ATLANTA – Prosecutors in Fulton County have launched a criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to reverse Georgia’s election results, including a phone call he made to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Mr. Trump pressured him to enough voices to ‘find’. to help him reverse his loss.
On Wednesday, Fani Willis, the newly elected Democratic Prosecutor in Fulton County, sent a letter to numerous state government officials, including Mr. Raffensperger, requesting that they preserve documents related to Mr. Trump’s appeal, according to a state official. with knowledge of the letter. The letter explicitly stated that the request was part of a criminal investigation, the official said, pushing for anonymity to discuss internal matters.
The investigation now comes to Mr Trump this week before a second impeachment trial in Washington state, accused of “instigating insurrection” for his role in stirring up the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6. The violence that day followed weeks of false claims by the former president that electoral fraud robbed him of victory, including in Georgia, where he lost by about 12,000 votes.
Two months after Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Trump ruthlessly attacked election officials in Georgia, including Mr. Raffensperger and Republican Governor Brian Kemp, claiming they were not doing enough to uncover voting fraud cases that could change the outcome. In addition to the phone call to Mr. Raffensperger, he also phoned Governor Brian Kemp in early December and pressured him to convene a special legislative session to reverse his election loss. Later that month, Trump called a state investigator and urged the official to “track down the fraud,” said those aware of the call.
The investigation makes Georgia the second state after New York where Trump is facing a criminal investigation. And it comes into a jurisdiction where potential jurors are unlikely to be hospitable to the former president; Fulton County encompasses most of Atlanta and overwhelmingly backed President Biden in the November election.
The Fulton County investigation comes on the heels of a Monday by Mr. Raffensperger’s office to open an administrative inquiry.
Ms. Willis has been debating whether to open an investigation for several weeks, after Mr Trump’s phone call to Mr Raffensperger on Jan. 2 alerted electoral experts calling it an extraordinary intervention in a state’s electoral process.
Former prosecutors said Mr. Trump’s calls could violate at least three state laws. One is a criminal request to commit electoral fraud, which can be both a felony and a felony; as a criminal offense, it is punishable by at least one year in prison. There is also a related conspiracy charge, which can be prosecuted as a felony or felony. A third law, a felony, prohibits “willful interference” in the “performance of election duties” of anyone else.
Mr Biden’s victory in Georgia was reconfirmed after election officials re-declared the results of the state’s presidential election in three separate ballots: the first election; a manual recount by order of the state; and another recount, which was requested by Mr Trump’s campaign and completed by machines.
Mr. Biden was the first Democrat to win the presidential election in Georgia since 1992. Mr. Trump accused the Brian Kemp administration and Mr. Raffensperger, both Republicans, of not doing enough to help him reverse the results in the weeks following the election. to make. Mr. Kemp and Mr. Raffensberger had each resisted numerous attacks by Mr. Trump, whom the Governor called “unhappy” and called on the Secretary of State to resign.
The Georgia investigation comes as Mr. Trump also faces an ongoing criminal fraud investigation into his finances by Manhattan district attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and a civil fraud investigation by the New York Attorney General, Letitia James.
The simple beginning of an investigation into the polarizing former president could be a career-defining moment for Ms. Willis, who took office in January. She’s the first African-American woman to hold the job in Georgia’s most populous county and has already faced some daunting challenges: Atlanta kicks off a year with a host of murders, and Ms. Willis has pledged an ambitious set of changes to it. office, as well as an overview of the controversial way her predecessor shot police on a black man, Rayshard Brooks in June.
If Mr. Trump were convicted of a state crime in New York or Georgia, a federal pardon would not apply. In Georgia, Mr. Trump cannot look to Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, for a pardon from the state, and not just because the two are in a broken relationship. In Georgia, pardons are only granted by the state commission of pardon and parole.