Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis says that her office will announce whether Donald Trump or members of his legal team will face criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn the state’s election results in the upcoming summer months.
Ms Willis’s pre-announcement came on Monday afternoon, along with a request for law enforcement agencies in the state and elsewhere to take extra steps to prepare for the risk of violence. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first reported the news, which came in the form of a notification from Ms Willis’s office to the county sheriff.
The decision will drop between 11 July and 1 September, according to the DA. And while she officially gave no indication of which way her office was leaning, Ms Willis asked that local law enforcement practice “heightened security and preparedness” as the announcement “may provoke a significant public reaction”.
“Please accept this correspondence as notice to allow you sufficient time to prepare the Sheriff’s Office and coordinate with local, state and federal agencies to ensure that our law enforcement community is ready to protect the public,” she wrote.
Ms Willis’s office received a report from a grand jury convened to hear evidence in the case earlier this year; that grand jury report has not been fully released to the public although exerpts indicated that several criminal indictments were recommended by the jury’s members.
The former president has long claimed that the Georgia investigation is one of many supposed political witch hunts against him; however, members of the grand jury concluded in their report that his assertions of widespread voter fraud in the state were false. Mr Trump also frequently tells his followers that a now-infamous phone call between him and the Georgia secretary of state in which he pressured officials to “find” thousands of votes in his favour he would have needed to win, was a “perfect” phone call — the same language he uses to describe his efforts to pressure Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to launch a criminal investigation into Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign.
Should he or any of his inner circle be indicted for their efforts in Georgia, it would mark the first effort by a law enforcement body to hold Mr Trump accountable for the months-long effort to overturn the legal results of the 2020 election which culminated in an unprecedented assault on the US Capitol by thousands of the president’s supporters. It would not be the first criminal charges for the former president, however, as Manhattan’s district attorney made that history earlier this month when his office charged the president with 32 counts of falisfying business records.
Those charges were related to activities that took place during Mr Trump’s first White House bid — another months-long effort, this one headed up by his attorney Michael Cohen, to pay off or otherwise silence people who came forward claiming that the “Apprentice” star had engaged in extramarital affairs.
