ATLANTA — The criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his allies overturning his loss in the Georgia election has begun to entangle, one way or another, an expanding cast of characters:
United States Senator. Congressman. Local Cadillac Dealer. High school economics teacher. The chairman of the state Republican Party. The Republican candidate for lieutenant governor. Six lawyers helping Mr. Trump, including a former New York mayor. The former president himself. And a self-described PR woman for rapper Kanye West.
Fannie T. Willis, the Atlanta district attorney, has led the investigation since early last year. But it wasn’t until this month, with a flurry of subpoenas and target letters, as well as court documents shedding light on some of the closed special grand jury proceedings, that the sprawling contours of the investigation emerged.
To legal experts, the expansion is a sign that Ms. Willis is doing what she has indicated all along: building the framework for a broad case that could target multiple defendants on charges of conspiracy to commit election fraud or charges associated with a racket to engage in a coordinated scheme to subvert elections.
“These people are all from very different places in life,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a professor of constitutional law at Georgia State University, said of the high-profile witnesses and targets. “The fact that they’re all brought together really suggests that she’s building this broader conspiracy case.”
What happened in Georgia was not unusual. A House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol has exposed how Mr. Trump and his allies tried to sway the election results in several key states, including by creating a list of fake voters supporting Trump. However, even as many Democrats complain that the Justice Department is moving too slowly in its investigation, the district attorney in Georgia is pursuing an accelerated case that may pose the most immediate legal danger to the former president and his associates.
Whether Mr. Trump will ultimately be targeted for indictment remains unclear. But the David-before-Goliath dynamic may in part reflect that Ms. Willis’s legal decision-making is less burdened than that of federal officials in Washington by the enormous political and public weight of prosecuting a former president, especially in a country with severe cracks.
But some key differences in Georgia law can also make the path to prosecution easier than in federal courts. There was a signal event that drew attention to Mr. Trump’s behavior in Georgia: his call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whose office in Ms. Willis’s Fulton County recorded the president imploring him to “find” the 11,780 votes he had to turn over your defeat.
Mr Trump’s staff did not comment, nor did his local lawyer. When Ms. Willis launched the investigation in February 2021, a Trump spokesman described it as “just the latest attempt by Democrats to score political points by continuing the witch hunt against President Trump.” The lawyers for 11 of the 16 Trump voters, Kimberly Burroughs Debrow and Holly A. Pearson, accused Ms. Willis of “abusing the grand jury process to harass, embarrass and attempt to intimidate the nominee voters, not to investigate their conduct’.
Last year, Ms. Willis told the New York Times that there could be allegations of racketeering. Whenever people “hear the word ‘racketeering,’ they think of ‘The Godfather,'” she said, before explaining that charges under Georgia’s version of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act can apply in any number of spheres where corrupt enterprises operate. “If you have different overt actions with an illegal purpose, I think you can — you can — get there,” she said.
The Trump investigations
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Numerous inquiries. Since Donald J. Trump has left office, the former president facing civil and criminal investigations across the country into his business dealings and political activities. Here’s an overview of the notable queries:
Trump’s social media merger. A federal grand jury in Manhattan issued subpoenas regarding the merger of Mr. Trump’s social media company, Truth Social, with Digital World Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Federal authorities are also investigating a spike in trading that preceded the announcement of the $300 million deal.
Westchester County Criminal Investigation. The district attorney’s office in Westchester County, New York, appears to be focused at least in part on whether the Trump Organization misled local officials about the value of a golf course, Trump National Golf Club Westchester, in order to reduce its taxes.
Ms. Willis, 51, a first-term Democrat, has long profited from racketeering allegations and has hired a leading expert on the state’s racketeering laws. In 2014, as a deputy in the office, she prosecuted public school teachers involved in a cheating scandal, and in May she secured an indictment charging rapper Young Thug and 27 of his associates with a racketeering conspiracy by identified as criminals a street gang.
Observers believe a similar fate awaits some of the countless Trump loyalists in and outside of Georgia who may have had a hand in trying to undermine legitimate election results. She has already informed the head of the Georgia Republican Party that he is under investigation, along with the party’s treasurer and 14 other Georgians who were on Trump’s fake voter list, including the car salesman and the economics teacher.
A number of people close to Mr Trump are also implicated in the case. His personal attorney, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, was ordered by a judge to testify on August 9. Lawyers for Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina are fighting his subpoena to testify, as are lawyers for Rep. Jody Hees, a staunch Trump ally who led the House effort in January 2021 to stop vote certification. Ms. Willis is also seeking to compel testimony from John Eastman, the architect of the legal strategy to keep Mr. Trump in power, as well as other lawyers — Kenneth Chesebro, Jackie Peak Deason, Jenna Ellis and Cleta Mitchell — who have played critical roles roles in the effort.
Ms. Willis’ office has turned to several lines of inquiry:
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Calls by Mr. Trump and his allies to put direct pressure on government officials. The pressure campaign began in the days after the election, when Mr. Graham called Mr. Raffensperger to ask about ways to help Mr. Trump by canceling certain mail-in votes. And it culminated in Mr. Trump calling Mr. Raffensperger four days before the attack on the Capitol.
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The Secret Plot to Send a Fake Roll of Georgia Voters to Washington. While both parties draw up a list of presidential electors in case their candidate wins, four of those Republican electors in Georgia dropped out after the election. Nevertheless, top Republican operatives in the state assembled a new list of Trump voters to thwart the transfer of power during the congressional certification of the vote.
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Numerous misrepresentations made by Mr. Giuliani and others to the state legislature during two hearings in December 2020. Mr. Giuliani’s conduct in Georgia had already been exposed by the New York State Court of Appeals last year when it stopped his license to practice law. The court’s 33-page report mentions Georgia 35 times and describes “numerous false and misleading statements about the results of Georgia’s presidential election,” including false claims that tens of thousands of underage teenagers voted illegally in Georgia and that voting machines altered the result.
Three witnesses who appeared before the grand jury told The Times that the Giuliani hearings were of particular interest. “There was seven hours of video,” said Jennifer Jordan, a Democratic state senator and one of the witnesses, of Giuliani’s hearing before a Georgia Senate committee, adding, “I’m pretty sure the grand jury watched the whole thing.”
Prosecutors even sought testimony from Trevianne Kuti, a Chicago-based publicist who says she worked for Mr. West, the rapper and Trump admirer who briefly ran his own 2020 presidential campaign. Ms. Kuti, who previously a celebrity stylist and cannabis lobbyist in Illinois, traveled to the Atlanta area a few weeks after the vote and visited Ruby Freeman, an obscure election official whose account of how Mr. Trump falsely accused her of counting fakes the ballots were presented at one of the House committee’s public hearings.
Ms Kuti, in an incident first reported by Reuters, initially introduced herself to Ms Freeman as a “crisis manager” connected to unnamed influential people and offered vague assurances of help. But in a court filing, prosecutors said she then warned Ms. Freeman that her “liberty was in jeopardy” and tried to “press Freeman into falsely admitting involvement in election fraud.”
The case accelerated dramatically this month, first with the news that Ms. Willis had tried to compel seven of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and advisers to testify in the case, including Mr. Eastman, Ms. Ellis, Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Graham. Court documents then revealed that all 16 fraudulent voters were told they were targets of the investigation and could face charges — a step many observers saw as an opening gambit that could lead to similar actions against more prominent allies of Trump.
Ms. Debrow and Ms. Pearson said in a statement that a local prosecutor has no jurisdiction to determine which federal voters are fake and which are genuine. But Gwendolyn Keyes Fleming, a former district attorney for neighboring DeKalb County, noted that Trump voters met at the state Capitol, which is in Fulton, adding…
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