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How the Jan. 6 panel is ramping up the investigation into Donald Trump in Georgia

Thanks to Georgia court system rules, the incriminating testimony of several former Trump administration officials — now being televised by the Committee on Jan. 6 — could very well help the Fulton County District Attorney’s criminal investigation into the threatening phone call of former President Donald Trump to the state’s top leadership election official last year.

Georgia is a state where prosecutors seeking an indictment can present hearsay to grand juries. That means the special grand jury now being held in Atlanta could be shown how former Attorney General Bill Barr and others repeatedly told Trump that his election conspiracy theories were absolute nonsense — laying the groundwork for to prove that he knowingly cited false allegations of election fraud when he intimidated Georgia’s Secretary of State on January 2, 2021.

According to a person familiar with the inner workings of the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, prosecutors from the beginning looked closely at whether Trump and his aides could be charged with violating Georgia’s state law against “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud.” Investigators could charge them if they find that any member of Trump’s team “solicited, demanded, ordered, coerced” or tried to get Georgia officials to “engage” in election fraud in several recorded phone calls that were did with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger or his agency’s chief investigator.

Prosecutors would have a hard time proving Trump was involved in a crime if he truly believed there was actual fraud in Georgia, attorneys told The Daily Beast.

But in recent weeks, half a dozen committee hearings since Jan. 6 have put that to rest, playing video testimony from Trump advisers who recalled telling the commander-in-chief that the conspiracy theories were baseless.

“I told him that the things his people were putting out to the public were — were — nonsense, that the allegations of fraud were nonsense. And, you know, he was outraged by it,” Barr told congressional investigators in a video released by the committee last month.

“I told him this is crazy stuff and they’re wasting their time with it and it’s doing the country a serious disservice,” Trump’s former AG added.

That testimony will be central to the grand jury, said Adam S. Kaufman, a staff attorney who previously served as a Manhattan prosecutor.

“Trump will cover up that he believed he was right. What will be really important is what his advisers told him at the time,” Kaufman said. “The Fulton County District Attorney’s Office can now put the United States Attorney General in front of this grand jury and say, ‘No, Mr. President, we investigated and there was no fraud.’

“It makes it a lot easier,” he said.

The Peach State’s official “Grand Jury Handbook,” which is compiled by the Georgia Board of Attorneys, makes it clear that residents arraigned in these secret court proceedings can hear this type of evidence.

“An unsworn, out-of-court statement … may be sufficient evidence upon which the return of an indictment may be based,” it said.

Barr and other senior Trump administration officials have testified under penalty of perjury before the committee since Jan. 6 in recent months, which could lend additional weight to their claims that Trump should have known better when he repeated baseless claims about election fraud. defrauding Georgia officials.

For example, during his Saturday afternoon conversation with the Georgia Secretary of State on January 2, 2021, Trump went on to mention how a poll worker 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, then acting as Trump’s lawyer, to sow doubt among conservative Georgia state lawmakers.

However, in the month before Trump’s phone call, the top federal prosecutor in that district had already investigated it at Barr’s behest — and found that no such thing had 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 this because he had anticipated that a few days after our call he would have to go to the White House for a meeting and this issue might come up. He asked me to make it a priority to get to the bottom of it to try to substantiate the accusation made by Mr. Giuliani,” Pack said.

“We discovered that the suitcase full of ballots — the supposed black suitcase that was seen taken out from under the table — was actually an official key box where the ballots were kept in a safe place,” he told Congresswoman 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 aides 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 is troubling to Peter Odom, a former assistant district attorney in that office who prosecutes criminal election cases.

“Conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime. It’s very clear that the grand jury is looking into a conspiracy by Donald Trump and his close associates to illegally influence the election,” Odom told The Daily Beast.

Neither the Fulton County Prosecutor’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 seek testimony from several key players in Trump’s orbit. And while Trump himself has not received a subpoena, the fact that he is missing may actually be evidence that the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office is continuing an investigation primarily targeting the former president, three attorneys told The Daily Beast.

“Trump is clearly the target of the investigation. And usually either the target doesn’t get a subpoena at all — or it comes at the very 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 who received a subpoena this week is Senator Lindsey Graham. A statement made by his defense attorneys on Wednesday gave further indication of how damning the Committee’s Jan. 6 support could be in the Georgia investigation. The senator’s two-person legal team, which has announced it will try to oppose the subpoena, criticized the investigation as a “fishing expedition and working in conjunction with the January 6 Committee in Washington.”

“Senator Graham was well within his rights to discuss with government officials the processes and procedures surrounding the administration of elections,” read the statement, which slammed the prosecutor’s office investigation as mere “politics.”