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Georgia prosecutor warns Republicans that they risk being charged for their involvement in the efforts by the former president's supporters to rig the 2020 election.
According to two persons with knowledge of the incident, a little-known member of the Donald Trump campaign took lists of fake electors to Capitol Hill in an effort to send them to Vice President Mike Pence on January 6, 2021.
Two separate sources who spoke to POLITICO revealed that Mike Roman, then-director of Trump's of Election Day operations for 2020, sent those fake elector certificates, which were signed by Trump fans in Michigan and Wisconsin, to the chief of staff of Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.).
Georgia DA Considers Trump's Testimony
According to these persons, Kelly was a Trump ally in the campaign to rig the 2020 election, and his top aide at the time got the materials from Roman before appointing a colleague to distribute copies on Capitol Hill. Roman has not previously been mentioned in relation to the endeavor to send those elector slates to Pence. The former researcher for the Trump White House and former staffer to the right-wing Koch network, who was subpoenaed in February by the Jan. 6 select committee, did not reply to any of our many requests for comment for this article.
A continuing subplot in the select panel's inquiry into the Capitol attack intended to disrupt that day is the origin of the fake elector lists, which never reached Pence until he oversaw certification of Joe Biden's victory on January 6. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) claimed that Kelly, who has previously denied any involvement by his office in their dissemination, was the source of the fake elector lists after the committee disclosed the role of a key assistant to Johnson in the incident during a hearing last month.
Meanwile, the discovery that two pro-Trump state senators and the head of the state Republican Party received letters from an Atlanta prosecutor warning them they could be indicted into election meddling by the former president Donald J. Trump and his associates in Georgia.
Per NY Times, Fani T. Willis, the prosecutor for Fulton County, has already subpoenaed seven of Trump's advisers, among them Rudolph W. Giuliani and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, as part of an investigation into efforts to rig Trump's 2020 election loss in Georgia, and she is now considering whether to subpoena Trump himself and request his testimony before a grand jury.
Georgia Republicans Subpoenaed
The selection of a slate of pro-Trump electors in the weeks following the election and MTrump's now-famous call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, asking him to "find" nearly 12,000 votes that would reverse his loss there are among the potential crimes being investigated by the special grand jury.
The new information highlights how quickly Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' investigation is moving along and what significant choices prosecutors may have to make as they continue to look into Trump and his associates' attempts to rig the Georgia election.
The Associated Press was informed by Jeff DiSantis, a spokesperson for Willis, that Willis is thinking about compelling Trump to appear before a special grand jury. Such a request would almost probably result in a court battle right away, possibly including Trump's protections from self-incrimination under the constitution.
According to a source familiar with the situation who insisted on anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, some persons who had been subpoenaed afterwards received so-called target letters. The person who confirmed the issuance of the target letters would not identify any of the recipients. Prosecutors typically send such letters to inform people they have been investigating that they have amassed evidence against them and that they are in danger of being charged criminally.
The letters were sent to senior Georgia Republicans who were engaged in submitting an alternative slate of electors that claimed Trump had won the state, according to Randy Evans, a Georgia lawyer who served as Trump's ambassador to Luxembourg.
Evans claimed to be a Republican who first backed Willis' probe because he thinks openness is a good thing. However, he was unhappy to discover the claim that supporting an alternative slate of electors constituted a crime.
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