Georgia grand jury investigating Trump and his legal team concludes work

Trump and his legal team to learn whether they will face consequences for effort to ‘find’ 11,000 votes

Rudy Giuliani arrives to testify at a courthouse in Fulton County (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

A grand jury convened in Fulton County, Georgia, has concluded its work hearing testimony and evidence regarding whether Donald Trump and his legal team committed crimes in their effort to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.

The decision regarding whether to charge any members of the ex-president’s inner circle or Mr Trump himself now rests in the hands of Fulton County’s district attorney, who will file charges (or not) based on the grand jury’s recommendations.

Those deliberations could take days, or even weeks. They will occur as a similar effort is underway in Washington DC, where the Department of Justice has appointed a special counsel to determine whether Mr Trump violated federal law relating to the events of January 6 or his overall campaign to overturn the election. That appointment was made after the former president declared his candidacy for 2024.

Mr Trump famously pushed the state of Georgia’s highest-ranking elections official in the days following the 2020 election to “find” more than 11,000 votes in his favour that he would have needed to overcome Joe Biden’s margin of victory there. His legal team is also known to have been in contact with multiple state and local officials, including elected lawmakers.

Several of his legal advisers were thought to be targets of the investigation, including the former New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani.

Mr Giuliani found his law licence suspended in New York as a consequence of pushing the false claims and conspiracies ginned up by the Trump campaign. In a phone recording obtained by the January 6 committee in the US House of Representatives, he also admitted that the campaign never had hard evidence to prove the existence of widespread fraud.

Georgia’s GOP governor, Brian Kemp, opposed Mr Trump’s efforts to influence the proper election results and survived a primary challenge backed by the former president in 2022 as a result.

Mr Trump’s mounting legal challenges are depicted by him as a political effort to stop his return to power. Meanwhile, he remains cloistered at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida surrounded by an increasingly small number of close friends and advisers, according to reports, battling a wide range of accusations about his conduct in office as well as his business practices.

The former president is currently the frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination if only for the fact that no other Republicans with a serious shot of winning the nomination have yet launched bids; Florida’s Ron DeSantis, in particular, is thought to be a likely rival (and a competive one) in the coming election cycle.