ATLANTA — In the latest sign that she is moving quickly in her investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Fulton, Ga., District Attorney Fannie Willis sent so-called target letters to prominent Georgia Republicans, informing them that they may be indicted for their role in a scheme to appoint alternate voters promised 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 ramifications in a crucial battleground state with high-profile races for governor and U.S. Senate this fall. Among the recipients of the targeted letters, the sources said, are GOP Sen. Burt Jones, Gov. Brian Kemp’s running mate for lieutenant governor; David Shaffer, Chairman of the Republican Party of Georgia; and State Sen. Brandon Beach.
Jones and Shaffer were among those who participated in a closed-door meeting at the Capitol on December 14, 2020, in which 16 Georgia Republicans chose to be the state’s electors, even though they had no legal basis to do so. Shaffer, according to a source who was present, presided over the meeting, conducting it as a formal procedure in which those present voted for themselves as bona fide voters in Georgia — and then signed their names to a declaration to that effect that was sent out. in the National Archives.
Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis speaks at a news conference in Atlanta on May 11, 2021. (Reuters/Linda So) #
The offices or spokespeople for Jones, Shafer and Beach did not respond to requests for comment. In an interview, Willis declined to comment on the target letters. But she confirmed she is considering another potentially controversial move: asking Trump himself to testify under oath before the special grand jury investigating his conduct.
“Yes,” Willis said when asked if there was any chance Trump would be called to testify. “I think that’s something we’re still weighing and evaluating.” She also said she spoke with Dwight Thomas, a veteran local defense attorney who was retained to represent Trump, as recently as Thursday. She declined to say what they talked about. Thomas did not respond to requests for comment.
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Willis also dismissed the possibility that she would be heavily criticized by state Republicans, and perhaps others, for using her powerful prosecutorial position to target political opponents. “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 Willis ally (she recently helped sponsor a fundraiser for him). He made Jones’ role in the so-called fraudulent voter scheme a central 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’s authoritarian,” Bailey said in an interview with Yahoo News’ “Skullduggery” podcast this week. “It’s the most un-American thing you can do.”
Georgia State Sen. Burt Jones at a rally held by former President Donald Trump in Commerce, Georgia, on March 26. (Alyssa Poynter/Reuters)
Randy Evans, a Republican attorney in Georgia who served as Trump’s ambassador to Luxembourg, said the targeting letters would bolster GOP efforts to attack the credibility of the Willis investigation. “It just characterizes it as a political, partisan witch hunt as opposed to a legitimate investigation,” he said in an interview. Evans, who was briefed on the target letters, added: “This will become a fundraising letter [for the Republican Party]: “Help us fend off the baseless legal attacks by the Democratic District Attorney for Fulton County.” You and I know this is going to happen.
The Trump campaign’s plan to target alternative voters was not limited to Georgia. Trump Republican supporters in Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Michigan took similar steps — bolstered by constitutional lawyer John Eastman’s view that alternative voters could provide a basis for then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification of Biden’s victory on January 6, 2021
But the details of the events in Georgia have drawn particular attention, both from the Willis grand jury and the US Department of Justice, whose Washington prosecutors also recently subpoenaed the state’s GOP voters.
Among those details was an email from Robert Sinners, who served as Trump’s election day campaign coordinator in Georgia, that was sent to prospective voters the day before the Dec. 14 meeting. In the email, Sinners urged them to operate in “total secrecy” and refuse to talk to members of the 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 the email. “Your duties are imperative to ensure the bottom line – a victory in Georgia for President Trump – but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.”
David Shaffer, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, during the Republican primary on election night in Atlanta on January 5, 2021. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
He also instructed voters to tell Capitol security that they had an appointment with one of two state senators. “Please do not under any circumstances mention anything related to the 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 for about an hour Wednesday before a special grand jury and was closely questioned by prosecutors about how he was tipped off about the secret meeting of voters at the Capitol. this day. He said he tried to report it until he was kicked out of the room. “They wanted to know how I knew to break into that meeting,” he told Yahoo News.
Chidi said he was informed the room had been reserved by someone in House Speaker David Ralston’s office. (Ralston testified before a grand jury on Thursday but declined to comment, citing respect for the “confidentiality 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 a “training meeting.” “A guy got up and sent me through the door,” he testified, adding that they “put a guy in front” to keep others out. (An Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, Greg Bluestein, wrote that he was also kept from the room.)
From left, Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Georgia Elections Officer Gabriel Sterling at a June 21 hearing of a House committee on Jan. 6. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Prosecutors appear to be focusing on the secrecy of the meeting as evidence of a consciousness of guilt on the part of Trump voters. But defense attorneys will argue that regardless of the Sinners email and Chidi’s removal from the room, the alternative voters did not try to keep the secret after their work was done — and that they had a good reason to do so: to preserve the campaign Trump’s legal rights should one of the legal challenges to Biden’s victory in Georgia prevail. (The theory was that the state legislature would not have time to formally name new electors before the Jan. 6 deadline, when Congress had to certify the Electoral College vote.)
Shaffer gave a number of interviews that day saying the same thing, although it’s unclear if he did so because he learned Chidi and Bluestein discovered the meeting.
It’s also unclear how the targeted letters to Jones and Shaffer fit into Willis’ overall strategy in the investigation. She could charge the bogus voters with what’s known as a false writing charge — alleging they submitted a false document naming themselves voters to the state.
Alternatively, or in addition, she could use a false-writing charge as a “predicate act” as part of a much broader conspiracy charge covering all of the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the state’s election results, including Trump’s charge of 2 January 2021 phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger urging him to “find” enough votes to overturn the election result there.
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