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BAt the end of 2024, Donald Trump could face two very different perspectives: He could be in the White House – or in a Georgia prison.
Since February 2021, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been investigating the former president’s attempts to influence the state’s election results.
In January, a grand jury convened by Ms. Willis completed its work, leaving the prosecutor in an unprecedented position to decide whether Donald Trump will become the first former president in US history to be charged with a felony.
Portions of the grand jury’s work will be released Thursday, providing new clues about the former president’s fate in Georgia.
The investigation focused on an infamous Jan. 2, 2021 phone call Mr. Trump made with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he urged the top official to “find” enough votes to reverse his defeat in the state, however, was extended to cover a wide-ranging campaign of influence that Mr. Trump and his allies were wielding in Georgia.
Here’s what you need to know about the call and the investigation that followed.
A “perfect” call or a perfect crime?
On January 2, four days before Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, Mr Trump called Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, one of the state’s top election officials. The year-old president lost his re-election bid in November and was scheduled to step down on January 20.
The call, a recording of which was released by the Washington Post, can be heard as Mr Trump appears to be threatening the state official and urging him to change the state’s election results.
“All I want to do is this,” Mr Trump says in the recording. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, that’s one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
“So what are we doing here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes,” he says elsewhere. “Guys, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”
The conversation is awash with Mr Trump making outlandish, conspiratorial claims about the Georgia election while state officials gently correct him.
“There’s no way I’ve lost Georgia,” Mr Trump says at one point. “There is no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
“Mr President, the challenge you have is that the data you have is wrong,” Mr Raffensperger says in response to an outbreak.
Things take an unprecedented turn when Mr Trump appears to be threatening the Georgia official.
“All this stuff is very dangerous stuff when you talk about no crime,” Trump said elsewhere. “I think it’s very dangerous to say that.”
“I felt that at the time – and I still believe it today – as a threat,” Raffensperger later wrote about the call. “Others obviously thought so too, because some of Trump’s more radical supporters have reacted as if it was their duty to carry out that threat.”
The state official and his family have faced death threats following Mr Trump’s attacks on Georgia’s electoral system.
Shortly after the call was made public, Mr. Raffensperger said he did not originally plan to release the audio, but did so in response to Mr. Trump’s online claims that he had spoken to the Georgia official, who was “not ready or not in.” was able to answer questions such as under-the-table ballot fraud, ballot destruction, out-of-state voters, dead voters, and more.”
“It was a private conversation for me,” Mr. Raffensperger told Georgian news channel 11 Alive. “And he violated privacy by posting a tweet – but the tweet was wrong.”
Lincoln Project ads attack Trump as traitor over Georgia call
“If you post things that we don’t believe are true, we will respond in kind,” he added.
Mr Trump has gone on to claim the exchange was a “PERFECT call to protest Georgia’s rigged election”.
That wasn’t the only call Mr. Trump made in the hectic final days before Joe Biden’s inauguration.
In another recorded call, also reported by the Post, Mr Trump can be heard urging Frances Watson, Georgia’s lead election investigator, to expose “dishonesty”.
“If the right answer comes out, you’ll be commended,” he says in the recording.
The call to Mr. Raffensperger was later cited during Donald Trump’s second impeachment.
His allies carried out similar tactics.
In November 2020, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham called Mr. Raffensperger’s office and suggested mailing ballots from counties with a high rate of mismatched signatures be discarded.
A gang prosecutor against a former president
Despite the high-profile case, Ms Willis says she will not be phased out of the assignments.
“The reality is we have a job, and the job is just trying to find out the truth,” she recently told The New York Times magazine. “We’re just going to treat this case like any other. I don’t know why it shocks people. If the charges are found to be legitimate, we will press them. And if the charges turn out to be unfounded, we won’t press them. We are going through the process right now.”
The Fox News panelist was laughed at for defending Trump’s call to Raffensperger
According to observers, she has a reputation for being a fearless prosecutor who has led high-profile RICO cases against alleged Atlanta gangs, including one against rapper Young Thug and his associates.
“Fani Willis is known to be a very tough prosecutor,” Tamar Hallerman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution told Vox. “She’s a woman who busts her butt and punctures her i’s and crosses her t’s. Also, she has shown throughout her career that she is not afraid to do unpopular things if she believes they are right. She is best known for prosecuting school teachers and principals in an Atlanta public school cheating scandal, and used a racketeering law to indict a dozen teachers for altering test scores. Some in the African American community still think she has gone too far with that usage.”
The prosecutor may be nonchalant, but Mr Trump’s potential crimes are far from random.
He could be charged under the state’s RICO statute, which is normally used to combat mob and gang conspiracies and a range of felonies and misdemeanors in the state of Georgia involving attempts to obtain voter fraud, personally committing him, the voter roll manipulate or make false statements about the work of government agencies.
Since Ms Willis’s investigation began in February 2021, her focus appears to have broadened.
Former Trump officials and allies were called to testify, including former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former Senator Kelly Loeffler, Senator Lindsey Graham and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Mr Graham made several attempts to quash the subpoena ordering him to testify, a battle that went as far as the US Supreme Court.
Another major focus is a December 2020 conspiracy allegedly directed by Trump campaign officials, and possibly the former president himself, to organize a slate of unauthorized Republican voters to cast the state’s electoral college votes rather than the Democratic slate , chosen by Georgia voters. The group of fake voters included the Georgia GOP chairman and Republican members of the state legislature. They have defended their efforts as a backup should the original election results be thrown out in court.
Donald Trump’s lawyers are confident he will avoid charges.
“We have never been part of this process before. The grand jury coerced testimony from dozens of other, often high-ranking, officials during the investigation, but never found it important to speak to the president,” attorney Drew Findling said, Marissa Goldberg and Jennifer Little said in late January. “He was never subpoenaed or asked to come in voluntarily by this grand jury or anyone in the Fulton County Attorney’s Office. Therefore, we can assume that the grand jury did its job and looked at the facts and the law, as we did, and concluded that there were no violations of the law by President Trump.
Trump’s election challenge in Georgia is “insane,” says a CNN commentator
But outside observers believe the 23-member jury is likely to recommend a criminal charge.
“The evidence is compelling and the law is very favorable to Georgia prosecutors,” Norman Eisen, lead author of a Brookings report on the Georgia case and former White House special counsel on ethics and government reform, told the Guardian. “I believe the [special grand jury] The report is very likely to call for prosecution of Trump and his fellow conspirators.”
What next?
We can now see steps in a few days.
On Thursday, the grand jury is expected to unseal parts of its work that could point to its findings on the indictments against Donald Trump and set out what’s next for the former president’s very uncertain path back to the White House.
Even if Mr. Trump faces no serious charges, if any, he is not out of danger.
Since leaving office, he has been the subject of a cloud of lawsuits and investigations, including allegations of misusing classified documents, fomenting the January 6 riot and raping a writer in New York. He denies all allegations against him, saying they are part of a political “witch hunt”.
