Fulton County DA Sends Target Letters To Trump Alllies In Fake Electors Scheme

A “target” of a criminal investigation is a person against whom the prosecutor and law enforcement are working to obtain formal charges, i.e., an Indictment.

Prosecutors use target letters mainly to encourage targets to retain counsel and to begin plea or cooperation discussions. Prosecutors do not expect targets to testify before the grnd jury even if subpoenaed. A lawyer’s representation that the target will invoke the privilege against self-incrimination usually is enough to earn discharge from the subpoena’s obligations.

With that preface, things just got real in Fulton County, Georgia.

Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman report, Exclusive: Fulton County DA sends ‘target’ letters to Trump allies in Georgia investigation:

In the latest sign that she is moving rapidly in her investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis has sent so-called target letters to prominent Georgia Republicans informing them they could be indicted for their role in a scheme to appoint alternate electors pledged to the former president despite Joe Biden’s victory in the state, according to legal sources familiar with the matter.

The move by Willis, a Democrat, could have major political implications in a crucial battleground state with high-profile races for governor and the U.S. Senate this fall. Among the recipients of the target letters, the sources said, are GOP state Sen. Burt Jones, Gov. Brian Kemp’s running mate for lieutenant governor; David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party; and state Sen. Brandon Beach.

Jones and Shafer were among those who participated in a closed-door meeting at the state Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, in which 16 Georgia Republicans selected themselves as the electors for the state, although they had no legal basis for doing so. Shafer, according to a source who was present, presided over the meeting, conducting it as though it were an official proceeding, in which those present voted themselves as the bona fide electors in Georgia — and then signed their names to a declaration to that effect that was sent to the National Archives.

The offices or spokespersons for Jones, Shafer and Beach did not respond to requests for comment.
Willis, in an interview, declined any comment on the target letters. But she confirmed she is considering another potentially controversial move: requesting that Trump himself testify under oath to the special grand jury investigating his conduct.

“Yes,” said Willis when asked if there was any chance Trump will be called to testify. “I think it’s something that we’re still weighing and evaluating.” She also said she had spoken to Dwight Thomas, a veteran local defense lawyer who has been retained to represent Trump, as recently as Thursday. She declined to say what they talked about. Thomas did not respond to requests for comment.

Willis also brushed aside the possibility that she will be sharply criticized by state Republicans, and perhaps others, for using her powerful prosecutorial position to target political adversaries. “I don’t make decisions based on what people say about me,” she said.

Charlie Bailey is the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor and a close ally of Willis (she recently helped sponsor a fundraiser for him). He has made Jones’s role in the so-called fake elector scheme a major issue in his campaign. “To come in and say: ‘No, the voters don’t matter, and I get to decide, the party gets to decide who wins this election,’ that is authoritarian,” Bailey said in an interview on the Yahoo News “Skullduggery” podcast this week. “It’s the most un-American thing you can do.”

Randy Evans, a Republican lawyer in Georgia who served as Trump’s ambassador to Luxembourg, said the target letters will reinforce GOP efforts to attack the credibility of Willis’s probe. “It drops it right into a characterization of this as a political, partisan witch hunt, as opposed to a legitimate inquiry,” he said in an interview. Evans, who has been briefed about the target letters, added: “It will become a fundraising letter [for the Republican Party]: ‘Help us fend off the unfounded legal attacks by the Democratic district attorney for Fulton County.’ You and I know that’s what’s going to happen.”

(After this story was published, Jones on Friday filed a motion in Fulton County Superior Court to disqualify Willis and her chief prosecutor on the Trump probe, Nathan Wade, for “conflicts of interest” due to their financial support for Bailey, Jones’s opponent. “This is a blatant effort to sway the outcome of the election in Mr. Bailey’s favor,” the motion reads. “Therefore, District Attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified.”)

The plan by the Trump campaign to designate alternative electors was not limited to Georgia. Pro-Trump Republicans in Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Michigan took similar steps — bolstered by constitutional corrupt lawyer John Eastman’s view that alternate electors could provide a basis for then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification of Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021.

But details about the events in Georgia have attracted particular scrutiny, both by Willis’s grand jury and by the U.S. Department of Justice, whose prosecutors in Washington also recently subpoenaed the GOP electors from the state.

Among those details was an email from Robert Sinners, who served as the Trump campaign’s Election Day coordinator in Georgia, which was sent to the would-be electors on the day before the Dec. 14 meeting. In the email, Sinners urged them to act with “complete secrecy” and to refuse to speak to any members of the news media about what they were doing. If asked, they were to say they were attending a meeting with Jones and Beach, the two state senators.

“I must ask for your complete discretion in this process,” Sinners wrote at the time, according to the Washington Post, which first reported on the email. “Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result — a win in Georgia for President Trump — but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.”

He also instructed the electors to tell security guards at the Capitol that they had an appointment with one of two state senators. “Please, at no point should you mention anything to do with Presidential Electors or speak to the media,” Sinners wrote in bold.

George Chidi, an Atlanta-based independent journalist and political activist, told Yahoo News that he testified Wednesday for about an hour in front of the special grand jury, and was closely questioned by prosecutors about how he was tipped off about the secret meeting of electors at the Capitol that day. He said he attempted to report on it until he was evicted from the room. “They wanted to know how I knew to barge into that meeting,” he told Yahoo News.

Chidi said he was informed that the room had been reserved by somebody in the office of Speaker of the House David Ralston. (Ralston testified before the grand jury on Thursday, but declined comment, citing respect for “the privacy of grand jury proceedings,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.)

When he tracked down the room and entered, Chidi testified, he was told the assembled group was holding “an education meeting.” “A guy got up and walked me out the door,” he testified, adding that “they posted a guy out front” to keep others out. (An Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, Greg Bluestein, has written that he, too, was kept from the room.)

Prosecutors appear to be focusing on the secrecy of the meeting as evidence of consciousness of guilt on the part of the Trump electors. But defense lawyers will argue that Sinners’s email and Chidi’s eviction from the room notwithstanding, the alternative electors did not attempt to keep the secret after their business was over — and that they had a valid reason to act as they did: to preserve the Trump campaign’s legal rights in the event that one of its legal challenges to Biden’s victory in Georgia prevailed. (The theory was that the state Legislature would not have time to formally name new electors before the Jan. 6 deadline, when Congress was due to certify the Electoral College vote.)

Shafer gave a number of interviews that day saying as much, although it’s not clear whether he did so because he had learned that Chidi and Bluestein had discovered the meeting.

It is also not clear how the target letters to Jones and Shafer fit into Willis’s overall strategy in the investigation. She could indict the fake electors on a so-called false writing charge — alleging that they filed a fraudulent document naming themselves electors for the state.

Alternatively, or in addition, she could use a false writing charge as a “predicate act” as part of a much broader conspiracy indictment encompassing all the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the election results in the state, including Trump’s Jan. 2, 2021, phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger urging him to “find” enough votes to flip the electoral result there.

In late June, Feds step up investigation of ‘fake’ Georgia GOP electors:

Federal investigators have stepped up their investigation into a phony slate of GOP electors in Georgia designed to help Donald Trump’s failed effort to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

The Justice Department has sought records from Georgia GOP Chair David Shafer and Brad Carver, an attorney and Republican activist who was among the 16 fake electors, according to several people with knowledge of the investigation. The Washington Post reported the activity is part of a broader probe involving phony electors in several states.

Carver, Shafer and several other members of the slate didn’t immediately respond or declined to comment on whether they are part of the fresh round of subpoenas.

The Justice Department is intensifying its investigation into the fake Georgia electors a day after the House committee probing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol presented fresh evidence that tied the former president directly to the scheme to put forward pro-Trump slates.

The 16 Republicans who filled out the fake slate are a cross section of influential leaders. They include Georgia GOP Chair David Shafer and state Sen. Burt Jones, a Trump-backed candidate who won the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor.

Jones spokesman Stephen Lawson said the candidate hasn’t received “anything from the FBI — but will certainly fulfill his civic duty, should it be necessary.”

Other state GOP electors were more circumspect.

“I’d rather not answer any questions on that,” said Kay Godwin, a South Georgia activist who was among the members of the GOP slate. Likewise, state Sen. Brandon Beach said he “can’t respond to any questions” about the investigation.

Shafer, whose subpoena was first reported by CNN, helped orchestrate the fake elector scheme. At the time, he and other GOP officials said they were submitting alternate slates in case Trump’s legal challenges were successful. Each of the challenges was rejected by courts.

In a December 2020 email, then-Trump aide Robert Sinners urged the electors to act with “complete discretion in this process” and to mislead state Capitol security guards and the media. Sinners later said he didn’t know at the time that the plan had no legal justification and that he regretted his participation in it. He said he was treated as a “useful idiot” by Trump’s campaign.

It’s the latest sign that investigators are sharpening their scrutiny of the Republicans who met, in secrecy, at the Georgia Statehouse in December 2020 to cast illegitimate ballots for Trump, even as Democrats met a floor above them to formally vote for Biden.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in May that federal investigators interviewed several Georgia Republicans who refused to join the alternative slate. Patrick Gartland said he was pressed on whether he talked to Trump or his top allies.

“Basically, they thought I was doing it because I was mad Trump lost,” said Gartland, who said he decided not to join the slate because his wife died, not because of any political reason. “I told them I know a lot of somebodies but that I was a nobody.”

Jason Shepherd, an activist who also rebuffed entreaties to join the slate, told the AJC he was interviewed by federal investigators who sought specific documents after Oct. 1, 2020, that were related to discussions on the alternate slate of electors.

The Justice Department also is reviewing fake Electoral College documents to determine whether the electorscommitted a crime.

* * *

The congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, meanwhile, has issued subpoenas to at least two Georgians on the fake slate.

A recorded deposition by Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel that was played at the committee’s hearing on Tuesday revealed Trump was personally involved in the scheme to put forward alternate slates in hopes of replacing legitimate electors who voted for Biden.

McDaniel said during a phone call with the former president, he put attorney John Eastman on the phone to “talk about the importance of the RNC helping the campaign gather these contingent electors.”

That took place despite testimony from several lawyers who said they warned the campaign that the plot to put forward alternate slates of electors in hopes of replacing the legitimate slates was illegal.

The inquiry into Shafer only adds to mounting problems for the embattled state GOP chair. Allies of Gov. Brian Kemp and other powerful Republicans are considering ways to render the state party meaningless in the 2022 election after Shafer sided with Trump-backed challengers who lost decisively in last month’s primary.