We were told Mayor Giuliani has completed his grand jury obligations.” His lawyer, Robert Costello, told the Washington Post afterward, “We had no disputes. He eventually spent six hours testifying in person on August 17 before the grand jury. Giuliani was ordered by a New York judge to testify in person in August after he failed to show up to a court hearing contesting his subpoena. Ben Gray/APīoth Graham and Giuliani have tried to avoid testifying. Previously, she stayed at the state and local level and kept it very Georgia-focused.” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, right, talks with a member of her team during proceedings to seat a grand jury in Atlanta, Georgia, on May 2, to look into the actions of former President Donald Trump and his supporters who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election. “This represents the first time that the DA is piercing the inner orbit of Donald Trump. “This is major,” Hallerman said at the time. Recently, it sought testimony from a variety of figures in Trump’s inner circle, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and South Carolina Sen. In addition to subpoenaing the fake electors, the grand jury has sought testimony from a wide array of figures ranging from a former publicist for Kanye West, who allegedly tried to pressure an election worker into making untrue claims about voter fraud, to Brian Kemp, the state’s Republican governor, who was the subject of an unrelenting pressure campaign by Trump to take action on his behalf. Who has the grand jury heard from so far? She had previously subpoenaed them in June. Last week, Willis sent a letter to all 16 fake electors in the state to inform them they were considered “targets” of the investigation, which means they are being viewed as potential subjects of indictment and not just witnesses. It also encompasses efforts by the Trump campaign to create a slate of fake electors in Georgia to transmit fraudulent electoral votes to Congress for certification. Those efforts included his notorious phone call on January 2, 2021, with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump said he wanted “to find 11,780 votes.” The grand jury is exploring whether Donald Trump and his allies violated Georgia state law in their efforts to reverse the former president’s 2020 loss in the state. What is the Georgia grand jury investigating? Willis has also recently received national attention for indicting the rapper Young Thug on an array of gang-related charges. She is a career prosecutor who was previously best known for prosecuting educators in Atlanta Public Schools for their role in a scheme to cheat on standardized tests. Willis is a first-term district attorney who was elected in Georgia’s largest jurisdiction as a Democrat in 2020. Special grand juries are relatively rare in Georgia and often used in intensive, long-lasting investigations such as this one into the effort to overturn the presidential election in Georgia. The whole idea is that they really can become experts and do a deep dive on everything to overturn Georgia’s election results.” “It is focused on this one exclusive case. “This is an investigative grand jury, which is slightly different from a regular grand jury that would hear every felony under the sun,” Tamar Hallerman, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who has been focused on the investigation, told Vox in July. It will aid the ongoing investigation launched by Willis in February 2021 into the conduct of Trump and his allies in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The special grand jury was convened in May at the request of Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, and she’s leading it. How did this investigation get started, and who is running it? That Georgia investigation intensified this summer, drawing closer to Trump’s inner circle and potentially posing a clearer legal threat to Trump than the other probes into his campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election that culminated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. While the congressional committee investigating January 6 has been holding public hearings and the Justice Department has been steadily securing convictions of hundreds of those who breached the Capitol, a grand jury in Atlanta has been meeting behind closed doors to focus on efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to reverse Joe Biden’s election win in Georgia.
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