The crusade of the Fulton County prosecutor, in Georgia, to bring Donald Trump to court for his role in the 2020 elections, which the former president still claims without evidence that they were stolen from him, is bearing fruit. Fani T. Willis requested last week the convocation of a special grand jury to study the case. The Superior Court of the southern state, where Joe Biden won 306 electoral votes (compared to Trump's 232), approved this request on Monday, which implies in practice tightening the siege on the tycoon. The US judicial system reserves that figure for the most complex cases. The process is expected to begin on May 2, and will not last more than a year.
Behind that decision is a phrase for history: “I need to find 11,780 votes,” Trump said in a January 2 phone call, while he was still president, to Republican Brad Raffensperger, then Secretary of State and the highest electoral authority in Georgia. The one-hour recording of the conversation was revealed by
The Washington Post .
in January 2021. In it, he is heard begging to find enough votes to alter the outcome of the elections in a territory that was key to his defeat.
Also threaten your interlocutor that he may be committing a crime if he does not attend to his wishes.
The Secretary of State responds to that request by defending the validity of the count that gave Biden an advantage of 11,779 votes.
"The people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry," Trump says on the call.
"And there's nothing wrong with admitting, you know what I mean, that you recounted and that you were wrong."
To which Raffensperger replies: "Well, Mr. President, the problem is that the data you handle is incorrect."
Fani Willis, district attorney for Fulton, Georgia, on January 4, 2022. Ben Gray (AP)
Despite such blatant interference, Willis, who got to work after learning the content of that conversation, is having a hard time gathering evidence for his case. In the letter requesting the constitution of the special grand jury, which was advanced by the local newspaper
The Atlanta Journal Constitution
, speaks of a “significant number of witnesses and potential witnesses [who] have refused to cooperate with the investigation in the absence of a subpoena requiring their testimony.”
“The special grand jury will be authorized to investigate each and every one of the facts related directly or indirectly to the alleged violations of the laws of the State of Georgia [after the 2020 elections]”, he has indicated in the document that gives reason to Prosecutor Christopher S. Brasher, Chief Justice of the Superior Court of Fulton County, the most populous in Georgia, which includes the city of Atlanta.
That judicial figure cannot issue accusations, but it can summon witnesses, present documents and investigate.
“We are going to know the facts, to know the law, to be very methodical, very patient and, to a certain extent, unemotional in this search for justice,” Willis recently told the
Associated Press
agency , who was also confident that the case will bear fruit in the first half of this year.
A Trump spokesman has called this move a "witch hunt."
It is not the only legal problem that the former president faces.
There is also the investigation of a House of Representatives committee into the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021 and their alleged involvement in them.
The New York prosecutor's office, for its part, summoned his two eldest children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., in early January as part of an investigation into the tycoon's business.
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