New Signs of the Ends of Donald Trump’s 2024 White House Run: New Efforts on Dealing With Political Persecutors

Donald Trump is heading for a period of maximum legal and political risk over his role in the US Capitol insurrection and hoarding of classified documents that will collide with his efforts to electrify a low wattage 2024 White House bid.

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.

Trump’s current prominence on the political scene was already highly unusual. One-term presidents typically fade fairly fast into history. It is a testament to the firm hold he has on the GOP that he is still a significant player nearly 2 years after losing reelection. And while there is growing talk about whether his thicket of legal and political controversies could convince some GOP primary voters it’s time to move on, Trump still seems to have plenty of juice.

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.”

Those controversies also show that given the open legal and political loops involving the ex-President, a potential 2024 presidential campaign rooted in his claims of political persecution could create even more upheaval than his 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.

A quickening special counsel probe, now focusing on the alleged attempt to steal Georgia’s election, the climax of the House January 6 committee and a new trial of pro-Trump Oath Keepers extremists underscore the breadth of attempts to secure accountability over one of the darkest days in modern American history. These new signs of a net possibly closing around Trump and his allies come a month after voters sent a signal of disapproval with his obsession over the 2020 election by repudiating many midterm candidates in swing states who bought his claims of voter fraud.

In Arizona, one of the ex-president’s favorite candidates is again raising doubts about the election system because of her history of voter fraud. “I’m afraid that it probably is not going to be completely fair,” Lake told AZTV7 on Sunday.

Joe Biden in the House: Criminal Tax Fraud and Grandy Lorentz Violation in the Era of Presidential Candidate Pro-Trump Elections

One of the most powerful pro-Trump Republicans told the New York Post last week that there was a possibility of impeachment of Biden. South Carolina GOP Rep. Nancy Mace, however, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” Sunday she did not want to see tit-for-tat impeachment proceedings after Trump was twice impeached. She said that she was against the process being weaponized. But when asked if Biden had committed impeachable offenses, she said that it would have to be investigated.

An already pro-Trump Republican presence in Washington is likely to expand after the midterms. There are a lot of Trump endorsed candidates running in upcoming elections, and their platforms raise questions about whether they will accept the results if they lose.

On another politically sensitive front, the Trump Organization’s criminal tax fraud and grandy larceny trial begins in Manhattan on Monday. The ex-President hasn’t been personally charged but the trial could impact his business empire and prompt fresh claims from him that he is being persecuted for political reasons that could inject yet another contentious element into election season. In a civil case, New York Attorney General Letitia James is accusing Donald Trump and the Trump Organization of running tax and insurance fraud schemes to enrich themselves for years.

Democrats have made their own attempts to return Trump to the political spotlight. President Joe Biden equated MAGA followers with “semi-fascism” and some campaigns have tried to scare critical suburban voters by warning pro-Trump candidates are a danger to democracy.

The party in power in Washington may not fare well if voters head to the polls in a few weeks and see escalating inflation and spikes in gasoline prices.

The ex- President told supporters at a rally in Texas that he will likely have to make another White House bid.

“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.”

The first debate against Joe Biden will not be like the food fight or the circus. This is a very serious set of issues.

Trump offered a glimpse of how he might use an appearance before the committee to create a political extravaganza after the panel announced it would send out the subpoena. In a 14-page letter, he made multiple false and debunked claims about election fraud, and lashed out at the panel itself, branding members “highly partisan political Hacks and Thugs whose sole function is to destroy the lives of many hard-working American Patriots, whose records in life have been unblemished until this point of attempted ruination.”

The committee takes most depositions in private and on video, as well as using testimony throughout its presentations. Its most sympathetic witnesses have been in person. While this has helped create a powerful narrative that has painted a picture of shocking derelictions of duty by Trump on January 6, it has also deprived viewers of seeing witnesses 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 likely to be against video testimony as it would be harder for him to dictate terms of the exchanges and control the way his testimony is used.

All of this could become an academic. 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.

Trump has already tried to use claims that justice is being weaponized against him as rocket fuel for his 2024 presidential bid. And while the law, and not politics, is Garland’s stated business, any potential prosecution of Trump must balance the national interest and the precedent that would be set if a commander in chief were to get away with attempting to overthrow an election.

The simple, politically charged act of investigating an ex-president was always bound to create a political furor. The fact that Trump is running for the White House again multiplies the stakes and means profound decisions are ahead for Attorney General Merrick Garland if evidence suggests Trump should be charged.

In August Mr. Graham was told to appear before the grand jury. His lawyers filed a document with the Supreme Court that says he was ordered to give testimony in November.

Mr. Cunningham said the senator is at risk of being seen by the public as not being forthcoming with answers to the grand jury questions.

The 2020 Presidential Election: The Case of Trump and his Associated Attorneys in a Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, and the Threat to a Special Counsel

Trump and his associates also face legal exposure in Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State and expects to wrap her probe by the end of the year.

Legal experts believe the case represents a serious threat to Mr. Trump, who was recorded on a phone call with Mr. Raffensperger in January 2021, telling him he wanted to “find” 11,780 votes — one vote more than he needed to declare victory.

Several of Mr. Trump’s closest allies have been fighting in court over the last few months, arguing they should not have to. So far, their track record has been mixed.

The lawyers for the president were worried that a special counsel would drag out the investigation they have fought continuously in court. Trump likens the prospect of a former special counsel like Robert Muller to the Russia investigation.

It likely won’t take long after the midterms for focus to shift to the 2024 presidential race. That could incentivize top DOJ officials to make crucial charging decisions as quickly as possible, including whether to bring charges against Trump himself or other top political activists, other sources familiar with the Justice Department’s inner workings say.

One defense attorney working on January 6 related matters said that they can charge almost anyone if they want to, adding that defense lawyers don’t know who the charges will be.

The Justice Department isn’t going to give up on partisan issues during the Mueller, Durham, and Gaetz probes of the Kremlin investigation

Special counsels, of course, are hardly immune from political attacks. Both former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe came under withering criticism from their opponents.

The Kansas City-based federal prosecutor and national security expert David Raskin, as well as David Rody, a prosecutor-turned-defense lawyer, were both brought into the investigations by top Justice officials.

Rody, whose involvement has not been previously reported, left a lucrative partnership at the prestigious corporate defense firm Sidley Austin in recent weeks to become a senior counsel at DOJ in the criminal division in Washington, according to his LinkedIn profile and sources familiar with the move.

While the January 6 investigations are being handled by the US Attorney’s Office in DC, the ones against right-wing extremists are going to trial.

A handful of other prosecutors have joined the January 6 investigations team, including a high-ranking fraud and public corruption prosecutor who has moved out of a supervisor position and onto the team, and a prosecutor with years of experience in criminal appellate work now involved in some of the grand jury activity.

The decision of whether to charge Trump or his associates will ultimately fall to Attorney General Merrick Garland, whom President Joe Biden picked for the job because his tenure as a judge provided some distance from partisan politics, after Senate Republicans blocked his Supreme Court nomination in 2016.

In March, Garland avoided answering a CNN question about the prospect of a special counsel for Trump-related investigations, but said that the Justice Department does “not shy away from cases that are controversial or sensitive or political.”

“What we will avoid and what we must avoid is any partisan element of our decision making about cases,” Garland said. I want to make sure the Department decisions are made solely on the facts and the law and not based on partisan considerations, and that is what I intend to do.

Garland has tough decisions beyond Trump. The long-running investigation of Hunter Biden, son of the president, is nearing conclusion, people briefed on the matter say. After prosecutors recommended against charges, the final decision on Gaetz’s investigation is waiting in the wings.

A former Justice Department official who had some knowledge about the thinking around the investigations said that they were not going to charge until they were ready to. There will be added pressures to get through the review early on since the DOJ only has five years to bring charges.

Willis has observed her own version of a quiet period around the midterm election and is seeking to bring witnesses before the grand jury in the coming weeks. CNN indictments could come as early as December, according to sources.

The state of Georgia is looking into efforts to interfere with the 2020 election. There are witnesses that have tried to fight their subpoenas.

At his presidential announcement a week ago, Trump said he was the victim of a “weaponization” of the justice system as he sought to paint the investigations as politically motivated.

The Justice Department has already returned to Trump a selection of documents that were either legal in nature or were non-government records with sensitive personal information, like medical records.

The outcome of the intelligence review of those documents may determine if criminal charges will be filed, according to one source familiar with the Justice Department’s approach.

Two people familiar with the investigation say a federal judge ordered a Trump adviser to testify before a grand jury.

It was decided by the DC District Court that he could not be charged if he gave information to the investigation.

The criminal investigations into the retention of national defense information at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort were put in the hands of a special counsel.

A special counsel is a lawyer appointed to lead an independent investigation and, if necessary, to prosecute anyone suspected of crimes. It’s necessary that he or she comes from outside the government. When there is a conflict of interest in carrying out a probe, the Justice Department will usually appoint a special counsel.

Garland stated that he had concluded that it was in the public interest to appoint a special counsel because of recent developments such as the former president’s intention to run for president in the next election.

Jack Smith was the chief prosecutor for the special court that investigated war crimes in Kosovo.

The US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against a Special Master in the Mar-a-Lago investigation into the insurrection and the death of the First Lady of the United States

Speaking at the America First gala at Mar-a-Lago on Friday night, the former president called the special counsel appointment an “appalling announcement” and a “horrendous abuse of power.”

The former president on Friday indicated that he had believed federal investigations into him were slowing down or over until the announcement from Garland. He repeatedly called the investigations political and said it was not a fair situation and would not be a fair investigation, telling the crowd at Mar-a-Lago, “You’d really say enough is enough.”

Judge Raymond Dearie served as the special master in the Mar-a-Lago case until the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals halted his review of the seized documents.

The ruling removed an obstacle in the way of the investigation into the mismanagement of government records while Donald Trump was in office.

The appeals court said that the law was clear. “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. We can’t write rules that only allow former presidents to do so.

The 11th Circuit said that either approach would be a “radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations” and that “both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”

The Justice Department needs to return any private documents it found during the search of Mar-a-Lago if a special master is needed, according to Trumps legal team.

There is a review of obstruction of justice, criminal handling of government records and violation of the Espionage Act by prosecutors.

The warning that the future threat of truth and democracy remains acute is brought by each sign that the post- election trauma is heating up. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance – a key force in the incoming GOP House majority that is likely to try to shut down or obstruct investigations into Trump – is embroiled in yet another controversy over the insurrection.

The Georgia Republican said that if she had her way, the mob that smashed into the Capitol would have been armed. She insisted she was joking by rejecting the White House condemnations. This happened a few days after the ex-president demanded the end of the Constitution in a sign of how his potential second term might unfold if he returns to the White House.

It is remarkable that with the exception of a few people, Washington politics is still in turmoil even after Trump tried to overturn the election. And Trump’s campaign of lies is having a damaging impact. Even after Republicans won the House last month, a new CNN/SSRS poll published Monday found that only 34% of Republican-aligned adults are even somewhat confident that elections reflect the will of the people – down from 43% in October.

Smith sent subpoenas to election officials in seven states, and got a lot of material. Included in the response from Michigan’s secretary of state is an email from a county official who was reporting two voicemails they received in December 2020 from individuals seeking access to voting equipment. One call came from someone claiming to work for Trump’s post-election legal team, the clerk wrote.

700 days have elapsed since the Washington Post published the full hour audio of his phone call, which was very incriminating. When does it happen? Under Jack Smith.

Goodman also suggested that Trump’s legal team was guilty of wishful thinking if they believed that Smith’s appointment after a period spent abroad meant he was less likely to be influenced by the politicized aftermath of the January 6 attack and that a fresh mind would lean against indictments.

Preet Bharara, a former US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday that Smith’s appointment and his assembling of a high-powered team of experienced prosecutors represented bad news for Trump.

“I don’t think they would’ve left their former positions, both in government and private practice, unless there was a serious possibility that the Justice Department was on a path to charge. He thinks that it will happen in a month.

Attorney General Garland has stated that investigations will only go where evidence leads and not anyone is above the law. It would take a considerable amount of time to prepare for and conduct a trial. The prospect of a prosecution of a former president and a current Presidential candidate is so political that it would be optimal for any proceedings to happen prior to the end of the White House race.

“We’re now coming up against a timeframe in which it is a challenge to finish either case, if it is brought, to finish it before the election,” said CNN legal analyst Jennifer Rodgers on “Newsroom” on Monday.

“So, I think they will bring a case on the documents side, if they can, as soon as they can,” Rodgers said, adding that any case on January 6 would probably take more time.

While Smith is following legal procedures, the political context makes it even more incumbent on the DOJ to demonstrate to Americans that it had no choice, for instance, to mount an unprecedented search at an ex-president’s home.

The final report of the House January 6 committee is likely to focus more on the former president’s conduct than before since the GOP majority wants to wipe it out by next year.

It is unclear what role Trump will play in the report, or if he will be indicted. The former president was not asked to voluntarily testify before the special purpose grand jury nor issued a subpoena, and his Georgia-based attorneys issued a statement before the hearing suggesting that the lack of those requests made them assume the grand jury found no wrongdoing.

That’s yet another reason why the turn of the year and the early months of 2023 are beginning to look like a moment of reckoning for both Trump and those who are investigating him.

Investigating the January 6, 2021, riot: Attorney General Jack Smith’s probe of the alleged misconduct of the DOJ and its associates

A person close to the situation says that he will be adding two more associates who have specialized in public corruption cases.

The expansion under Smith shores up the office’s ability to examine broad conspiracy cases and determine the avenues of the investigation, another source said. They are joining a team of more than 20 prosecutors from DOJ and senior advisers who are already investigating Trump and his associates.

Smith’s appointment won’t slow down the probes, but setting his office up does take time. Smith’s team is still working to find a permanent physical office location but has begun changing over email addresses for staffers who had previously been using their usual Justice Department accounts.

CNN reported on Thursday that Harbach was getting his bearings at the federal courthouse in Washington, DC and he talked to a special counsel prosecutor about the Oath Keepers case.

According to the Justice Department, more than 950 defendants have been arrested for their alleged participation in the January 6, 2021, riot, with more than 500 being found guilty. Four people died in the attack, including a rioter who died of an overdose, two people who suffered heart attacks, and a member of the crowd who died of an overdose. Five officers died in the months after the riot and 140 were injured on that day, according to the DOJ.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/politics/january-6-justice-department-jack-smith-trump-investigation/index.html

Investigating a Democratic Cautionary: Donald Trump and the House January 6 Committee on Election Fraud and Fraud Electoral Correlations

The DOJ prosecutors now working under Smith will have certain tools to dismantle the barriers that hindered the House select committee’s probe. The legal proceedings related to piercing the confidentially of a president are part of them.

Witness emails, text messages and testimony from the House January 6 committee show Trump’s role in pushing alternate slates of electors, pressing battleground state officials to overturn the election results, attempting to replace the acting attorney general with someone who would embrace election fraud claims and laying the groundwork early on to call his followers to the Capitol.

The rally creator wrote that the Obama administration expected something intimate at the ellipse and a call for everyone to march to the capitol.

“My father doesn’t use text messaging or email,” Donald Trump Jr. told congressional investigators during his interview. Trump Jr. thought he wouldn’t know what other messaging apps were.

Trump’s style of making ambiguous asks rather than direct demands was also on display as he pressed state officials to upend the election results. Michigan’s former Senate Majority Leader says that the man never asked in a specific way. “It was always just general topics.”

An evidence has been assembled that shows a group of Trump lawyers looking at Congress’ certification as they worked to prepare for the fake electoral vote.

The ex-president was the center of this conspiracy, but he was assisted by many others, including MarkMeadows, according to Rep. Lofgren, who worked on the committee.

According to the evidence collected by the committee, many of the state-based operatives and fraudulent electors themselves were largely in the dark about what the endgame of the gambit was. Several of them testified that they were under the impression alternate electors were being assembled as a contingency plan in case Trump prevailed in a legal challenge that changed the result in their state.

Meanwhile, top Trump campaign officials distanced themselves from the effort after the last prominent election challenge – a far-fetched petition at the Supreme Court – petered out on December 11, 2020.

Mark Meadows vs. Mark Trump: The Case for a Ugly Corrupt Presidential Candidate and the Attorney-General’s Office

The DOJ would have a much easier case to prove for those who continued working on the scheme after Congress approved it, said Ryan Goodman, a New York University School of Law professor.

In the event that a court ruled that Trump did not win the election, the advisers thought the alternate electors were important, not only in the event of a court case but also if a state legislature deemed them the valid ones.

The committee referred Trump to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, but also named several allies as potential co-conspirators in its final report. One of them was former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

There is evidence showing that he had a part in every scheme to overturn the election. Some of the most revelatory evidence came from Meadows himself – in the thousands of text messages he turned over to the committee before ceasing his cooperation with the investigation.

The texts show that beginning on Election Day, Meadows was connecting activists pushing conspiracy theories and strategizing with GOP lawmakers and rally organizers preparing for January 6. After the election, Trump Jr. was texting his father’s pastor about ways to keep power in his father’s possession.

According to testimony provided by a former White House aide, Giuliani and Meadows were involved in discussions about creating fake slates of electors.

Hutchinson testified before the committee about how he had a fireplace that he used to burn documents in between December 2020 and January 2021.

After sending the text to the congressional investigators, the leader of the House changed his mind about testifying before the House. A lawsuit he filed challenging the subpoena was unsuccessful, but the Justice Department opted not to bring criminal charges for his lack of cooperation.

The Department of Justice and the Fulton County District Attorney may have access to witness testimony and records that were not available to the Committee, including testimony from MarkMeadows, the President’s Chief of Staff, who invoked their Fifth Amendment rights.

“When it comes to the President, he committed no crime so there should absolutely be no prosecutions related to him,” said Timothy Parlatore, one of Trump’s attorneys.

Trump and his team were not looking to overturn the will of the people, but to make sure that their will was accurate, according to Parlatore.

Investigating Donald Trump and the Mar-a-Lago FBI Search for insurrection and stealing of election: The investigation into the two-state campaign of Donald Trump

The two people who were hired to look at four of Trump’s properties after the FBI conducted a raid at Mar-a-Lago were each interviewed for about three hours over the course of last week. The extent of information they offered the grand jury remains unclear, though they didn’t decline to answer any questions, one of the sources familiar with the investigation said.

They were hired to search Trump’s Bedminster golf club, Trump Tower in New York, an office location in Florida and a storage unit in Florida last October, months after the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. They didn’t decline to answer any questions, one of the sources said, though the extent of information they offered remains unclear.

The investigators are trying to determine if there is an electronic paper trail when they are pushing for access to computers.

The investigation into Donald Trump’s haul of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago is taking place inside a bubble, as shown by the report about the grand jury.

From the outside, it appears as if Biden and Pence were far more cooperative with the DOJ and the FBI after some classified documents were found at their properties than Trump has been. It took an FBI search warrant to get to Mar-a-Lago, and the ex-president claimed that he had the presidential papers that belonged to the federal government. But voters might find it hard to understand nuanced legal differences between the two cases – a factor the House Republican counter-attack based on Biden’s documents made more likely.

Special counsel Jack Smith and prosecutors who now work for him have used the federal grand jury nearly weekly to question witnesses in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.

The twice-impeached former president, who tried to steal an election and is accused of fomenting an insurrection, launched his first two-state campaign swing on Saturday as he seeks a stunning political comeback.

There was a possibility of exposure to two of his strands of legal peril, on Monday. This could lead to a campaign that would be repeatedly interrupted by distraction from criminal investigations.

Efforts to call him to account, legally and politically are made by Trump. He has constructed a basis for his new presidential bid around the idea that he is being political persecuted by Justice Department investigations and rogue Democratic prosecutors.

“We’re going to stop the appalling weaponization of our justice system. There’s never been a justice system like this. It’s all investigation, investigation,” the ex-president said on the trail over the weekend.

This is a message that may be attractive to some of Trump’s base voters who themselves feel alienated from the federal government and previously bought into his claims about a “deep state” conspiracy against him. In this technique, a strongman leader argues that he is taking the heat so his followers don’t have to, that is a familiar page of authority tactics used by demagogues throughout history.

On the recent developments in the classified document furor: a case study of the Robert Birchum alleged collusion with the secretary of state

Ryan Goodman, a former special counsel at the Department of Defense, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday that the latest development was a sign of an advanced special counsel investigation and could indicate that Smith was leaning toward indictments.

“It sounds like he is trying to lock in their testimony, to understand how they would testify at trial, whether it is incriminating evidence against Trump or exculpatory evidence that the prosecutors would then have that and have it solidified.”

Those discoveries allowed Trump to claim that he was being unfairly singled out, even if the cases have significant differences. The fact that Trump claimed the documents were his and not the government would make it harder for him to argue that he was the one who accidentally took them.

Fresh indications of the momentum in the Trump documents special counsel probe followed the latest sign of a lopsided approach to the controversy over classified material by House Republicans, who are hammering Biden over documents but giving Trump a free pass.

House Oversight Chairman James Comer was, for example, asked by CNN’s Pamela Brown this weekend why he had no interest in the more than 325 documents found at Trump’s home but was fixated upon the approximately 20 classified documents uncovered in Biden’s premises by lawyers and an unknown number also found during an FBI search of the president’s home this month.

The investigations into the retention of documents by Biden and Trump are separate from each other. In a legal sense, there is no overlap between them. If findings are public, they will both be in political hot water.

As the political fallout from the classified documents furor deepened on Monday, the country got a reminder of the treatment that can await lower-ranking members of the federal workforce when secret material is taken home.

Robert Birchum served in the Air Force for more than 30 years and previously held top secret clearance. According to his plea agreement, he stored hundreds of files that contained information marked as top secret, secret or confidential classified outside of authorized locations. A plea agreement stated that “the defendant’s residence was not a location authorized to store classified information, and the defendant knew as much.”

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in an eight-page order released Monday that there are due process concerns for people that the report names as likely violators of state laws, but he found that three sections that do not mention specifics can be released later this week, on Thursday.

If she decides to go after a regular grand jury, she won’t have to follow the recommendations from the special grand jury about how to proceed.

The District Attorney’s office argued against publishing the report after a hearing where a group of media outlets said it should be published.

McBurney’s order is a slight compromise, writing that certain parts of the report should be shared with the public while others merit secrecy until further action by prosecutors.

A Special Purpose Grand Jury Whose Reports Have No Indictments? Judge McBurney’s Constraints on the Procedural Integrity of the Investigative Action

Unlike regular grand juries which only meet for a limited period of time, this body only spent about eight months interviewing more than 70 witnesses and gathering evidence, though it had no authority to issue indictments.

Jurors voted to have that report made public, but the judge had questions about the applicability of prior precedents that have generally barred such reports from outlining alleged crimes without an indictment.

McBurney found that the uniqueness of the special purpose grand jury left him with a decision that “is not that simple,” calling the investigation “entirely appropriately a one-sided exploration” that means it would not be fair to have that exploration made public outside of a court setting if and when indictments are issued.

Willis said that they need to protect future defendants’ rights. It’s not appropriate to release this report because we don’t think it’s appropriate to treat future defendants fairly.

The special grand jury did not conduct its work in public, but in public court, where clues as to potential targets of the investigation can be found. Those details include:

He told the court that “decisions are imminent”, but he has not yet said anything about potential indictments. At least 17 people were notified they may be considered targets of the investigation, including Giuliani, Shafer and the rest of the fake electors, though the DA was disqualified from investigating new Lt. Gov. Burt Jones by Judge McBurney because of a conflict of interest.