It's the coverup. It's always the coverup.

Georgia grand jury was lied to by Trump pals and co-conspirators

Imagine for a moment that you’re playing a video game, one of those combat games you can play with a friend or acquaintance or even someone you’ve met online.  In this game, you’re on the run in an urban environment and your opponent is getting the better of you. You’re running down a street with your opponent shooting at you, bullets ricocheting off walls to your left and right, just missing you.  You turn down another street to escape the pursuing opponent — another near miss.  You spy an alley and run around the corner.

It's a dead end.  You’re boxed in with nowhere to go.

That’s what it feels like to walk into a grand jury room in real life.  You’ve run from the grand jury for weeks, filing this motion and that lawsuit, claiming privilege from testifying or jurisdictional issues. Your opponent, meanwhile, has fired back with answers to your motions and countersuits and won every one of them.  Now you’re in the box.  You’re not allowed to have an attorney in there with you, although there is a door and your lawyer can stand outside in the hall or anteroom where you're allowed to consult him or her.  But your lawyer is under fire, too.  Lawyers can’t advise you to lie, or they will be suborning perjury.  They can tell you to plead the Fifth Amendment, but that’s just dodging a bullet because the prosecutor can give you immunity from prosecution, which effectively compels you to testify truthfully.

Going before a grand jury isn’t a game, especially when you have been subpoenaed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis who is not playing games, video or otherwise.  She is a formidable opponent.  The year Donald Trump lost his race for president in Georgia, she won her election by 45 percentage points in a runoff against her own boss, six-term incumbent Paul Howard Jr. Willis, a graduate of Emory University Law School, has 16 years of experience with grand juries and courtroom trials as a deputy prosecutor in the office she now heads up.  

She put 75 witnesses before her grand jury in Fulton County since she requested the grand jury be appointed in January of last year – 23 citizens of the county chosen by lottery from voter registration and drivers’ license records and state and county tax records.  The makeup of the grand jury is unknown.  So we don’t know how many members are male or female, Black or white or Latino or Asian, or what ages they are.

Their job, we do know, is to listen to prosecutors from the office of the Fulton County DA who present evidence to them.  It could be written evidence, like emails or text messages, or in this case, the false statements signed by 16 prominent Republicans, including Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer, asserting that they were “duly elected and qualified” electors for Trump, who they claimed was the real winner of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

The witnesses called by Willis could be the fake electors themselves, or they could be Governor Brian Kemp, or Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, or Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, or South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the witnesses who filed a myriad of lawsuits and appeals  trying but failing to  avoid testifying before the grand jurors.

And now Willis has completed her investigation of the attempt by Trump to overturn the results of the presidential election in Georgia, and she has dismissed her grand jury.  This week, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who has overseen the work of the grand jury over the past year, ruled that portions of the grand jury’s report can be released to the public in advance of prosecutorial decisions.  

I think it’s safe to assume that Willis has the GOP establishment in Georgia tied in knots at this point.  Governor Kemp and Secretary of State Raffensperger —  both of whom won their elections in 2020, and both of whom certified that the elections were free and fair and that no irregularities or election crimes had been committed — testified before the grand jury.  So did the 16 fake electors.  In fact, the Georgia Republican Party spent $200,000 last year to pay the legal fees for the 16 fake electors.  Eleven of the fake electors were represented by two Republican lawyers until Judge McBurney ruled on a motion filed by the DA that there was a conflict of interest between Republican State Chairman Shafer and the other 10 Republicans represented by the same lawyers. According to a story by the Associated Press, McBurney ruled that Shafer’s interests were different than his fellow fake electors “because of his role in establishing and convening the slate of fake electors, his ‘communications with other key players’ in the investigation and ‘his role in other post-election efforts to call into question the validity’ of Georgia’s election results.”

So, you can see how complex  the defense of prominent Georgia Republicans in the face of Willis’ grand jury has been and how worried they must be that at least some of them will be swept up in a surge of indictments that may be on the way.

It is known that Willis has been interested in the now infamous phone call during which Trump asked Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we’ve got” so that Trump could be declared winner of the election in Georgia.  Last month, after Willis dismissed the grand jury and began preparing its final report, Trump sent out a message on his Truth Social app that he wasn’t worried about being indicted because “My phone call to the Secretary of State of Georgia, and a second call which the Marxists, Communists, Racists, and RINOS don't even want to talk about, were 'PERFECT' calls." Recall, however, that a previous “perfect” phone call Trump made to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy got him impeached in 2019.

Willis also subpoenaed former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark and Trump lawyer John Eastman, questioning them about their roles in the fake elector scheme in Georgia.  Clark and Eastman have also been the targets of subpoenas and search warrants issued by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in its continuing investigation of Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.  Eastman’s cell phone was seized, and Clark’s home was searched by the DOJ Inspector General who was looking into whether Clark abused his office when he pressured his superiors to send a letter to officials in Georgia falsely stating that the DOJ had evidence the election was stolen and advising that the Georgia legislature could decertify the 2020 election and issue its own slate of Trump electors.

On January 6, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel reopened an investigation into the Republican slate of fake electors who had attempted to send their fake ballots for Trump to the Senate in advance of its certification of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021.  Nessel told the Michigan press she is looking at charges for “forgery of the public record,” and other crimes that may have been committed in the fake elector scheme in her state.

Meanwhile, Special Counsel Jack Smith has subpoenaed officials in all seven states Trump targeted in his attempts to overturn the election, including fake electors in at least six of those states who signed documents falsely asserting that they were legitimate electors for Trump.  It is a federal crime to sign a false statement and submit it to a federal agency or office, in this case the National Archives, which collects all electoral ballots before submitting them to the Senate for official certification.

What has become known as the fake elector scheme has emerged as a central focus of Smith’s investigation, apparently because it crosses all the t’s and dots all the i’s in the Trump conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.  The scheme was discussed by Trump and his lawyers, including Giuliani and Sidney Powell and John Eastman in the Oval Office.  A plan for the scheme was actually written down by Eastman and passed out to state officials so they could carry it out.  Trump discussed the scheme with state legislators he invited to the White House and in group phone calls with legislators for Pennsylvania and other states.  Many of those involved in the scheme have been subpoenaed by the Washington D.C. grand jury investigating Trump and others for having committed federal crimes when they attempted to overturn election results in multiple states.

This week, in the portion of the Georgia grand jury report that was released by Judge McBurney, we learned that the grand jury suspects that multiple witnesses perjured themselves while giving testimony.  There is one thing I can assure you about grand juries and the prosecutors who run them:  they hate, and I mean hate being lied to.  A grand jury can tell when lies have been told because they listen to the testimony of multiple witnesses and have access to all the documentary evidence, and they can compare one person’s testimony with the testimony of others questioned about the same subjects. 

When prosecutors know or suspect that lies were told within a grand jury room where all testimony is given under oath and penalty of perjury, they conclude that crimes are being covered up — and they are more likely to issue indictments of those whom they suspect of committing those crimes.

That’s where we are in Georgia, with indictments of suspects expected at any moment.  And that’s where we are in Washington, D.C., where the Special Counsel has also been comparing the testimony of witnesses for conflicts and differences with other witnesses questioned about the same things.

It's only a matter of time before more Republican Party coffers will have to be opened to pay for more Republican lawyers to represent more Republican defendants.  It’s going to be a very expensive year for Trump’s Grand Old Party. 

(This is my biweekly Salon column.)