Georgia DA gearing up to prosecute Trump for 'criminal solicitation' and 'election fraud': report

25 July 2023

Former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results have been the focus of two separate criminal investigations: one by special counsel Jack Smith for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the other by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis for the State of Georgia. If Trump is indicted in both cases, he will be facing four criminal prosecutions altogether; Trump's team of lawyers is already battling a 37-count federal indictment and a 34-count indictment in New York State.

All of this comes at a time when Trump is the clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. Never before in U.S. history has an ex-president faced so many legal problems while seeming to be his party's most likely presidential nominee — assuming his poll numbers continue to hold up.

Polls released in late July find Trump leading the second-place primary candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, by 43 percent (Morning Consult), 44 percent (Rasmussen) or 40 percent (Harvard University/HarrisX).

An indictment in Willis' probe, according to reports, could come sometime in August. The Guardian's Hugo Lowell, in an article published on July 25, reports that two Georgia sources "briefed on the matter" say the charges could include "criminal solicitation to commit election fraud and conspiracy to commit election fraud, as well as solicitation of a public or political officer to fail to perform their duties and solicitation to destroy, deface or remove ballots."

Lowell reports, "The district attorney is also seeking to charge at least some of the Trump operatives who were involved in accessing voting machines and copying sensitive election data in Coffee County, Georgia, in January 2021 with computer trespass crimes, the two people said. The outcome of deliberations, as well as the manner in which the statutes might be enforced, remains unknown."

The Guardian reporter adds, "For instance, prosecutors could charge under certain statutes individually, fold them into a wider racketeering case of the kind that the Guardian has previously reported, or do a combination."

Lowell notes that with a criminal solicitation charge, Georgia prosecutors "would have to show that Trump persistently requested another person to engage in certain illegal conduct that are 'likely and imminent' as a result of the solicitation."

"The statute for soliciting a public officer to fail to perform duties could apply to Trump when he pressured the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to 'find 11,780 votes,' as well as his phone calls to chief investigator Frances Watson and House Speaker David Ralston," Lowell explains. "The threshold question there is whether Raffensperger would have failed to perform his duty as the state's top election official if he had done what Trump wanted, according to the Brookings Institution — for instance, if he actually went and 'found' 11,780 votes to reverse Trump's loss."

Read The Guardian's full report at this link.

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