ATLANTA – Fulton County prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn Georgia election results, including a phone call he made to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Trump pressed him to “find” enough votes to help you reverse your loss.
On Wednesday, Fani Willis, the newly elected Democratic prosecutor in Fulton County, sent a letter to several state government officials, including Raffensperger, asking them to preserve documents related to Trump’s summons, 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 affairs.
The investigation comes as Trump faces a second impeachment trial in Washington this week, on charges of “inciting insurrection” for his role in inciting the crowd that attacked the Capitol on January 6. The violence that day followed weeks of false claims by the former president that electoral fraud deprived him of victory, including in Georgia, where he lost by about 12,000 votes.
For two months after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declared the winner, Trump relentlessly attacked election officials in Georgia, including Raffensperger and Republican Governor Brian Kemp, claiming they were not doing enough to uncover cases of electoral fraud that could change the result. In addition to the call to Raffensperger, he also called Governor Brian Kemp in early December and pressured him to call a special legislative session to reverse his electoral defeat. Later that month, Trump called a state investigator and pressured the officer to “find the fraud”, according to those who knew about the call.
The inquiry makes Georgia the second state after New York where Trump faces a criminal investigation. And that is in a jurisdiction where potential jurors are unlikely to be hospitable to the former president; Fulton County spans most of Atlanta and overwhelmingly supported President Biden in the November election.
The Fulton County investigation comes in the wake of a decision made on Monday by Raffensperger’s office to open an administrative inquiry.
Willis has been considering whether to open an inquiry for several weeks after Trump’s call to Raffensperger on January 2 alarmed election officials, who see it as an extraordinary intervention in a state’s electoral process.
Former prosecutors said Trump’s calls could conflict with at least three state laws. One is the criminal request to commit electoral fraud, which can be a crime or misdemeanor; as a crime, it is punishable by at least one year in prison. There is also a related conspiracy charge, which can be prosecuted as a misdemeanor or crime. A third law, a misdemeanor offense, prohibits “intentional interference” in another person’s “performance of electoral duties”.
Biden’s victory in Georgia was reaffirmed after electoral authorities recertified the results of the state’s presidential elections in three separate ballot counts: the initial electoral count; a manual recount ordered by the state; and another recount, which was requested by Mr. Trump’s campaign and completed by machines.
Biden was the first Democrat to win the presidential election in Georgia since 1992. Trump accused Governor Brian Kemp and Raffensperger, both Republicans, of not doing enough to help him topple the result weeks after the election. Kemp and Raffensberger resisted several attacks by Trump, who called the governor “unhappy” and asked the secretary of state to step down.
Georgia’s investigation comes at a time when Trump is also facing an ongoing investigation into criminal fraud in his finances by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and a civil fraud investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The mere beginning of an investigation into the former president’s polarization could be a turning point in the career of Willis, who took office in January. She is the first African American woman to get a job in Georgia’s most populous county and has faced some daunting challenges: Atlanta is coming out of a year with a high number of homicides, and Ms. Willis has promised an ambitious set of changes for the office, as well as a review of the controversial manipulation of its predecessor to police shooting at 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, Trump can’t wait for Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, to forgive the state, and not just because the two have a broken relationship. In Georgia, pardons are only granted by the state council for pardons and parole.