Atlanta-area District Attorney Fani Willis is continuing to move forward with her criminal investigation of efforts by former President Donald Trump and certain associates of his to undercut the outcome of last year’s presidential election in Georgia. Those efforts ranged from phone conversations that Trump had with certain officials in Georgia to false testimony that longtime Trump ally Rudy Giuliani provided to state legislators, to whom he attempted to make the case that fraud had swung the state to Biden. Now, CNN explains that investigators in Georgia “have been quietly conducting interviews, collecting documents and working to build a line of communication with congressional investigators” amid their probe of Trump.
Georgia criminal investigators are quietly conducting interviews, collecting documents, and working to build a line of communication with congressional investigators as they aim to build a case against Trump for his attempts to overturn election results. https://t.co/ALv6zMb3yP
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 18, 2021
Last week, Willis told reporters as follows:
‘What I can tell you is that the Trump investigation is ongoing. As a district attorney, I do not have the right to look the other way on any crime that may have happened in my jurisdiction. We have a team of lawyers that is dedicated to that, but my number one priority is to make sure that we keep violent offenders off the street.’
Interviews that have so far been conducted have included officials working in the office of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, including “general counsel Ryan Germany, press secretary Ari Schaffer, chief operating officer Gabriel Sterling and external affairs director Sam Teasley,” as CNN explains. Raffensperger, who is a Republican and supported Trump in the 2020 election cycle, has been among the few prominent conservatives willing to go against Trump’s claims that the election was somehow rigged for Biden. He is one of the Georgia officials to whom Trump spoke on the phone amid his efforts to fraudulently stay in office. Specifically, Trump (among other things) implored Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to flip the state from Biden.
Meanwhile, officials like Fulton County Elections Director Richard Barron have also spoken with investigators from Willis’s office, with an apparent interest on the part of the district attorney’s team in understanding the manner in which elections are conducted. Going forward, Willis said that she “hope[s] so” when asked if she intends “to strike a formal cooperation with congressional committees investigating the insurrection,” as summarized by CNN. According to a source, “staff-level conversations have already begun between the district attorney’s office and congressional committees,” as also recapped by CNN. Read more at this link.
