A grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia could be asked to return a fourth set of criminal charges against former president Donald Trump and a large number of his associates as soon as next week, according to multiple reports.
For the last two and a half years, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been pursuing a wide-ranging probe into alleged efforts by Mr Trump and numerous Republican allies to unlawfully overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results after the then-president became the first Republican in decades not to carry the Peach State’s electoral votes.
Ms Willis announced she was launching an investigation into the ex-president after the public release of a recorded phone call between Mr Trump and Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Secretary of State.
The recording, which was first published by The Washington Post, includes a section in which Mr Trump pressured Mr Raffensperger, who is Georgia’s top elections official, to “find” enough non-existent votes in his favour to overtake the winner, President Joe Biden.
A seven-month investigation by a special purpose grand jury convened by the Fulton County Superior Court has reportedly named roughly 20 people as targets, including close allies of the ex-president such as Rudolph Giuliani, the disgraced former New York City mayor who served as Mr Trump’s personal attorney during the latter months of 2020 and early 2021.
Ms Willis has signalled her intention to seek indictments against multiple targets from a regular grand jury that began meeting at the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta late last month.
According to CNN, the Atlanta-area prosecutor is set to ask grand jurors to vote on charges for more than a dozen separate defendants, capping off the more than two years of work by investigators with her office.
The timeline for possible charges in the long-running probe has been known since May, when in a letter to the chief judge of the Fulton County Superior Court, Ms Willis asked for regular activities at the courthouse to be paused and said she planned for most of her team to work remotely during this month.
Last week, law enforcement officials began erecting physical barriers and stepping up security around the courthouse, a sign that charges against Mr Trump — and the protests that could accompany them — could soon be coming.
And earlier this week, at least two witnesses who have received subpoenas to appear before the grand jury said in media interviews that they have yet to be served with legally-required papers giving them 48 hours of notice before their grand jury appearances.
Because of the known schedule of the two grand juries currently meeting in Fulton County, this makes it unlikely that grand jurors could be asked to vote out charges against Mr Trump before next week.
The charges against Mr Trump and his allies that Ms Willis is considering are said to include racketeering charges, as well as charges of conspiracy and solicitation of election fraud.
The racketeering charges, which would make use of a Georgia law modelled on the federal Racketeering and Corrupt Organisations Act, are understood to centre on efforts to pressure election officials into unlawful actions, the fake elector scheme that has already resulted in federal charges against Mr Trump, and a breach in security around voting systems in rural Coffee County, Georgia.
Although the voting security incidents under investigation did not occur in her jurisdictions, Georgia’s racketeering statute allows her to charge defendants by referencing criminal acts that occurred anywhere in the state or the country.
While Mr Trump could potentially pardon himself to end the two federal criminal cases against him were he to win next year’s presidential election, an indictment in Georgia falls outside the jurisdiction of the president’s pardon power.
Moreover, Georgia law does not allow for a governor to issue pardons. Instead, a nonpartisan board decides whether to grant them, and only after five years have passed following the completion of any sentence imposed after a conviction.
