Trump, Gingrich, Flynn, Herschmann, and the Special Grand Jury in Georgia: Will the Ex-President Be Indicted?

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ sweeping investigation has sought to determine not only whether Trump committed crimes but also whether there was a broader criminal conspiracy playing out in the efforts to overturn Georgia’s election results.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis filed petitions in court seeking to have Gingrich and Flynn, as well as former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann and others, testify next month before a special grand jury that’s been seated to aid her investigation.

CNN reported that Flynn and Powell were in the Oval Office with Trump, three weeks after he pardoned Flynn.

CNN reported last month that the House select committee investigating the January, 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol sent a letter to Gingrich seeking his voluntary cooperation to discuss his role promoting false claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen.

It’s necessary to use a process that involves getting judges in states where people live to compel witnesses to testify in Georgia. The petitions she filed Friday are essentially precursors to subpoenas.

The latest significant developments out of a special grand jury in Georgia probing Donald Trump’s election-stealing effort in the state are ramping up intrigue over a question the entire political world wants answered: Will the ex-president be indicted?

Comments on a Motion by Lee Flynn to Supremum Trump’s Electoral Campaign and a Special Counsel to the 2020 Election

Flynn didn’t immediately respond to email and phone messages seeking comment, and his lawyer also didn’t immediately return an email seeking comment. Gingrich referred questions to his attorney, who declined to comment. Herschmann couldn’t be reached immediately.

Willis has said she plans to take a monthlong break from public activity in the case leading up to the November midterm election, which is one month from Saturday.

Potential witnesses should appear after the election according to the petitions filed Friday. But the process for securing testimony from out-of-state witnesses sometimes takes a while, so it appears Willis is putting the wheels in motion for activity to resume after her self-imposed pause.

A Fulton County judge approved the district attorney’s request to document testimony by all 75 witnesses who appeared before the special grand jury, so the full record of transcripts could become public record, according to a source familiar with the investigation. It’s still unclear when this information could be released.

He was involved in an effort to get people to contact their state election officials and challenge the results of the 2020 election because of false claims made in television ads.

The petition seeking Flynn’s testimony says he appeared in an interview on conservative cable news channel Newsmax and said Trump “could take military capabilities” and place them in swing states and “basically re-run an election in each of those states.”

According to news reports, there was a meeting at the White House on December 18, 2020, where he met with Trump, Powell and others in relation to appointing Powell as a special counsel to investigate the 2020 election.

Herschmann, who featured prominently in the House committee hearings on the Capitol attack, was a senior adviser to Trump from August 2020 through the end of his term and “was present for multiple meetings between former President Trump and others related to the 2020 election,” Willis wrote in the petition seeking his testimony.

She said that Penrose worked with Powell and other people associated with the Trump campaign in late 2020 and early 2021.

He discussed with Powell and others a plan to hire a data solutions firm called SullivanStrickler to copy the data and software from the voting system equipment in Coffee County, as well as in Michigan and Nevada. Penrose did not immediately respond to an email and phone message seeking comment.

Willis wrote in a petition seeking Lee’s testimony that he was part of an effort to pressure elections worker Ruby Freeman, who was the subject of false claims about election fraud in Fulton County. He could not immediately be reached for comment.

Grand Juries in Georgia: The Last Moment of Donald Trump’s Trump-Biden Collision with the Media and the Law: Sen. Lindsey Graham and the House Select Committee

Special grand juries are impaneled in Georgia to investigate complex cases with large numbers of witnesses and potential logistical concerns. They can compel evidence and subpoena witnesses for questioning and, unlike regular grand juries, can also subpoena the target of an investigation to appear before it.

The special grand jury can recommend action when it completes its investigation. It is up to the district attorney to ask a grand jury for an indictment.

The grand jury heard from several figures including the lawyer for Trump and the White House chief of staff. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, told CNN’s Manu Raju on Thursday that he had confidence in his testimony.

Neither Mr. Graham’s media representative nor his lawyers could be reached for comment on Thursday, and a spokesman for Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, declined to comment. The six-page ruling came from the 11th Circuit in Atlanta and was a blow for Mr. Graham, the South Carolina Republican who became an ardent fan and golfing partner of Mr. Trump.

Former President Donald Trump and his movement are posing new challenges to accountability, free elections and the rule of law, ushering in a fresh period of political turmoil.

Trump dropped his clearest hint yet Saturday of a new White House run at a moment when he’s on a new collision course with the Biden administration, the courts and facts.

After losing reelection in 2020, Trump was back to being the center of US politics thanks to a number of confrontations. It’s likely to deepen polarization in an already deeply divided nation. Trump coming back to the spotlight probably means the 2020 elections and the early stages of his presidency will be more chaotic.

Controversies that are coming to a head underscore that the nation and its political and legal systems are still far from dealing with and moving on from the shock and awe fallout of Trump’s turbulent single White House term. GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, alluded to that reality when she said on Sunday that the panel wants to avoid Trump turning his potential testimony into a “circus.”

If there is a presidential campaign that stems from his claims of political persecution, it will cause more upheaval than he did in four years in office.

And while fierce differences are emerging between Democrats and Republicans over policy on the economy, abortion, foreign policy and crime in the 2022 midterms – while concerns about democracy often rank lower for voters – there is every chance the coming political period revolves mostly around the ex-President’s past and future.

Trump’s Inner Circle and Corrupt Campaigns: State and Local Public Integrity in the Contest of the 2020 Presidential Re-election Campaign

At the federal level, special counsel Jack Smith is overseeing parts of the criminal investigation into the Capitol attack and has subpoenaed members of Trump’s inner circle. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that Smith had subpoenaed the former president’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner for testimony.

In Arizona, one of the ex-President’s favorite candidates, GOP gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake – a serial spreader of voter fraud falsehoods – is again raising doubts about the election system. Lake said that it probably is not going to be fair.

A Republican majority in the House will return Trumpism to power because the ex-president keeps the House GOP in Republican hands. Some leading “Make America Great Again” Republicans are already speaking of a possible drive to impeach Biden and have already signaled they will use their powers to investigate to rough up Biden for a possible clash with Trump in 2024.

An already pro-Trump Republican presence in Washington is likely to expand after the midterms. There are more than 50 candidates who are running on a platform of 2020 election fraud, and if they lose their races in two weeks, will they accept the results?

On another politically sensitive front, the Trump Organization’s criminal tax fraud and grandy larceny trial begins in Manhattan on Monday. The ex-president has not been personally charged in the trial but it can have a huge impact on his business empire and he could make another accusation that he is being discriminated against for political reasons. The $250 million civil suit against Trump was filed by New York’s Attorney General Letitia James, who alleges that they ran tax and insurance fraud schemes to enrich themselves for years.

Democrats want Trump to return to being the center of attention. President Joe Biden denounced pro-Trump followers and some campaigns tried to frighten Suburban voters by warning that pro- Trump candidates are a danger to democracy.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/24/politics/donald-trump-circus-analysis/index.html

The Ethics Committee of the House of Representatives to the Standing Committee on the Report of the 2016 Pedestal Teaser Against Donald Trump and Joe Biden

But raging inflation and spikes in gasoline prices appear to be a far more potent concern before voters head to the polls, which could spell bad news for the party in power in Washington.

The ex-president told his supporters in Texas that he will probably have to run for president again.

“It may take multiple days, and it will be done with a level of rigor and discipline and seriousness that it deserves,” Cheney told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

His first debate against Joe Biden won’t be like the food fight that happened in the circus. This is a far too serious set of issues.”

With Mr. Rosen’s deputy, Richard Donoghue, also on the line, Mr. Trump launched into the same tired, disproved and discredited allegations he had propagated so often at rallies, during news conferences and on social media. Mr. Donoghue told him that it was not true. Mr Trump was frustrated that his own appointees at the Justice Department wouldn’t affirm his baseless accusations of election rigging, so he asked them to just say that it was corrupt and leave him alone.

The committee has taken most depositions behind closed doors and on video and used testimony throughout its highly produced presentations. Only its most sympathetic witnesses have appeared in person. While this has helped create a powerful narrative that shows Trump in a bad light, it has also deprived viewers of seeing witnesses testify under cross examination. This has made it difficult to assess whether the committee’s case would stand up to more rigorous evidentiary requirements in a court of law.

The former president is not likely to agree with the idea of video testimony because it would make it difficult for him to control how his testimony is used.

All this could become an academic endeavor. Given the possibility of a Trump legal challenge to the subpoena, the issue could drag on for months and become moot since a possible new Republican House majority would likely sweep the January 6 committee away as one of its first acts.

If there is evidence a crime was committed, Garland would face a dilemma over whether the national interest lay in implementing the law to its full extent or whether the consequences of prosecuting a former commander in chief in a fractious political atmosphere could tear the country apart.

A charging an ex-president for a non-White House term would definitely cause a stir. But sparing him from accountability if there’s evidence of a crime would send a damaging signal to future presidents with strongman instincts.

A lawyer for former President Donald Trump is believed to have described Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as a key part of his plan to block the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

John was an attorney for Trump and replied to the email with his support for the plan. In the email exchanges with several other lawyers working on Trump’s legal team, they were discussing filing a lawsuit that they hoped would result in an order that “TENTATIVELY” held that Biden electoral votes from Georgia were not valid because of election fraud.

The email was first reported by a publication. It is part of a tranche of emails the House has obtained from Eastman, under an order from a court, that are still subject of litigation before an appeals court. The emails were available through a link in a court filing submitted by the House committee early Wednesday.

Carter said in the recent decision he believed the exchanges were a sign of a fraudulent scheme after the election. Though he described this set of emails in an order last month, the full text of the exchanges is now available.

Chesebro wrote in one of the newly-available emails that that if the legal team could just get a case pending before the Supreme Court by January 5, “ideally with something positive  written by a judge or a justice, hopefully Thomas,” that it was their “best shot at holding up the count of a state in Congress.”

But, he wrote, “a lot can happen in the 13 days left,” and having the election results of multiple states under review in the courts and in state legislatures could bolster the push to extend Congress’ debate over certifying the results.

In the next two days, he said that Georgia could be important in a Supreme Court filing. Chesebro speculated that if there was a Georgia case pending before the Supreme Court,  Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to open proceedings any of the envelopes documenting the state’s electoral votes during the January 6 proceedings.

Such a move by Pence would force the court to act. “Trump and Pence have procedural options available to them starting on January 6 that might create additional delay, and also might put pressure on the Court to act,” Chesebro wrote.

The Infuriated Donald Trump indicted on a Big False Declaration of Election Fraud and a Presidential Call to Resign

Doug Letter, House general counsel, told the court that the link to the files was accidentally included.

He and other private attorneys discussed changing the verification that Trump would sign. But there was no notary around the White House to witness Trump’s signing until after the new year, the emails show. “Presidential trip to a UPS store?” another lawyer, Christopher Gardner wrote.

Eastman also wrote that a White House adviser and lawyer, Eric Herschmann, had “concern about the President signing a verification when specific numbers were included” regarding votes cast. The numbers implied that dead and relocated people had voted illegally, according to another email.

On December 31, the lawyers were talking and at that time Trump was in the air and would consult with Herschmann to sign the verification.

The lawyers suggested that Trump sign the document without the language called perjury because they wanted him to be tried for a crime.

On Dec. 27, 2020, more than six weeks after losing re-election, an infuriated President Donald Trump telephoned his acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen. Mr. Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, had announced his resignation less than two weeks earlier, after telling the president that the claims of election fraud Mr. Trump had been trumpeting were — as Mr. Barr later bluntly put it in testimony — “bullshit” and publicly affirming that there was no fraud on a scale that would affect the outcome of the election.

It was a remarkable statement, even for a president who had serially abused the powers of his office. The acting attorney general and his deputy were told by the department that the claims of fraud were false and Mr. Trump ordered them to lie about it.

When we consider the violent attack on the Capitol that he incited, it’s easy to see how Mr. Trump was willing to lie about a matter at the heart of our democracy. But Americans shouldn’t lose sight of how this behavior indicts the former president, and not just the former president but the Republican members of Congress whom he knew would go along with his big lie.

When Willis was a Governor: She Occurred on Atlantas-Gammas Now She Might Be For Trump

That said, Ms. Willis has a proven propensity for bringing and winning RICO cases. And as we have learned in our criminal trial work, sometimes juries are more responsive to grander narratives that command their attention — and outrage.

There was a scenario in which a Democrat like Willis, with her tough-as-nails messaging on crime, could have been not entirely unlike Governor Deal before her, better positioned to deliver on some reforms the left wing of the party has been fighting for — especially considering how, over the past year, reformists have experienced backlashes in places like San Francisco and New York. Kim Jackson, the chaplain at the Brooks protests, has since been elected to the State Senate, and she told me she supported Willis with a sense of excitement: A Black woman running on an anti-death-penalty platform seemed about as progressive as she could hope for. But three months into Willis’s tenure, a horrific mass shooting occurred at multiple spas in and around Atlanta, leaving eight dead, mostly Asian women, in what appeared to be a hate crime. Not long after, Willis announced that she would seek the death penalty for the accused shooter. And though Willis campaigned on pretrial diversion in lieu of prison time as one of her major reform issues, a report released by the American Civil Liberties Union on overcrowded and unsafe conditions at the Fulton County Jail cited insufficient use of diversion and a failure to indict arrested individuals in a timely manner as two major factors.

A judge was holding a series of preliminary hearings for all the Black jail inmates that had been arrested since July, the morning after we spoke. One of the people accused of stealing from a truck had been locked up for 112 days, while the other one was locked up for 116. According to the initial police report, the crime was a felony even though it was only a minor offense.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/magazine/she-took-on-atlantas-gangs-now-she-may-be-coming-for-trump.html

The Special Grand Jury Report on Donald Trump’s 2021 Georgian Effort to Reverse the 2020 Georgia Election: Mark Binelli and Nydia Blas

Mark Binelli is a writer. He wrote about the tangled legal aftermath of a biker brawl in Texas before he wrote about the opera director. Nydia Blas is an Atlanta-based visual artist who is interested in storytelling through a Black female perspective. She was named as one of the Ones to Watch in the British Journal of Photography.

Portions of a highly anticipated report by the Atlanta-area special grand jury that investigated Donald Trump’s actions in Georgia after the 2020 election will be released Thursday, giving the public its clearest look yet into the two-year probe into Trump and his associates’ efforts to reverse his election defeat.

The report will be made public on Thursday, after Judge McBurney wrote in his order that concerns about witnesses perjury will be made public.

The big question is whether the portions will include any new information about what the president did in the two years that he’s been in office or if the grand jury decided that he committed no crimes.

Trump lost to Joe Biden in Georgia by nearly 12,000 votes in 2020. The former president denied there was a problem with his activities during the election.

Their investigation included the possibility of election fraud, false statements to state and local governments, conspiracy, racketing, violation of oath of office, and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration.

Cunningham added to CNN that “there is no doubt that whatever (the report is) referring to is either conduct that was done directly by Donald Trump or done on his behalf.”

Some of the work done on behalf of the Former President to overturn the election results was a crime according to a cross section of citizens. That is a very significant thing for me.

The Georgia probe was set off nearly two years ago by an hourlong January 2021 phone call from Trump to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asking him to “find” the votes necessary for Trump to win the Peach State. Trump has referred to it as a “perfect” phone call.

The special grand jury, barred from issuing indictments, penned their final report as a culmination of its seven months of work, which included interviewing 75 witnesses, from Giuliani to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham.

The final report is likely to contain summaries of the panel’s investigative work, as well as any recommendations for indictments and alleged conduct that led to the panel’s conclusions.

The grand jury in Fulton County won’t be charged in the case now that a special grand jury has made its findings public.

Narrow charges could include the Georgia felonies of solicitation of election fraud in the first degree and related general crimes like conspiracy to commit election fraud, specifically focusing on events and people who have a strong nexus with Georgia. Also include others who had direct contacts with Georgia like Mr. Trump and his attorneys John C. Eastman and Rudy W. Giuliani. There would be activities around the fake electoral slates on December 14, 2020, followed by a conversation with Mr. Raffensperger on January 2, avoiding national events except to extent absolutely necessary.

Whether it’s simple or broad, if a case is opened, one thing is nearly certain: The next two years are probably going to take a long time. The flurry of legal files that Mr. Trump would see would take a lot of time. The battle would likely consist of motions and appeals, as Mr. Trump has done before in other cases, that he is immune from prosecution if he is acting in his official capacity.

Even if the courts work at the relatively rapid pace of other high-profile presidential cases, we would still be talking about months of delay. In both U.S. v. Nixon and Thompson v. Trump, about three months were consumed from the first filing of the cases to the final rejection of presidential arguments by the U.S. Supreme Court. In this case, there would be more issues, which would be likely to require additional time. At the earliest, Ms. Willis would be looking at a trial toward the end of 2023. The appeals wouldn’t be concluded until the end of 2024 or beyond.

It’s not clear if any perjury indictments would implicate those close to Trump. The grand jury did not hear from the ex-president. And Trump maintains he did nothing wrong.

Questions about Georgia are complicated by the fact that Thursday’s excerpts came from a grand jury report that was only partially released. Such a document is, by definition, one-sided since witnesses do not testify alongside counsel or have a chance to rebut any accusations. The rest of the report was not released to make sure that the rights of those who might or might not be charged were not prejudiced. Still, the recommendations of perjury prosecutions, although non-binding, represent a small step forward on the issue of whether there will criminal accountability for an attempt to subvert democracy – or to cover it up.

Whether Willis concludes the same thing and if there is evidence sufficient to make indictments or to win a such a critical case is not yet clear. But the answer may be coming soon.

Thomas Dupree, who was a deputy assistant attorney general in the Bush Administration, said on CNN that he was certain there would be indictments for perjury or other crimes.

There is no evidence of voter fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election in Georgia, as the grand jury concluded in the report.

Norm Eisen, a former diplomat and ethics expert, told CNN on Thursday that the conclusion was an important building block in any case against Trump. Donald Trump has been making claims about what happened in Georgia. It repudiates him,” Eisen said on CNN “Newsroom”

“It also establishes a basis for bringing charges – you couldn’t bring charges without this kind of a conclusion – on solicitation of election fraud. This is another nail in the coffin that was already full of them.”

The former attorney general in the Bush administration advised against getting overly excited by the events in Georgia on Thursday.

Investigating Donald Trump’s 2020 Counting by means of the Ruling Rodeo Investigation Commission (RICO). Tim Burnett Out Front: A CNN Special Counsel to Fulton County

“All I want to do is this. The transcript of the call that took place in January of 2020 shows that Trump stated he wanted 11,780 more votes than they have, because he won the state.

The FBI would likely make indictments in Georgia and at the federal level, unless there is no consistent information, Timothy said on “Erin Burnett OutFront.”

In Georgia, the foreperson of the grand jury that investigated Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the election said the panel is suggesting multiple indictments and suggesting the big name is on the list.

“They were present for really significant events. The special counsel will want to know what the president understood about the election results on January 6. And they both had direct communications with him about the events preceding the riot at the Capitol,” he said.

The special counsel has a massive amount of evidence already in-hand that it now needs to comb through, including evidence recently turned over by the House January 6 committee, subpoena documents provided by local officials in key states and discovery collected from lawyers for Trump allies late last year in a flurry of activity, at least some of which had not been reviewed as of early January, sources familiar with the investigation told CNN at the time.

Smith would continue because of executive privilege, and he will not stop because of a family relationship. He believes that he can get all of that information because of the law.

There is a reason that I am a fan of RICO, I think jurors are very intelligent, that is what drew me to it. They want to know what happened. They want to make an accurate decision about someone’s life. RICO is a tool that allows prosecutors and law enforcement to tell the whole story.

John Floyd, a lawyer with deep expertise in racketeering cases, is assisting Fulton County on multiple cases, including Willis gang indictment against the rapper Young Thug, where she is currently using the RICO Act and introducing song lyrics as evidence.

Trump, who has launched his 2024 campaign for the White House, denies any criminal wrongdoing. He has claimed that he won the election in Georgia, even though he didn’t.