Today, Explained - Curious Georgia

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

Prosecutor Fani Willis and a special grand jury have some questions for the man with the yellow hair. Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Stephen Fowler explains Fulton County’s election interference investigation that appears to be closing in on former President Trump and his allies. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Victoria Chamberlin, Miles Bryan, Amanda Lewellyn, and Victoria Dominguez, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Former President Donald Trump got an assist this week from a judge in his chosen state of Florida. Judge Eileen M. Cannon, who was appointed by Trump, said a special master, that's an independent arbiter, will get to review the documents that the FBI seized in Redelago last month. This will slow the Justice Department's investigation down. There are four separate criminal probes underway into the former president's actions and businesses. But it is a criminal investigation in Georgia

that Trump can't seem to shake. Partly because what went on in Georgia isn't about classified documents or an impenetrable network of businesses. Everything happened right out in the open. Coming up. Well, it's going to be fireworks. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM.

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at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Today Explained, I'm Noelle King. Stephen Fowler is a political reporter at Georgia Public Broadcasting and host of the Battleground Ballot Box podcast.

Stephen, I know that you have been covering this story for a long time. Tell me about the criminal investigation into the former president and his associates that's underway in Fulton County. Well, you know, it's like that Saturday Night Live sketch. New York's hottest club is the Fulton County District Attorney investigation in Georgia. It has everything. You've got fake electors. Trump and his associates proposed putting forward a fake slate of pro-Trump electors

to prevent Congress from certifying President Biden's victory. You've got pressure campaigns. I guess maybe they were just trying to intimidate me and cajole me into something. And calls to top elections officials asking to find votes or to find voter fraud. So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You've got witness intimidation and kind of pressure of threats against election workers and calls for violence and attacks. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States to target you?

And you've got lying to public officials where you had a parade of figures come before Georgia lawmakers and tell them that they had the authority to overturn the election and to call a special session and toss out votes. It's your responsibility if a false and fraudulent count is submitted to the United States government. And it's clear that the count you have right now is false. So there's a lot of potential legal violations here for a lot of different people. And this special purpose grand jury is trying to get to the bottom of those and figure out how all the dots are connected. This place has everything. Glass, steam, bear traps, and just when you think the fun is over, knock, knock, who's there?

It's Black George Washington. Who are Trump's main antagonists in Fulton County? Well, I guess on the one hand, you could say the main antagonists were the 11,779 votes that were for Joe Biden that put him over the top. Spicy. But the other antagonist here is Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis. I think that people thought that we came into this as some kind of game. This is not a game at all. She's a relatively new to the role prosecutor. She was elected. She ousted an incumbent. She came to fame sort of as a prosecutor in this

infamous Atlanta public school's teacher cheating trial a while back, where she prosecuted a bunch of teachers accused of cheating on test scores using this RICO Act and this racketeering charge in Georgia. And so she is the one who represents the Atlanta Judicial Circuit. And she spent a lot of time, gathered a lot of facts, and asked for this special purpose grand jury to be seated to investigate what state laws were being broken because she listed a laundry list of things that she said might have happened. And she's been trying to get to the bottom of it ever since. I plan to do my job, and my job is to make sure that we get the evidence that gives us the truth. Tell me about the ways in which Trump and his associates tried to cast doubt on the election. One of the most prominent ways in Georgia came in the form of several state legislative hearings

convened by Republicans, dominated by Republicans, where people like former President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and other people came in and just paraded about these nonsense theories about elections and vote casting. You've got voter fraud right in front of people's eyes. Blatant, clear, obvious. You have to be a fool to ignore it or worse. And saying that there was fraud and no way that Donald Trump could have lost,

and that it was up to the lawmakers to make things right. There's more than ample evidence to conclude that this election was a sham. It was an embarrassment to the citizens of your state. I mean, one example is this infamous suitcase full of ballots video that had to do with State Farm Arena. How can they say there's no fraud? Look at that woman. Look at her taking those ballots out. Look at them scurrying around with the ballots. Nobody in the room hiding around. They look like they're passing out dope. And there's a clip of a security video that Rudy Giuliani and others said shows election workers pulling out a suitcase full of ballots from underneath the table that mysteriously got there. And there were Joe Biden votes. And that was going

to be enough because they calculated, well, the suitcase is this big and a paper is this big. And so by our math, you know, there was enough votes. Toss it all out. He won. It is quite clear they're stealing votes. Now, none of these things were true. These are just typical everyday election workers who are just doing their jobs. I mean, it's not like this is an Ocean's Eleven level scheme that was put together in the middle of the night. And pretty quickly, elections officials, Republican elections officials, Democratic election officials, nonpartisan people, all poked holes in these theories, but they took lives of their own and ultimately ended up in these election workers being harassed and death threats and people coming to their homes. And so that's just a small taste of the things.

In the days after the election, Rudy Giuliani appeared to be experiencing something that I won't characterize out of journalistic restraint. But he had hair dye running down his face. He was giving press conferences outside of a landscaping company that he appeared to think was was the Four Seasons Hotel down in Georgia. What is the thing that Fonny Willis is going after with respect to Rudy Giuliani? Well, Rudy Giuliani was kind of the ringleader of these legislative hearings that I was mentioning. President Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, took his voter fraud concerns to state senators. Giuliani's team brought in witnesses who claimed there was illegal activity, such as other people voting in their name. And he brought in all of these disparate people who basically were united in their theory that there's no way Donald Trump lost and paraded them as experts to these lawmakers.

State law doesn't in any way prevent you, the legislature, from immediately taking this over and deciding this. That power, right, obligation is given to you by the founding fathers, deliberately. And one of the statutes that I think Fonny Willis is looking at is giving false statements to public officials. And Rudy Giuliani, in particular, made a lot of these claims and advanced a lot of these claims that were just absolutely not true and that anyone with a basic shred of common sense also understood them to not be true. We don't know what he said because the grand jury is operating behind closed doors. And the only time we see things are when there's public disputes that have to be settled by a judge. But he talked for five or six hours. And so my guess is that he had a lot of things to say about what he did and did not do and what he thought he did in the aftermath of the election.

Giuliani and others had been making these wild claims. And early on, there was no criminal investigation, but some Georgia Republicans almost immediately started to fight back. How did Georgia's secretary of state get involved? So Georgia's secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, is a Republican. He's a capital C conservative. He's by no means a squishy moderate or somebody who kind of favors Democrats. This kind of favors that his personal beliefs are that he is a diehard capital C conservative. But when it comes to doing the job of secretary of state, he has been one of the most principled people in the country to defend the rules and defend the election processes and push back against claims that aren't true. And so in the aftermath of this election,

where he voted for Donald Trump, by the way, there were just all of these just bonkers things that people were saying. And his office very forcefully pushed back and said, no, that's not true. The State Farm video, Brad Raffensperger and his team invited a local TV station to view the entire security camera footage from hours and hours. We can show exactly when they were placed under there. So these were not mystery ballots that came from a mystery location? No. They were right there in the room? Yes. People watched them placed in the room. Yes.

People watched them placed in those boxes. Yes. What is also remarkable is that Brad Raffensperger had gotten a call from the then president of the United States, a very kind of explicit call. The ballots are corrupt and you're going to find that they are, which is totally illegal. It's more illegal for you than it is for them. The election was already certified. The presidential race was done and over. The electoral college people met and all that was left was the formality of January 6th. But that weekend before, Donald Trump and people on his staff called Brad Raffensperger and said, I just need you to find 11,780 votes and spent more than an hour saying

there was so much fraud in Georgia, you need to fix it. You would be a hero if you fixed it. The people are mad at you because you didn't fix it and basically spent more than an hour trying to harass a sitting election official into changing the outcome of an already certified election. How does that phone call wind up fitting into a criminal investigation? Well, it's usually not a good idea to threaten a sitting elected official. And there's lots of different state codes and laws that they're looking at. But one of the things and one of the reasons we've seen Fannie Willis, the district attorney, subpoena a lot of people is trying to paint a picture about former President

Trump cajoling or harassing an official into changing the outcomes and changing the results. And so, you know, it's criminal election interference, I believe, is the term that they're using. And so it's one thing to say, oh, I don't think the election was fair. And it's another to use your power to call up the chief election official and say, hey, you need to change this or else. Who in Trump's circle has this grand jury subpoenaed? There are a lot of people ranging from kind of less affiliated people like the chair of the Georgia Republican Party who served as a fake elector all the way up to the most recent round of subpoenas, which have gone to people like Mark Meadows, Trump's former chief of staff, and Rudy Giuliani, his personal attorney, and Jenna Ellis, another lawyer on the campaign, and Sidney Powell, another lawyer who, according to reporting, was almost potentially made a special counsel to investigate election fraud. So Donald Trump himself has not been subpoenaed. But this is on Trump's doorstep.

And the most recent filings and subpoenas we've seen has the prosecutor's finger hovering over the doorbell, so to speak. Among those summoned was sitting United States Senator Lindsey Graham for information on his phone calls to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger questioning legally cast mail-in ballots. Lindsey Graham was called to go down to Georgia. He didn't want to take the stand. A judge recently said he has to. New details tonight as a federal judge denies South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham's request to quash a subpoena. He's arguing that there are a lot of different privileges that come with being a United States senator and at the time, chair of the Judiciary Committee that says he doesn't have to answer to this closed door special grand jury seeking

answers. The judge ruled that constitutional protections do not shield him from testifying. He's not a target. They're not alleging at this time that he did anything wrong or broke any laws, but they want to know more as a witness about calls that he had with Georgia's secretary of state. Now, Lindsey Graham called Brad

Raffensperger and was asking about absentee ballots and potential ways to toss them out or to change some of the scrutiny rules to see if there were some that needed to be tossed out. Now, Lindsey Graham says, hey, I was just doing my job as the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. I was researching before I certified the electoral college votes. Brad Raffensperger said, yeah, I kind of felt a little pressured on that. And so because of the filings that have been made in public and because Lindsey Graham has tried to fight this in federal court, we kind of get the sense here that the DA and the investigation

is trying to use Lindsey Graham's call as more evidence to tie into this broader picture of Donald Trump at the top orchestrating this multi-pronged pressure campaign to undo the election in Georgia. Coming up, if and when we might see charges filed in Georgia. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter.

Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday. And she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a

link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A frames.com promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. Today explained Stephen Fowler of Georgia Public Broadcasting. Timing matters here. Yeah. Do we have a sense of how close the grand jury in Georgia is to releasing a report or to pressing charges? Well, you know, the district attorney is being cognizant that she is a Democratic prosecutor investigating some of the top Republicans

in the state and the country. I made it very well known to the judge who's over this, as well as my team, that I would not do anything until after the election. So they'll have to accuse me of something else. They can get rid of that one. So in some ways, she's very sensitive to the political nature of this. Now, she wanted Georgia's governor, Brian Kemp, who's on the ballot this November.

She wanted him to come and testify. But we've seen through these public filings that there was a breakdown of communication, a lot of antagonism. He filed a motion last week alleging that the probe is being pursued for, quote, improper political purposes. He asked the court to kill the subpoena that was requiring him to testify later this month. And a judge ruled that Brian Kemp will have to answer questions. But after November's election, because it's very close to election time and frankly, both sides of this, both the governor's office and the district attorney's office, were kind of using it as a political cudgel. And so the judge said, nope, we're not doing it. You're talking after the November election. And so Brian Kemp is a big piece of this because he faced pressure and he faced calls from Trump and others. So they can't finish until they hear from all the people. And obviously, the big question mark is, will they

subpoena Donald Trump? And what will that fight look like? So the district attorney said that she feels they're about 60% of the way done talking to people that they'd like to hear from. And they're also going to kind of enter stealth mode as we get close to the election. So it's not getting done anytime soon,

but at the same time, she does want it to get done sooner than later. But frankly, the other thing that's been a drag on this is just the sheer scale of all of this. This wasn't just a couple of people making a couple of calls saying, hmm, you should undo the election. This was kind of this massive, massive enterprise that took months and months and months of time to try to pressure people. And this is kind of like Donald Trump's vision to overturn the election in Georgia manifested by people like Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows and others directing people at the ground level like these fake electors and these state lawmakers to break a lot of laws to undo

the election. And that's kind of complicated. What happens if the special grand jury uncovers evidence that Donald Trump or anyone else in his circle did commit a crime? Well, it's going to be fireworks. This is not the only legal trouble that Donald Trump, as an individual, is in. There's the federal investigation into documents stored at Mar-a-Lago. The new filing from the DOJ suggests, but does not prove, a couple of crimes may have been committed. First, obstruction of justice. A second possible crime? Lying to the FBI. There's also questions about the Trump organization's taxes in New York.

And so this is one of many fronts of legal jeopardy that the former president is in as he weighs whether or not he's going to be a very, very controversial report that comes out, no matter what the finding is, because of the way we see these building blocks being built and because of the allegations that top Republicans, either in the state or, you know, the president of the United States, broke laws in trying to overturn the election. And like we've seen with the January 6th hearings in Washington, not everybody's on the same page about whether they think that's a good thing or a bad thing or a correct thing. It's going to be a big deal and it's going to be a big story. And it's also something that is going to drag on for months leading up to the 2024 presidential race. So this is one of the most consequential investigations into election fraud and into election interference.

And this is one of the most consequential investigations of Donald Trump that is taking place. Do you get the impression that Fannie Willis, who has used RICO or racketeering charges against everyone from the rappers Young Thug and Gunna to teachers in Atlanta, does appear to be building towards a case where the Fulton County District Attorney is saying that this is a criminal enterprise with Donald Trump as the head, as this kind of mob boss coordinating the effort that is carried out at the top level by lieutenants like Mark Meadows and Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani that you get all the way down to the low level of 16 Republicans signing fake elector documents and state lawmakers itching to call for a special session and even just average everyday Trump supporters harassing election workers and sending death threats. And so, you know, Fannie Willis has mentioned that she really likes Rico as a prosecutorial tool because it can paint a picture for the jury in a way that is easier to understand the grand picture of things. The reason it works is that there is this bigger picture scale of it and tool of it to show how different threads are connected. And I think when you look at 2020 and the post-election time in Georgia, there are a whole lot of threads that you and I could talk for weeks and weeks and weeks about that now, because of this racketeering framework, can tie all together in a neat bow and say,

these are all the things that happen. These are the people that caused it. This is why it's illegal. This case is one among several that have lined up against the former president and his associates, but it is sometimes talked about as being the most promising one in terms of prosecuting Donald Trump someday. How do you see it? I would say that this is probably the most liability that Donald Trump has from a criminal perspective, even considering a lot of the document cases that are right now dealing with what was or was not found in Mar-a-Lago. Because Fannie Willis is a district attorney. She has certain laws and tools at her disposal

that the Department of Justice doesn't have or won't necessarily use. You know, she doesn't have to think about the political motivations and machinations of one branch of the federal government looking into, you know, the president or looking into the White House or things like that. You know, she's looking at the Fulton County perspective. She's also not necessarily as

cautious as the DOJ has to be with a lot of politically sensitive investigations, like we're seeing with this Mar-a-Lago document case. And also, she doesn't have the same baggage as Attorney General Merrick Garland, who will ultimately be the one to decide whether to prosecute Trump under federal law. You know, Merrick Garland was appointed by President Joe Biden, who beat Donald Trump in the election. Bonnie Willis was elected by voters in Fulton County. And so she answers to them and not a political appointee. So there are still a lot of factors weighing in on this. But that said, what was done in Georgia plays a central role in the 2020 election denial and lead up to January 6th.

And so looking at just the Georgia piece of the puzzle and just the Georgia law section of this, it's the most tangible way that Donald Trump could be held accountable for everything that was done. Stephen Fowler, he knows his stuff. He's a politics reporter for Georgia Public Broadcasting, and we thank GPB for letting him take the time to do this. Today's show was produced by Hadi Mouagdi and engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey. It was edited by Matthew Collette. Fact-checking was a group effort today. Amanda Llewellyn, Miles Bryan, Victoria Chamberlain,

and Tori Dominguez. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. you