I love the smell of criminal investigation in the morning, it smells like incarceration. Prosecutors in Fulton County have begun a criminal investigation into Donald Trump’s interference with election results in Georgia, most notably his telephone call to the secretary of state, asking him to “find” 11,780 votes. Plus he called Brian Kemp in December asking him to call a special legislative session and then he called a state investigator asking him to “find the fraud,” so there’s no lack of pressure tactics to investigate. New York Times:
On Wednesday, Fani Willis, the recently elected Democratic prosecutor in Fulton County, sent a letter to numerous officials in state government, including Mr. Raffensperger, requesting that they preserve documents related to Mr. Trump’s call, according to a state official with knowledge of the letter. The letter explicitly stated that the request was part of a criminal investigation, said the official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal matters.
The inquiry makes Georgia the second state after New York where Mr. Trump faces a criminal investigation. And it comes in a jurisdiction where potential jurors are unlikely to be hospitable to the former president; Fulton County encompasses most of Atlanta and overwhelmingly supported President Biden in the November election. […]
Former prosecutors said Mr. Trump’s calls might run afoul of at least three state laws. One is criminal solicitation to commit election fraud, which can be either a felony or a misdemeanor; as a felony, it is punishable by at least a year in prison. There is also a related conspiracy charge, which can be prosecuted either as a misdemeanor or a felony. A third law, a misdemeanor offense, bars “intentional interference” with another person’s “performance of election duties.”
Trump always had a particular ax to grind with Georgia, possibly because no Republican candidate had lost the state in so many years. He just couldn’t do enough to target Georgia and its elected officials and now it looks like the chickens are finally coming home to roost. This investigation comes on the heels of an administrative inquiry which secretary of state Brad Raffensperger opened on Monday.
This should be good. It’s an axiom in Trump world that whatever you think you know, you only see the tip of the iceberg.
