Thanks to the rules of the Georgia court system, the scathing testimony of several former Trump administration officials, now being televised by the Jan. 6 committee, could start the Fulton County District Attorney’s criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump’s threatening phone call the head of state very well support elections officially last year.
Georgia is a state where prosecutors seeking indictments can present hearsay to grand juries. That means the special jury currently underway in Atlanta can be shown how former Attorney General Bill Barr and others have repeatedly told Trump that his election conspiracy theories are absolute nonsense – laying the groundwork for proving that he knowingly cited false allegations of voter fraud, when he intimidated Georgia’s foreign minister on January 2, 2021.
According to one person familiar with the inner workings of the Fulton County Attorney’s Office, prosecutors have been investigating closely from the outset whether Trump and his lieutenants could be charged with violating a Georgia state statute against “criminal solicitation of voter fraud.” Investigators could indict them if they find a member of Trump’s team is “prompting, demanding, ordering, intrusive” or trying to get Georgia officials to “participate” in voter fraud in the multiple recorded phone calls they made with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger or the best investigator in his agency.
Prosecutors would have a hard time proving Trump was involved in a crime if he genuinely believed there was actual fraud in Georgia, attorneys told The Daily Beast.
But in recent weeks, the Jan. 6 Committee hearings proved the half-dozen by playing video testimonies from Trump advisers who recalled telling the commander in chief that the conspiracy theories were unfounded.
“I told him that the stuff his people were shoveling publicly was – was – bullshit, that the cheating allegations were bullshit. And, you know, he was outraged by that,” Barr told congressional investigators under oath in a videotaped statement shared by the committee last month.
“I told him it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time and it would do the country a huge disservice,” added Trump’s former secretary general.
That testimony will be crucial to the grand jury, said Adam Kaufmann, a commercial defense attorney who was previously a Manhattan district attorney.
“Trump will disguise himself as believing he is right. What will really matter is what his advisers said to him at the time,” Kaufmann said. “The Fulton County Attorney General is now in a position to put the United States Attorney General before this grand jury and say, ‘No, Mr. President, we did an investigation and there was no fraud.'”
“It makes it a lot easier,” he said.
The Peach State’s official Grand Jury Handbook, compiled by the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, makes it clear that residents brought to justice for these secret trials may hear this type of evidence.
“An unsworn, out-of-court statement … may be sufficient evidence on which to base the return of a charge,” it said.
Barr and other senior Trump administration officials were under oath as they testified before the January 6 Committee in recent months, which may lend additional weight to their claims that Trump should have known better than he did when he made baseless allegations of voter fraud against Georgians officials repeated.
For example, during his Saturday afternoon call with the Georgia Secretary of State on Jan. 2, 2021, Trump repeatedly brought up how a poll worker allegedly brought in “what appeared to be suitcases or trunks” with “18,000 ballots, all for Biden.” It was a popular conspiracy theory propagated by former New York Mayor Rudy Giulaini, who was then acting as Trump’s attorney, to sow doubt among Georgia’s conservative lawmakers.
However, in the month prior to Trump’s phone call, the chief federal attorney in that district had already investigated this at Barr’s behest – and determined that nothing like this had happened. Byung Jin “BJay” Pak, then-US Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, recalled the details of his conversation with Barr and the subsequent investigation when testifying before the committee on June 13.
“He asked me to find out what I could find out about it because he had imagined that a few days after we called him he would have to go to the White House for a meeting and that this issue might arise. He asked me to make it a priority to get to the bottom of Mr Giuliani’s allegation and try to back it up,” Pak said.
“We found out that the suitcase full of ballots — the alleged black suitcase that was pulled from under the table — was actually an official locker where the ballots were kept safe,” he told Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren.
Subpoenas issued to members of Trump’s team in Georgia earlier this week indicate how prosecutors are building a case that the former president and his lieutenants were involved in a criminal conspiracy.
Subpoenas say several of the witnesses “were part of a cross-country, coordinated effort to influence the results of the November 2020 election.”
That particular language raises red flags for Peter Odom, a former assistant district attorney in that office who prosecuted elective crime cases.
“Conspiracy is an agreement by two or more people to commit a crime. It is very clear that the grand jury is investigating the conspiracy by Donald Trump and his close allies to illegally influence the election,” Odom told The Daily Beast.
Neither the Fulton County Attorney’s office nor the Jan. 6 committee on Thursday responded to questions about the nature of their communications or sharing of evidence.
The eight subpoenas issued Tuesday require testimonies from several key figures in Trump’s orbit. And while Trump himself has not received a subpoena, the fact that he is missing may actually be evidence that Fulton County prosecutors are proceeding with an investigation aimed primarily at the former president, three attorneys told The Daily beast
“Trump is clearly the target of the investigation. And it’s common that either the target doesn’t get a subpoena at all — or they come at the very end of the process,” said Norman Eisen, an attorney who previously advised the House Judiciary Committee and helped build the case for Trump’s first impeachment .
One of those who received a subpoena this week is Senator Lindsey Graham. A statement issued Wednesday by his defense attorneys provided another indication of how damning the Jan. 6 committee’s support of the Georgia investigation could be. The senator’s two-person legal team, which said it would seek to challenge the subpoena, slammed the investigation as “a fishing expedition and collaboration with the January 6 Committee in Washington.”
“Senator Graham had every right to discuss with state officials the processes and procedures surrounding the conduct of elections,” the statement said, describing the prosecutor’s investigation simply as “politics.”
