Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis has announced she will begin to present her election fraud case to a grand jury this week. And she is expected to present a RICO case that will involve several “perps.” Here and there I’ve seen some grumbling that Willis should simplify her case and just aim at Trump, but I disagree. We’ve got Jack Smith doing that already, and Willis is a county-level prosecutor whose first responsibility is to bring Georgia criminals to justice. And, anyway, I wouldn’t presume to second-guess Willis. She seems to know what she is doing.
Atlanta-area prosecutors investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia are in possession of text messages and emails directly connecting members of Donald Trump’s legal team to the early January 2021 voting system breach in Coffee County, sources tell CNN.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is expected to seek charges against more than a dozen individuals when her team presents its case before a grand jury next week. Several individuals involved in the voting systems breach in Coffee County are among those who may face charges in the sprawling criminal probe.
Investigators in the Georgia criminal probe have long suspected the breach was not an organic effort sprung from sympathetic Trump supporters in rural and heavily Republican Coffee County – a county Trump won by nearly 70% of the vote. They have gathered evidence indicating it was a top-down push by Trump’s team to access sensitive voting software, according to people familiar with the situation.
Trump allies attempted to access voting systems after the 2020 election as part of the broader push to produce evidence that could back up the former president’s baseless claims of widespread fraud.
In other words, Trump’s people were trying to get their hands on voting machines from everywhere in Georgia, but they were only able to do so in hyper-MAGA Coffee County. One suspects similar efforts were made in other states. Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell are mentioned in the article and may have been involved. Sidney Powell is expected to be the next recipient of a Jack Smith indictment, btw.
In other news: Watch: Far-right activist Ammon Bundy arrested at high school football fundraiser. Heh.
Worth reading: David French, The Lost Boys of the American Right. No paywall.
I've come around to your viewpoint that Willis is doing the right thing pursuing this via RICO, although I'm no lawyer. I want all the dirt to be shown for what it is (esp these msgs connecting Trump w Coffee County), and she's about as expert in prosecuting a RICO case as you can find, in GA. I just hope she can avoid getting torpedoed by the Georgia legislature, which I'm sure they will try.
Team Trump is rolling out some truly nasty ads about Willis in GA and Bragg and Letitia James in NY – all of them black targets. Trying to start a race war indicates how desperate these people are, but that's where we're headed.
The story as reported has me confused. I thought that the grand jury was months ago, but now Fani Willis is going to convene a grand jury this week? How long will it take to call all the witnesses and present the evidence needed to get the grand jury to return indictments? Weeks? Months?
A "special grand jury" was convened months ago. They did all the heavy lifting. What's coming this week is presenting their findings to a regular grand jury. They're the ones who can indict. It's not a rerun of the first grand jury. At least I think that’s what’s going on. The legal eagles I read have been saying there might be an indictment on Tuesday.
The previous grand jury was a "special" grand jury that engaged in an investigation, but could not bring indictments. The new grand jury will be a regular grand jury that will decide indictments.
David French has zero standing to deprecate anything that is happening today. Everyone has a gag point. I don't care exactly where his is. (If I did, I would perforce be measuring against my own, and that is to trivialize the whole undertaking.)
The more I think about Stump the more I need the blues. CNN will destroy any chance Fanni has of convicting Stump. She has the best case but she's black. Watch the money flow!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7A12LuA8-U
I'm lovin' SRV and Albert King. We're so lucky this session is available (great recording).
A lot of things can go wrong in GA, it's going to be a long trial. But a lot of stuff is going to come out, so this country can begin to heal. It's like cleaning the puss out of a wound, and it will be messy. Willis may fail, but fortunately our bets are hedged. Smith is coming at Trump like a cruise missile: target acquired and locked in.
One thing that bugs me is the report that the voting machine 'breach' was a, "push by Trump’s team to access sensitive voting software…" You can't access software by grabbing machines, at least not "source code" that can be analyzed by humans. The software on the machine would be machine code, the program that actually reads and tallies ballots from the paper ballot that the voter filled out in pencil.
You could run tests with sample (or real) ballots to see how the machine counts. This recount was done by GA election officials, twice by machine and once by hand. The counts never varied. It's possible Trump intended for computer people to tamper with the machines, substituting a program that would miscount for the one on the machine that worked. The problem is: the manual count of paper ballots is the most accurate count and Trump never had control of them.
I seriously doubt that Trump had access to any computer people competent enough to erase the real program and upload a program that would function AND would produce fraudulent tallies that indicated votes were moved from Trump to Biden in a district Trump won by 70%.
I concede that Team Trump got illegal access to voting machines, but what was their intent? I do not think they expected that the machines didn't count votes accurately. Team Trump was fraudulent from election day on – the claims of dead people voting and the fake suits alleging voter fraud. So I suspect the idea of grabbing machines was to commit a new fraud, but what?
Moonbat is right about how the federal J6 charges are streamlined and pointed exclusively at Trump. Co-conspirators are mentioned but not named and not indicted (yet.) I see no evidence that Jack Smith is in a hurry to charge. (I'm curious about Sidney Powell.) At the moment, they're sweating – it will get worse because it seems certain that Willis WILL bring charges against the whole gang.
BTW, Georgia CAN televise the trial. And Trump can't pardon any of the lawyers who likely will be charged. The fake electors in GA will be charged and about half are reportedly going to cooperate with Willis. That means Rudy is toast because he spearheaded that effort. Trump will probably be defending himself in the J6 trial with the claim that he (Trump) was misled by his lawyers about fraud. Rudy is gonna realize he's being thrown under the bus. (If Sidney Powell is charged, is she gonna feel like Rudy and Trump will blame everything on HER?) Eastman is trying to say he wasn't in on it – he simply tossed out academic and theoretical Constitutional concepts that Rudy and Sidney acted on. I wouldn't bet on the group of lawyers hanging together and presenting a unified front.
Trump will want all the lawyers to STFU about the discussions they had in the Oval Office. Trump can't buy their silence with bribes – these lawyers are looking at years in jail in Georgia. Trump may threaten the witnesses with MAGA violence should they consider breaking ranks. When he does that, Trump is threatening witnesses in the federal J6 case and we know how the judge feels about that. And the MAGA crowd isn't responding to subtle hints about violence. "Will Be Wild!" will get Trump a vacation in jail. So Trump will turn up the volume in calls for domestic terrorism, I suspect. And soon.
I doubt anyone involved in The Plotting and Planning knows source code from spinach.
My suspicion all along has been that some loose-lipped GOP hack told Trump (during the 2016 campaign) about methods the Party had used to win in 2000 & 2004 (see: ESS voting machines, Ohio, etc), and Trump chose to accuse Democrats of using those tricks against him. This (1) inoculated Trump from accusations of vote-manipulation, (2) led Democrats to back themselves into a corner defending computerized voting machines, and (3) warned Republicans that they had better use those old tricks to help him get elected (or he'd spill the beans on prior manipulation).
That worked for Trump in 2016, but by 2020 the GOP Old Guard feared Trump more than Biden (SC super-majority will prevent any serious new taxes), so GOP tricks in 2020 focused on House & Senate races and let Trump lose honestly.
Trump would have been looking for evidence that the GOP hung him out to dry (as well as evidence for Democratic manipulation, though that was unlikely in a State where the Elections Dept had been dominated by the GOP for decades).
My advice to Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani.
It's better to have had a law licence and lost it, than to never have had a law licence at all.
I hear McDonalds is hiring fry cooks, and they all have experience in cooking the books.
They went after voting machines with trumped-up "evidence". Big mistake, Georgia law is tough on racketeering. The Benghazi brains. When will they ever learn. Collect evidence first, come to conclusions later if supported by evidence.
You misspelled Ramasmarmy.