When US president Donald Trump’s eldest son took the stage outside the Georgia Republican Party headquarters two days after the 2020 election, he likened what lay ahead to mortal combat.
“Americans need to know this is not a banana republic!” Donald Trump Jr shouted, claiming that Georgia and other swing states had been overrun by wild electoral shenanigans. He described tens of thousands of ballots that had “magically” shown up around the country, all marked for Joe Biden, and others dumped by Democratic officials into “one big box” so their authenticity could not be verified.
Trump told his father’s supporters at the news conference – who broke into chants of “Stop the steal!” and “Fraud! Fraud!” – that “the number one thing that Donald Trump can do in this election is fight each and every one of these battles, to the death!”
Over the two months that followed, a vast effort unfolded on behalf of the lame-duck president to overturn the election results in swing states across the country. But perhaps nowhere were there as many attempts to intervene as in Georgia, where Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, is now poised to bring an indictment for a series of brazen moves made on behalf of Trump in the state after his loss and for lies that the president and his allies circulated about the election there.
Trump has already been indicted three times this year, most recently in a federal case brought by special prosecutor Jack Smith that is also related to election interference. But the Georgia case may prove the most expansive legal challenge to Trump’s attempts to cling to power, with nearly 20 people informed that they could face charges.
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It could also prove the most enduring: While Trump could try to pardon himself from a federal conviction if he were re-elected, presidents cannot pardon state crimes.
Perhaps above all, the Georgia case assembled by Willis offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths taken by Trump and his allies to exert pressure on local officials to overturn the election – an up-close portrait of American democracy tested to its limits.
There was the infamous call that the former president made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, during which Trump said he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to overturn his narrow loss there. Trump and his allies harassed and defamed rank-and-file election workers with false accusations of ballot stuffing, leading to so many vicious threats against one of them that she was forced into hiding.
They deployed fake local electors to certify that Trump had won the election. Within even the US Department of Justice, an obscure government lawyer secretly plotted with the president to help him overturn the state’s results.
And on the same day that Biden’s victory was certified by Congress, Trump allies infiltrated a rural Georgia county’s election office, copying sensitive software used in voting machines throughout the state in their fruitless hunt for ballot fraud.
The Georgia investigation has encompassed an array of high-profile allies, from lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff at the time of the election. But it has also scrutinised lesser-known players including a Georgia bail bondsman and a publicist who once worked for Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West.
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As soon this week, there could be charges from a Fulton County grand jury after Willis presents her case to them. The number of people indicted could be large: A separate special grand jury that investigated the matter in an advisory capacity last year recommended more than a dozen people for indictment, and the forewoman of the grand jury has strongly hinted that the former president was among them.
If an indictment lands and the case goes to trial, a regular jury and the American public will hear a story that centres on nine weeks from election day through early January in which a host of people all tried to push one lie: that Trump had secured victory in Georgia. The question before the jurors would be whether some of those accused went so far that they broke the law.
Fuelling ‘hate and fury’
It did not take long for the gloves to come off.
During the November 5th visit by Donald Trump Jr, the Georgia Republican Party was already fracturing. Some officials believed they should focus on defending the seats of the state’s two Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who were weeks away from runoff elections, rather than fighting a losing presidential candidate’s battles.
But according to testimony before the House of Representatives committee that investigated the Capitol riot of January 6th, given by one of the Trump campaign’s local staffers, Trump’s son was threatening to “tank” those Senate races if there was not total support for his father’s effort. (A spokesperson for Donald Trump Jr disputed that characterisation, noting that the former president’s son later appeared in ads for the Senate candidates.)
Four days later, the two senators called for Raffensperger’s resignation. The Raffensperger family was soon barraged with threats, leading his wife, Tricia, to confront Loeffler in a text message: “Never did I think you were the kind of person to unleash such hate and fury.”
Four other battleground states had also flipped to Biden, but losing Georgia, the only Deep South state among them, seemed particularly untenable for Trump. His margin of defeat there was one of the smallest in the nation. Republicans controlled the state, and as he would note repeatedly in the aftermath, his campaign rallies in Georgia had drawn big, boisterous crowds.
By the end of November, Trump’s Twitter feed had become a font of misinformation. “Everybody knows it was Rigged” he wrote in a tweet on November 29th. And on December 1st: “Do something @BrianKempGA,” he wrote, referring to Georgia governor Brian Kemp, a Republican. “You allowed your state to be scammed.”
But these efforts were not gaining traction. Raffensperger and Kemp were not bending. And on December 1st, Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, announced that the Department of Justice had found no evidence of voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
A show for lawmakers
It was time to turn up the volume.
Rudy Giuliani was on the road, travelling to Phoenix and Lansing, Michigan, to meet with lawmakers to convince them of fraud in their states, both lost by Trump. Now, he was in Atlanta.
Even though Trump’s loss in Georgia had been upheld by a state audit, Giuliani made fantastical claims at a hearing in front of the state Senate, the first of three legislative hearings in December 2020.
He repeatedly asserted that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had flipped votes from Trump to Biden and changed the election outcome – false claims that became part of Dominion defamation suits against Fox News, Giuliani and a number of others.
Giuliani, then Trump’s personal lawyer, also played a video that he said showed election workers pulling suitcases of suspicious ballots from under a table to be secretly counted after Republican poll watchers had left for the night.
He accused two workers, a black mother and daughter named Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, of passing a suspicious USB drive between them “like vials of heroin or cocaine”. Investigators later determined that they were passing a mint; Giuliani recently admitted in a civil suit that he had made false statements about the two women.
Other Trump allies also made false claims at the hearing with no evidence to back them up, including that thousands of convicted felons, dead people and others unqualified to vote in Georgia had done so.
Eastman, a lawyer advising the Trump campaign, claimed that “the number of underage individuals who were allowed to register” in the state “amounts allegedly up to approximately 66,000 people”.
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That was not remotely true. During an interview last year, Eastman said he had relied on a consultant who had made an error, and there were in fact about 2,000 voters who “were only 16 when they registered”.
But a review of the data he was using found that Eastman was referring to the total number of Georgians since the 1920s who were recorded as having registered before they were allowed. Even that number was heavily inflated due to data-entry errors common in large government databases.
The truth: Only about a dozen Georgia residents were recorded as being 16 when they registered to vote in 2020, and those appeared to be another data-entry glitch.
(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)
The president calling
In the meantime, Trump was working the phones, trying to directly persuade Georgia Republican leaders to reject Biden’s win.
He called Kemp on December 5th, a day after the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit seeking to have the state’s election results overturned. Trump pressured Kemp to compel lawmakers to come back into session and brush aside the will of the state’s voters.
Kemp, who during his campaign for governor had toted a rifle and threatened to “round up illegals” in an ad that seemed an homage to Trump, rebuffed the idea.
Two days later, Trump called David Ralston, the speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, with a similar pitch. But Ralston, who died last year, “basically cut the president off”, a member of the special grand jury in Atlanta who heard his testimony later told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “He just basically took the wind out of the sails.”
By December 7th, Georgia had completed its third vote count, yet again affirming Biden’s victory. But Trump allies in the legislature were hatching a new plan to defy the election laws that have long been pillars of American democracy: They wanted to call a special session and pick new electors who would cast votes for Trump.
Never mind that Georgia lawmakers had already approved representatives to the Electoral College reflecting Biden’s win in the state, part of the constitutionally prescribed process for formalising the election of a new president. The Trump allies hoped that the fake electors and the votes they cast would be used to pressure the then vice-president Mike Pence not to certify the election results on January 6th.
Kemp issued a statement warning them off: “Doing this in order to select a separate slate of presidential electors is not an option that is allowed under state or federal law.”
The fake electors meet
Rather than back down, Trump was deeply involved in the emerging plan to enlist slates of bogus electors.
Trump called Ronna McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee, to enlist her help, according to McDaniel’s testimony to the January 6th committee. By December 13th, as the supreme court of Georgia rejected an election challenge from the Trump campaign, Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s local director of election day operations, emailed the 16 fake electors, directing them to quietly meet in the capitol building in Atlanta the next day.
Trump’s top campaign lawyers were so troubled by the plan that they refused to take part. Still, the president tried to keep up the pressure using his Twitter account. “What a fool Governor @BrianKempGA of Georgia is,” he wrote in a post just after midnight December 14th, adding, “Demand this clown call a Special Session.”
Later that day, the bogus electors met at the Georgia statehouse. They signed documents that claimed they were Georgia’s “duly elected and qualified electors”, even though they were not.
In the end, their effort was rebuffed by Pence.
In his testimony to US House investigators, Sinners later reflected on what took place: “I felt ashamed,” he said.
Moves in the White House
With other efforts failing, the White House chief of staff, Meadows, got personally involved. Just before Christmas, he travelled to suburban Cobb County, Georgia, during its audit of signatures on absentee postal ballots, which had been requested by Kemp.
Meadows tried to get into the room where state investigators were verifying the signatures. He was turned away. But he did meet with Jordan Fuchs, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, to discuss the audit process.
During the visit, Meadows put Trump on the phone with the lead investigator for the secretary of state’s office, Frances Watson. “I won Georgia by a lot, and the people know it,” Trump told her. “Something bad happened.”
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Byung J Pak, the US attorney in Atlanta at the time, believed that Meadows’s visit was “highly unusual,” adding in his House testimony, “I don’t recall that ever happening in the history of the US.”
In Washington, meanwhile, a strange plot was emerging within the justice department to help Trump.
Barr, one of the most senior administration officials to dismiss the claims of fraud, had stepped down as attorney general, and jockeying for power began. Jeffrey Clark, an unassuming lawyer who had been running the department’s environmental division, attempted to go around the department’s leadership by meeting with Trump and pitching a plan to help keep him in office.
Clark drafted a letter to lawmakers in Georgia, dated December 28th, falsely claiming that the justice department had “identified significant concerns” regarding the state’s results. He urged the lawmakers to convene a special session – a dramatic intervention.
Richard Donoghue, who was serving as acting deputy attorney general, later testified that he was so alarmed when he saw the draft letter that he had to read it “twice to make sure I really understood what he was proposing, because it was so extreme”.
The letter was never sent.
One last call
Trump refused to give up. It was time to reach the man who was in charge of election oversight: Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state.
On January 2nd, he called Raffensperger and asked him to recalculate the vote. It was the call that he would later repeatedly defend as “perfect”, an hour-long mostly one-sided conversation during which Raffensperger politely but firmly rejected his entreaties.
“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president warned, adding, “you know, that’s a criminal – that’s a criminal offence. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you”.
Raffensperger was staggered. He later wrote that “for the office of the secretary of state to ‘recalculate’ would mean we would somehow have to fudge the numbers. The president was asking me to do something that I knew was wrong, and I was not going to do that”.
Trump seemed particularly intent on incriminating the black women working for the county elections office, telling Raffensperger that Freeman – whom he mentioned 18 times during the call – was “a professional vote-scammer and hustler”.
“She’s one of the hot items on the internet, Brad,” Trump said of the viral misinformation circulating about Freeman, which had already been debunked by Raffensperger’s aides and federal investigators.
Trump-fuelled conspiracy theories about Freeman and her daughter, Moss, were indeed proliferating. In testimony to the January 6th committee last year, Moss recounted Trump supporters forcing their way into her grandmother’s home, claiming they were there to make a citizen’s arrest of her granddaughter; Freeman said that she no longer went to the grocery store.
Then, on January 4th, Freeman received an unusual overture.
Trevian Kutti, a Trump supporter from Chicago who had once worked as a publicist for Ye, persuaded Freeman to meet her at a police station outside Atlanta. Freeman later said that Kutti – who told her that “crisis is my thing,” according to a video of the encounter – had tried to pressure her into saying she had committed voter fraud.
“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” Freeman said in her testimony, adding, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”
‘Every freaking ballot’
On January 7th, despite the fake electors and the rest of the pressure campaign, Pence certified the election results for Biden. The bloody, chaotic attack on the Capitol the day before did not stop the final certification of Biden’s victory, but in Georgia, the machinations continued.
In a quiet, rural county in the southeastern part of the state, Trump allies gave their mission one more extraordinary try.
A few hours after the certification, a small group working on Trump’s behalf travelled to Coffee County, about 300km from Atlanta. A lawyer advising Trump had hired a company called SullivanStrickler to scour voting systems in Georgia and other states for evidence of fraud or miscounts; some of its employees joined several Trump allies on the expedition.
“We scanned every freaking ballot,” Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area Trump supporter and bail bondsman who travelled to Coffee County with employees of the company on January 7th, recalled in a recorded phone conversation. Hall said that with the blessing of the Coffee County elections board, the team had “scanned all the equipment” and “imaged all the hard drives” that had been used on election day.
A law firm hired by SullivanStrickler would later release a statement saying of the company, “Knowing everything they know now, they would not take on any further work of this kind.”
Others would have their regrets, too. While Trump still pushes his conspiracy theories, some of those who worked for him now reject the claims of rigged voting machines and mysterious ballot-stuffed suitcases. As Sinners, the Trump campaign official, put it in his testimony to the January 6th committee last summer, “It was just complete hot garbage.”
By then, Willis’s investigation was well under way.
“An investigation is like an onion,” she said in an interview soon after her inquiry began. “You never know. You pull something back, and then you find something else.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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