The unlikely team of prosecutors hunting Trump in Georgia
A sheriff’s deputy who went to law school but remained a cop for another two decades. A prosecutor best known for tackling juvenile offenders. And the guy who literally wrote the book on racketeering cases against mafia goons.
This is the team Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is assembling to investigate Donald Trump—to go after his advisers and their attempts to manipulate election results in Georgia.
In interviews with Willis, her staff, five former members of the team, and several people who interacted with them, The Daily Beast has learned there are now two grand juries underway in Fulton County, and jurors in these secret proceedings will soon be asked to issue subpoenas demanding documents and recordings related to the Trump investigation.
“I suspect that’s in the very near future,” Willis told The Daily Beast.
It’s practically unheard of for a regional prosecutor to target a former U.S. president. But this is Donald Trump. Manhattan’s district attorney and New York State’s attorney general have active investigations. And so does the DA of Fulton County, Georgia. The case in Georgia may be the strongest; there’s a trove of evidence—documents, phone calls, witnesses—that Trump personally interfered with and pressured elections officials in Atlanta as they recounted votes.
Trump’s now infamous Jan. 2 call, in which he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes,” became public on Willis’s first day in office.
Three cases were referred to her office from the Office of the Secretary of State, she said. The monumental task of conducting this investigation has fallen on the DA’s new anti-corruption team, once known as the “public integrity unit.” [Continue reading…]