Legal Experts Outline The Case For Criminal Prosecution of Donald Trump In Georgia

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, Think tank: Trump faces ‘substantial’ legal risk in Georgia case:

[L]egal experts with the Brookings Institution think tank published a detailed analysis Friday of the potential criminal investigation Trump faces in Fulton County linked to his outspoken efforts to overturn the state’s election results.

The 107-page report, written by seven legal analysts, concludes that Trump’s post-election conduct leaves him at “substantial risk of possible state charges predicated on multiple crimes.” It was published a day before Trump is set to hold a rally in Perry to promote a slate of state Republican candidates.

Much of the report centers on the Jan. 2 phone call between Trump and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger first reported by The Washington Post and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. During that call, Trump badgered the GOP elections official to “find” enough votes to reverse his narrow defeat.

But it also outlines a host of other potential criminal infractions surrounding his push to invalidate the election, including direct calls to Gov. Brian Kemp and state Attorney General Chris Carr, and efforts by his attorney Rudy Giuliani to lobby state legislators to take extraordinary action.

Overall, the report said, the charges could include criminal solicitation to commit election fraud, intentional interference with performance of election duties, conspiracy to commit election fraud, racketeering and violations of more than a dozen other state statutes.

“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,” the group wrote.

Among the report’s authors are Norman Eisen, President Barack Obama’s ethics czar who later became a special counsel to House Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment trial; and Gwen Keyes Fleming, a former DeKalb County district attorney.

The report comes as the Fulton County district attorney’s office continues its 7-month-old criminal probe of Trump’s conduct related to Georgia’s elections.

Prosecutors have appeared before a grand jury seeking subpoenas for documents and witnesses; interviewed at least four of Raffensperger’s closest aides; hired the state’s leading authority on racketeering and conspiracy laws; and begun coordinating with members of Congress probing the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the AJC previously reported.

A spokesman for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said Thursday that the investigation is “active and ongoing” but declined to disclose additional details.

The DA’s office should use this report as an outline for the charges they are investigating.

[As] a part of their legal analysis, the authors of the Brookings report explored the legal defenses Trump’s lawyers could mount should the Fulton investigation eventually lead to the courtroom.

They said he can’t be immune because “a candidate who believes he has won an election does not enjoy any legal warrant to commit possible crimes in furtherance of that belief.” And second, because “there is an extraordinary absence of any evidence suggestive of irregularity in any respect in the Georgia process.”

In an interview with the AJC, Eisen said the state’s responsibility to count the ballots cast by its citizens and certify the presidential election results is paramount over the desires of a political candidate — even that of a president.

“The president doesn’t have the right to overturn state elections to benefit himself,” Eisen said. “He doesn’t have any role in state elections.”

Eisen said he wouldn’t be surprised if Trump details his grievances about Georgia officials’ handling of the 2020 election during his appearance in Perry over the weekend.

That he did. TRUMP PRETENDS ARIZONA ELECTION AUDIT FINDINGS DIDN’T COMPLETELY EMBARRASS HIM.

“His statements and those of his allies have unfortunately contained a great deal of false information and disinformation, and that’s another reason that it’s important to put the undisputed facts out there in great detail,” Eisen said, mentioning one of the reasons why he and his colleagues produced the report.

The authors said that beyond analyzing the public facts and the law itself, it isn’t their place to say what should happen to Trump. They strongly suggest, however, that prosecutors can build a potent case against the former president.

“There can be no doubt that prosecutors should take extra care and deliberation when considering charges against former public officials and those associated with them,” the authors wrote.

“But if they were somehow exempt, or ultimately subject to different and lower standards of liability, that would betray the core ideas of American justice.”

Joshua Matz, a co-author of the Brookings Institution report on Georgia`s case against Donald Trump, was interviewed by MSNBC/s Lawrence O’Donnell on Monday night.

Transcript (excerpt):

O`DONNELL: Joining us now is Joshua Matz, a co-author of the Brookings Institution report on Georgia`s case against Donald Trump. He also was counsel to the House Judiciary Committee in both impeachment trials of Donald Trump.

Thank you very much for joining us tonight. I really appreciate it.

What we just saw in that video seems to be part of this Trump method of maybe his belief that if he does it in public, it can`t be a crime. He seems to be doing an impression of his phone calls with the secretary of state, asking him to do things. And if he is talking about it in public, it can`t possibly be a crime. That seems to be the way he approached his previous high crimes in office.

JOSHUA MATZ, FORMER IMPEACHMENT COUNSEL, HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: Well, that`s absolutely right. And thank you for having me. I mean, when the impeachment proceedings went forward, obviously, earlier this year, that too was based on president Trump`s acts in public there the incitement to insurrection. But whether or not he thinks that carrying out some kind of real-time live stage parody is going to immunize him from criminal liability, the reality, as we conclude in our report is that President Trump`s repeated interference with the election administration in Georgia, his efforts to solicit and threaten senior state officials to certify the election for him falsely and to find exactly enough votes to rig the election back for him, that was a crime, and whatever he wants to say on stage, however much he might want to make fun of Secretary Raffensperger, I`m confident in the end, the facts will come out and that the Fulton County district attorney who is investigating will lead her wherever the facts in the law require.

O`DONNELL: You identify a possible felony in the list of offenses and this is a Georgia statute that makes the felony if you willfully tampers with any elector`s list, voter certificate, numbered list of voters, ballot box, voting machine, direct recording electronic equipment, electronic ballot marker or tabulating machine, anyone who does that shall will guilty of a felony with possible sentence of not less than one year, not more than ten years a fine not to exceed $100,000, or both, jail — prison sentence and fine.

That — how do you apply that statute to the evidence as we know it?

MATZ: That`s a fantastic question. This is a case where it wasn`t like President Trump was going to get on a plane, fly to Georgia and start messing around with the ballots, although god only knows what he would have done had that been a possibility. This is a case where he was calling senior state officials, most notably Secretary of State Raffensperger and a chief investigator in his office, Frances Watson on December 23rd and urging them to vary from state election procedures, and in Raffensperger`s case to find 11,780 ballots, the exact number needed to alter the election outcome.

Looking at a fact pattern like that, there is a strong case that President Trump committed the Georgia crime of solicitation of election fraud that what he was doing here was soliciting Secretary Raffensperger with the intent that Secretary Raffensperger perform a certain act, and that act itself was a crime, the crime that you just described, the crime of tampering with ballots, tampering with the vote tabulation in the state.

So I think looking at that, you`d probably see it charged as a solicitation offense, maybe a conspiracy offense it could even help support a charge of intentional interference with the carrying out of public duties by public officer. Again, in this case, Secretary Raffensperger. There is numerous avenues through which President Trump`s conduct could give rise to criminal liability here.

O`DONNELL: As soon as this phone call became public in the Raffensperger side released to it the media, we`re all listening to it, we brought Georgia lawyers on to this show to outline all of these statutes that they knew about, that we didn`t know about within Georgia law. And they were rattling off these things that don`t exist. Some of these statutes, they`re different from state to state, obviously as you know.

And as we kept hearing about them, kept looking at them, kept reading them, kept saying wow, these laws in Georgia are very solid, protective lines around the voting process.

MATZ: Well, that`s exactly right. And there is a reason why it`s so important that there are state level laws like this.

Obviously, in our federal system of government, you know, the federal law is what it is. There are powerful bases, compelling bases for the Justice Department to investigate a significant amount of what happened surrounding the 2020 presidential election. And obviously there is a select committee in the house that`s doing that too.

But under our constitutional system, states actually have the primary role in carrying out presidential elections. The federal government hardly has much of a role at all, and it`s really Congress, not the president that has a role, namely certifying the electoral ballots as occurred this past year, this year on January 6.

And that`s sort of an obvious point. You wouldn`t want the president, who might be a candidate or who might have very strong feelings on who replaces him or her have a big role in the presidential election so states are the key players here. And states like Georgia have put in place powerful laws to protect the integrity of their electoral process.

And those laws I think apply with full force here, you know, a circumstance where you have a candidate calling up and threatening senior state officials if they do not falsely alter the final count of votes to alter the outcome of the election in the state.

Frankly, if that weren`t a crime, you would think that we need to go rewrite the criminal laws to make sure that it is. And in this case, we don`t need to do that Georgia`s laws are solid. I think the public record powerfully supports potential criminal charges.

And that`s why I think it`s so crucially important that the district attorney in Fulton County is investigating this since her office in Georgia is the only investigating office that didn`t make itself a witness to the crimes here.

O`DONNELL: Joshua Matz, thank you very much for joining us tonight. Really appreciate it