Donald Trump reportedly got a report on the Georgia criminal inquiry he’s being investigated for on Tuesday morning. I can say this with some confidence because the former president published a series of frantic rants about the investigation on his social media account that morning, including this gem:
“My phone conversation to the Georgia secretary of state was “PERFECT,” as was a subsequent call that the Marxists, Communists, Racists, and RINOS don’t even want to discuss. On the line were numerous people, including lawyers for both sides. I was protesting what evidence shows was a rigged and stolen election. Even though I easily won Georgia, I only needed a small portion of the total votes. They committed numerous acts of fraud, all of which were seen on camera live: stuffing ballots.
The Republican asserted in subsequent statements that he had “proof” that Georgia’s elections were “rigged and stolen” and that he had “a legitimate right” to “challenge” the election results.
Trump, who has previously experienced similar breakdowns, issued a few more articles yesterday talking about the crime rates in Atlanta. The intended message seemed to effectively be, “Local prosecutors should focus less on my alleged misconduct and more on others’ alleged wrongdoing,” even though the former president didn’t explicitly say it.
Trump’s post-election chat with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was anything but “great,” if reality is still relevant in the midst of all this insanity. Additionally, despite the fact that the former president has had more than two years to provide evidence to the contrary, he has only offered up discredited attacks against Ruby Freeman. Republican election officials in the state have consistently concluded that Trump lost Georgia in 2020, fair and square.
Absolutely no illegal activity related to Georgia’s 2020 election has been “caught on film.”
This week, my colleague Jordan Rubin provided the following explanation from MSNBC’s new legal blog as to why precisely the Republican is in a tailspin:
I have some bad news for anybody who is excited to read the Georgia special grand jury report: At the hearing on Tuesday, the judge did not make a decision. It’s unknown when and how he’ll do it. But I have some intriguing news from the hearing that may interest those hoping to see Donald Trump and others put on trial in the Peach State for crimes related to their plan to rig the 2020 election: Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, stated that decisions are “imminent.”
Let’s take a moment to reflect on how we got here.
On Saturday, January 2, 2021, Trump told Raffensperger that he wanted someone to “find” enough votes to swing the state in his favor, the will of the voters be damned. This is when things seemed to get serious.
As we discussed shortly after, Raffensperger recorded the call, giving the public the chance to hear Trump, desperate to claim power he didn’t earn, exploring ways to cheat, pleading with others to join his anti-democracy scheme, and even directing some subliminal threats at the state’s top elections official. This was by no means a “protest”; rather, it was one of the most scandalous recordings of an American president ever made.
It didn’t take long for several onlookers to question the legality of such actions. According to legal professionals and lawmakers, Trump’s actions “may violate federal and state criminal prohibitions,” according to a Politico investigation.
Georgian prosecutors began to have similar thoughts: Since it is illegal to attempt to obstruct the lawful administration of an election, Willis began a criminal inquiry into alleged violations of state election law. This seemed reasonable, and shortly a special grand jury was appointed.
Charges seem to be very likely in that investigation as it draws to a close. The local district attorney’s request this week to keep the grand jury report, in this case, private for the time being startled some observers, even though, as Rubin’s report highlighted, it appeared she was “gearing up to file criminal charges.”
That’s because Willis urged Judge Robert McBurney to take into account the rights of potential future defendants—note the plural form of the word—who the report might implicate. As a result, there’s more than a suggestion that the district attorney may decide to file criminal charges against a number of individuals, though it wasn’t made clear at the hearing on Tuesday who those individuals may be.
