Georgia is a state where prosecutors seeking indictments can present evidence to grand juries. That means the special grand jury currently underway in Atlanta can show how former Attorney General Bill Barr and others repeatedly told Trump that his election conspiracy theories were utter nonsense — setting the stage to prove that in he knowingly reported false allegations of election fraud when intimidated. Minister of Foreign Affairs of Georgia on January 2, 2021. According to a person familiar with the inner workings of the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, prosecutors initially carefully considered whether Trump and his lieutenants could be charged with violating Georgia’s state law against “criminal solicitation to commit electoral fraud.” of forgery”. Investigators could indict them if they find that any member of Trump’s team “solicited, solicited, ordered, introduced” or tried to persuade Georgia officials to “engage” in election fraud in the various recorded phone calls they made to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger or a leading researcher of his service. Prosecutors would have a hard time proving Trump was involved in a crime if he really believed there was real fraud in Georgia, lawyers told The Daily Beast. But in recent weeks, half of the committee’s Jan. 6 hearings avoided that, playing video testimony from Trump advisers who recalled telling the commander-in-chief that the conspiracy theories were unfounded. “I told him the stuff his people were shoveling out to the public was—was—bullshit, that the allegations of fraud were bullshit. And, you know, he was outraged about it,” Barr told congressional investigators in a videotaped testimony released by the committee last month. “I told him it was crazy stuff, and they wasted their time on it, and it did a grave injustice to the country,” Trump’s former AG added. That testimony will be key to the grand jury, said Adam S. Kaufmann, a white-collar defense lawyer who was previously a Manhattan district attorney. “Trump will be revealed to have thought he was right. What will be very important is what his advisers were telling him at the time,” Kaufman said. “The Fulton County DA can now put the United States Attorney General in front of this grand jury and say, ‘No, Mr. Chairman, we investigated and there was no fraud.’ “It makes it a lot easier,” he said. The Peach State’s official “Grand Jury Handbook,” compiled by the Georgia Board of Prosecuting Attorneys, makes it clear that residents brought to court for these secret court proceedings can hear this type of evidence. “An unsworn, out-of-court statement … may be sufficient evidence upon which to base the return of an indictment,” he says. Barr and other top Trump administration officials have testified under penalty of perjury before the Jan. 6 Committee in recent months, which could lend additional weight to their claims that Trump should have known better when he repeated baseless allegations of voter fraud to Georgian officials. For example, on Saturday afternoon with the Georgia secretary of state on January 2, 2021, Trump went on to mention how a poll worker allegedly brought “what looked like suitcases or trunks” filled with “18,000 ballots, all for Biden. ” It was a favorite conspiracy theory peddled by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was then acting as Trump’s lawyer, in a ploy to cast doubt on conservative Georgia state lawmakers. However, in the month before Trump’s call, the top federal attorney in that district had already investigated the matter at Barr’s behest — and determined that no such thing happened. Byung Jin “BJay” Pak, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia at the time, recalled the details of his conversation with Barr and the subsequent investigation when he testified before the committee on June 13. “He asked me to find out what I could about it, because he had envisioned that in a few days after our call he would have to go to the White House for a meeting and this matter could be brought up. He asked me to make it a priority to get to the bottom of it, to try to substantiate Mr. Giuliani’s claim,” Pack said. “We found that the suitcase full of ballots — the supposed black suitcase that appeared to be pulled from under the table — was actually an official locker where the ballots were kept safe,” he told Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA). Subpoenas issued to members of Trump’s team earlier this week in Georgia hint at how prosecutors are building a case that the former president and his lieutenants were involved in a criminal conspiracy. The subpoenas say several of the witnesses “were part of a multi-state, 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 criminal election cases. “Conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime. It is very clear that they have the grand jury looking into the conspiracy of Donald Trump and his close associates to illegally influence the election,” Odom told the Daily Beast. Neither the Fulton County DA’s Office nor the Jan. 6 Commission responded to questions Thursday about the nature of their communications or the sharing of evidence. The eight subpoenas issued Tuesday require testimony from several key figures in Trump’s orbit. And while Trump himself did not receive a subpoena, the fact that he was missing may actually be evidence that the Fulton County DA is moving forward with an investigation primarily targeting 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 it comes at the end of the process,” said Norman Eisen, a lawyer who previously advised the House Judiciary Committee and helped build the case for Trump’s first impeachment. . One of those subpoenaed this week is Senator Lindsey Graham. A statement released by his defense attorneys on Wednesday provided further clues as to how damning the Jan. 6 Commission’s support for the Georgia investigation could be. The senator’s two-person legal team, which has announced it will try to fight the subpoena, criticized the investigation as “a fishing expedition and working with the January 6 Commission in Washington.” “Senator Graham was well within his rights to discuss with state officials the processes and procedures surrounding the conduct of the election,” the statement said, which slammed the DA’s investigation as merely “political.”
