Seven allies of former president Donald Trump were subpoenaed on Tuesday in the ongoing criminal investigation in Georgia of election interference by the Trump team.
The move is the latest sign that the inquiry has entangled a huge number of prominent members of Trump’s crew.
It has the potential to cloud Trump’s future even more.
The subpoenas underscore the wide reach of the investigation being conducted by the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis. That district includes most of Atlanta. She is looking at a range of charges, including racketeering and conspiracy.
The investigation is only one of several inquiries into the efforts made by Trump and his team to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost. The House special committee is continuing to investigate the violent Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection on the Capitol, and there is also an intensifying investigation by the Department of Justice into a scheme by the Trump team to create fake presidential electors in 2020.
But the investigation happening in Georgia appears to put Team Trump is the most immediate legal jeopardy.
One of the subpoenaed individuals is Rudy Giuliani, who is a personal lawyer for Trump, and has emerged as a central figure in the grand jury proceedings in the Georgia investigation.
In December 2020, after the election results came in, Giuliani spent several hours speaking before state legislative panels, peddling false conspiracy theories about corrupted voting machines and suitcases stuffed with ballots. He urged Georgia to not certify its election results.
Ellis, a lawyer who worked with Giuliani to overturn the 2020 election; John Eastman, the legal architect of a plan to keep Trump clinging to power by using fake electors; and Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who called the Georgia secretary of state days after the election to inquire about how to discard mail-in ballots.
Cleta Mitchell also received a subpoena, another prominent lawyer who was on a Jan. 2, 2021 call that Trump made when he asked the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to find enough votes to overturn the state’s results.
Two more lawyers also got the subpoenas. Jacki Pick Deason, who helped make Trump’s case before the Georgia legislature, and Kenneth Chesebro, who emailed Eastman before the Jan. 6 attack that the Supreme Court would be more likely to act on a Wisconsin legal challenge if justices fear “wild chaos” on Jan 6.
Be the first to comment