In Georgia, a New District Attorney Starts Circling Trump and His Allies [View all]
She laid out an array of possible criminal charges in letters sent to state officials and agencies asking them to preserve documents, providing a partial map of the potential exposure of Mr. Trump and his allies. Mr. Trump’s calls to state officials urging them to subvert the election, for instance, could run afoul of a Georgia statute dealing with “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud,” one of the charges outlined in the letters, which if prosecuted as a felony is punishable by at least a year in prison.
The misinformation spread by Mr. Giuliani could prove problematic, as Ms. Willis said in her letters that she would review “the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies.” Georgia law bars “any false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement” within “the jurisdiction of any department or agency of state government.”
Ms. Willis is also open to considering not just conspiracy but racketeering charges. As she put it in the interview, racketeering could apply to anyone who uses a legal entity — presumably anything from a government agency to that person’s own public office — to conduct overt acts for an illegal purpose. In this case, it applies to the pressure the president and his allies exerted on Georgia officials to overturn the election.
Ms. Willis has brought a novel racketeering case before. In 2014, as an assistant district attorney, she helped lead a high-profile criminal trial against a group of educators in the Atlanta public school system who had been involved in a widespread cheating scandal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/us/politics/fani-willis-trump.html
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