Georgia takes center stage in Trump federal indictment alleging election interference

ATLANTA — A federal grand jury investigating the efforts of Donald Trump and others to overturn the results of the 2020 election returned an indictment against the former president on Tuesday.

The four-count indictment includes:

• A conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud and deceit to obstruct the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election (Count 1, in violation of 18 USC 371).
• A conspiracy to impede the Jan. 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified (Count 2, in violation of 18 USC 1512).
• The indictment also alleges that Trump attempted to, and did, corruptly obstruct and impede the certification of the electoral vote (Count 3, in violation of 18 USC 1512).
• A conspiracy against the right to vote and to have that vote counted (Count 4, in violation of 18 USC 241).

The events that transpired around the 2020 election here in Georgia ended up making up a big part of the indictment against the former president.

Since it was announced that Trump lost Georgia to now-President Joe Biden, Trump and his allies started a pressure campaign to overturn the results of Georgia’s election.

Part of that campaign started on Dec. 3, 2020, when former New York City mayor and then-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani testified before a Georgia subcommittee hearing that there was massive fraud during the election in Georgia.

During the hearing, Giuliani and others accused Democrats of being involved in a nationwide conspiracy to throw the election for Joe Biden and showed video from State Farm Arena where they said election workers threw Republicans out of the room and counted ballots in the middle of the night.

“I think that today revealed the smoking gun we’ve been looking for. The video makes it clear,” Giuliani told Channel 2′s Elliot following the first day of those hearings. “They took ballots from under a table and counted them in the middle of the night. This is what they were doing all throughout the country. Luckily, there is now a tape of it.”

Giuliani also made claims that thousands of convicted felons, dead people and people out of state voted in Georgia.

Following the hearing, the video and all of the claims were quickly investigated and debunked by federal and state investigators.

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Even with the allegations made by Giuliani being found to be untrue, Trump repeatedly stated that there was election fraud throughout Georgia, the indictment alleges.

On Dec. 8, a senior campaign advisor of Trump’s “expressed frustration that many of Co-Conspirator 1 and his legal team’s claims could not be substantiated.”

The document says as early as mid-November, that advisor had told Trump that the claims of dead people voting in Georgia were not true.

That same advisor also had this to say about the State Farm Arena video in an email mentioned in the indictment:

“When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0-32 on our cases.”

On Dec. 10, “Co-Conspirator 1″ played the State Farm Arena video before another Georgia committee and this time called out two election workers by name, the indictment says.

The election workers were Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. Just recently, the women were cleared by the Georgia Board of Elections of any fraud allegations in the 2020 election.

Following being named in the hearing, Freeman and Moss “received numerous death threats” and even testified in the Jan. 6 Committee hearings, that they had to leave their home and go into hiding because of those threats.

On Jan. 2, the indictment talks about the now-infamous call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger where he told the secretary of state to find votes.

“All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said on the call. “Because we won the state.”

“During the call, (Trump) lied to the Georgia Secretary of State to induce him to alter Georgia’s popular vote count and call into question the validity of the Biden electors’ votes,” the indictment said.

As Channel 2 Action News reported at the time, Georgia counted its votes three times before certifying Biden’s win by an 11,779 margin, which Raffensperger noted.

“President Trump, we’ve had several lawsuits, and we’ve had to respond in court to the lawsuits and the contentions. We don’t agree that you have won,” Raffensperger told Trump.

Raffensperger pushed back against Trump who insisted he won Georgia.

“You should want to have an accurate election, and you’re a Republican,” Trump says in one exchange.

“We believe we have an accurate election,” Raffensperger says.

During that call, Trump insisted thousands of dead people had voted in the election, and thousands of people from out-of-state also voted in Georgia’s election.

A large part of the indictment centered around a scheme where Trump and his co-conspirators “organized fraudulent slates of electors in seven targeted states … attempting to mimic the procedures that the legitimate electors were supposed to follow under the Constitution and other federal and state laws.”

One of those states listed is Georgia.

Elliot was inside the room when the slate of Georgia’s false electors met on Dec. 14, the same day that the legitimate Electoral College electors were meeting to cast their votes for Joe Biden.

As Channel 2 Action News previously reported, sources at that meeting confirmed to Elliot at the time that the Trump campaign sent out an email asking attendees to keep the meeting quiet and to say instead they were meeting with now-Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and state Sen. Brandon Beach.

Following the meeting, Elliot asked David Shafer, who was head of the Georgia GOP at the time, why they met.

“The president’s lawsuit contesting the Georgia election has not been decided or even heard, we held this meeting to preserve his rights. Had we not held this meeting, then his lawsuit would effectively be mooted,” Schafer said at the time.

According to the indictment, “(Trump) and co-conspirators ultimately used the certificates of these fraudulent electors to deceitfully target the government function, and did so contrary to how fraudulent electors were told they would be used.”

All of the events that were listed in this indictment are also part of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ case here in Georgia which is also looking into election interference.

She is expected to announce charges in that case soon.

Meanwhile, Trump is expected to be arraigned on this latest round of federal charges on Thursday.

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