In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is rigorously continuing her criminal investigation into post-2020 election attempts by former President Donald Trump and others to basically undo Biden’s win in the state. She’s now subpoenaed half a dozen figures associated with the office of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — including Raffensperger himself.
Others subpoenaed include Interim Deputy Secretary of State Gabe Sterling, General Counsel Ryan Germany, former Elections Director Chris Harvey, Legislative Liaison Victoria Thompson, and former Chief Investigator Frances Watson, CNN says. Raffensperger and Sterling have already indicated they’d comply with subpoenas. The subpoenas demand testimony from their targets across early and mid-June, with a June 2 date sought for Raffensperger’s testimony. Raffensperger recently won the GOP primary for the secretary of state position, successfully holding back a Trump-supported challenger. Trump was outraged with Raffensperger over the elections official’s refusal to go along with his hopes to change the election outcome.
An infamous phone conversation between Trump and Raffensperger when the then-president pushed the Georgia leader to “find” enough votes to flip the state from Biden is among the incidents and efforts driving Willis’s criminal investigation. Other areas of investigation include the effort in Georgia to assemble essentially faked electoral votes on Trump’s behalf, something that’s also under investigation by authorities at the federal level. Justice Department officials recently subpoenaed an individual tied to one state’s fake electoral vote scheme, demanding this individual provide “any communications with government employees, with the Trump campaign and with some of the most prominent people around Trump in 2020,” CNN summarizes. These “prominent people” apparently include Rudy Giuliani.
Giuliani’s promotion to Georgia officials of lies about the integrity of the 2020 presidential election is another matter that Willis has targeted, and as for the faked electoral votes, “several” people tied to the Georgia version of that scheme — including Georgia GOP chairman David Shafer — have cooperated with Willis’s investigation, according to CNN. The fake electoral vote scheme — as that Justice Department subpoena suggests — directly connects to the Trump campaign, which was involved in the multi-state effort. Meanwhile, a special grand jury is set to begin its work in tandem with Willis’s investigation on June 1. A so-called special grand jury — under the guidelines relevant to Willis’s inquiry — focuses on just a single matter (instead of the range considered by ordinary grand juries), and it can issue subpoenas. Investigators associated with the Willis probe visited Washington, D.C., this month in order to meet with staff for the House committee investigating the Capitol riot, with whom the Georgia investigators went over info that could be “relevant” for their Fulton County investigation, CNN says.
Trump continues to promote the lie that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election and obviously seems extremely likely to never give it up. David Perdue, a “Big Lie”-supporting, Trump-backed candidate in the recent GOP primary for the Georgia governorship, lost big time, funnily enough: Perdue finished behind incumbent Brian Kemp by a whopping margin of more than 50 percent.
