under federal law. Garland was appointed by President Joe Biden, who Trump could face again in 2024. Willis is an independently elected local official.
Even as Garland investigates whether Trump violated federal law and Willis whether he violated Georgia law, both can still prosecute Trump and others for the same acts under the dual sovereignty doctrine that both state and federal governments can prosecute allows the federal government to pursue parallel criminal prosecutions for the same act so long as the act is a criminal offense under both state and federal law.
Is this related to the work of the January 6 committee?
Technically not. The probes are completely separate. But the events they investigate are connected, so their efforts overlap significantly. Trump’s campaign to reverse the Georgia election result was unsuccessful, and the committee has argued that failure prompted him to make a last-ditch effort to overturn the Jan. 6, 2021 election.
The Committee’s public hearings featured a disproportionate number of witnesses from Georgia compared to other similarly situated states. A June hearing featured almost exclusively Georgia witnesses, with Raffensperger and his former top adviser Gabriel Sterling appearing on one panel, while two former state election officials, Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, appeared on a second panel in the same hearing.
The peach state has drawn disproportionate attention from the panel, both because of the ample evidence of wrongdoing — it’s the only state where there is phone recording of Trump pressuring the top election official — and because so many of the figures involved resisted the effort, like Raffensperger and Sterling were Republicans who actually voted for Trump.
The evidence unearthed and made public by the committee will likely be very helpful to Willis in proving Trump’s sanity and that he knew or should have known that he had indeed lost the 2020 election.
Have there been any major setbacks in Willis’ investigation?
Yes, one has surfaced this week that has created legal obstacles and made it easier to view the investigation as a partisan witch hunt, which could undermine its credibility.
A judge ruled this week that Willis could not act against any of the state’s 16 wrong voters. In one decision, a local circuit court judge ruled that Willis could not himself pursue criminal charges against state senator Burt Jones, who is the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in the midterm election, or compel testimony and documents. Instead, Willis would have to approach an independent outside group to appoint another prosecutor to investigate Jones.
The decision came after Willis hosted a fundraiser for Charlie Bailey, a Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, ahead of his first runoff, which resulted in too much conflict. In the ruling that disqualified Willis, the judge wrote: “An investigation of this magnitude, which inevitably draws public attention and touches so many political nerves in our society, cannot be marred by legitimate doubts about the district attorney’s motives.” will. The district attorney doesn’t have to be apolitical, but her investigation does.”
What happens next?
The special jury can be elected for up to one year according to Georgian law. However, it is unlikely that it will be that long before charges are brought. Sending the target letters to the wrong 16 voters is an indication that some charges are likely to come sooner rather than later.
Willis has also signaled her willingness to call Trump before the grand jury, which would almost certainly spark a major legal battle. However, no final decision has been made on the former president’s compelling testimony.
