In the year 2021, it’s basically a full-time job keeping up with the many lawsuits, civil inquiries, and criminal probes against Donald Trump, which, if you can believe it, surpass the number of times a human woman has agreed to marry him. On the lawsuit front, as of March, the ex-president was facing more than two dozen, which normal people who haven’t spent their entire lives suing or being sued thousands of times consider a lot. When it comes to civil cases, the New York attorney general is currently looking into whether the Trump Organization manipulated the value of its assets for loans and tax breaks, and recently won a major victory in court. Then of course there are the criminal investigations, which are probably at the top of Trump’s mind considering they could result in his going to prison. Obviously, there’s the one being led by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which has already produced numerous charges against Trump’s business and longtime CFO, with more indictments expected. On top of that, he’s also under criminal investigation by the D.C. attorney general for inciting the attack on the Capitol, while in Fulton County, Georgia, the D.A.’s office is looking at his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. And according to legal experts, the latter situation may end very badly for him!
In a new 109-page report, D.C. think tank the Brookings Institution analyzed publicly available evidence concerning Trump’s and his allies’ efforts to pressure Georgia officials to “change the lawful outcome of the election,” concluding that the 45th president could be charged with multiple crimes. Obviously, one of the least helpful things Trump has going for him is his infamous phone call to Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger on January 3, during which Trump told the guy to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the state. “There’s no way I lost Georgia,” Trump said numerous times throughout the call, though of course he did. “There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
The report also notes that Trump both publicly pressured and personally contacted a number of Republican officials in the state, including Attorney General Chris Carr and Governor Brian Kemp, to get their help in declaring him the victor. (The men did not go along with the plot, which might explain why Trump pretended to endorse Stacey Abrams for Georgia governor over the weekend.) The report, penned by Norman Eisen, Joshua Matz, Donald Ayer, Gwen Keyes Fleming, Colby Galliher, Jason Harrow, and Raymond P. Tolentino, notes that the then president called Carr and Kemp in December to beg them to go along with “his increasingly desperate plans to decertify his loss.” The authors warn that criminal liability could extend to Trump allies as well, including Rudy Giuliani.
Among the charges Trump himself could be hit with, the authors believe, are “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud; intentional interference with performance of election duties; conspiracy to commit election fraud; criminal solicitation; and state RICO violations,” in addition to violations of more than a dozen other Georgia state statutes. “We conclude that Trump’s post-election conduct in Georgia leaves him at substantial risk of possible state charges predicated on multiple crimes,” the report states.
Referencing the fact that Trump would likely claim that everything he did was just part of his job as president, the report declares: “Stated simply, soliciting and then threatening senior state officials to alter the outcome of a presidential election does not fall within any reasoned conception of the scope of presidential power.”
A spokesman for Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week that the investigation is “active and ongoing” but declined to reveal any details. Prosecutors have reportedly appeared before a grand jury seeking subpoenas for witnesses and documents; hired the state’s top experts on racketeering and conspiracy laws; interviewed at least four of Raffensperger’s closest advisers; and started coordinating with the congresspeople probing the events surrounding January 6.
Trump’s advisers have reacted to the Georgia probe exactly how one would expect if one paid attention for the last five years. “This is simply the Democrats’ latest attempt to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump, and everybody sees through it,” Jason Miller said in a statement following the launch of the investigation in the spring.
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