Since the voting pandemonium of the 2020 election, Democrats have refuted MAGA Republicans’ claims that Democrats manipulated voting in battleground states. A two-year-long investigation in the swing state of Georgia, similar to the Jan. 6 investigation, is attempting to accuse former President Trump’s campaign of interfering with election processes.
Similar to the situation on January 6, when President Trump acknowledged the right of citizens to engage in nonviolent protest, the outcome of the Georgia election provoked a similar acknowledgment. Democrats are fast to interpret Trump’s words as “incitement to violence” rather than as a call to the American people to protest what they perceive to be a flawed outcome.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been coy about whether or not Trump will be indicted and is edging closer to making an announcement. On Monday, she announced that she would reveal this summer whether former President Donald Trump and his allies will be charged with offenses related to alleged interference in Georgia’s 2020 election.
The AJC stated:
Willis revealed the timetable in a letter to local law enforcement in which she asked them to be ready for “heightened security and preparedness” because she predicted her announcement “may provoke a significant public reaction.”
Willis stated in the letters that she will announce potential criminal indictments between July 11 and September 1, sending one of the strongest signals to date that she is on the verge of pursuing an indictment against Trump and his supporters.
“Please accept this correspondence as notice to allow you sufficient time to prepare the Sheriff’s Office and coordinate with local, state, and federal agencies to ensure that our law enforcement community is ready to protect the public,” Willis wrote to Fulton Sheriff Patrick Labat.
Darin Schierbaum, the police superintendent of Atlanta, and Matthew Kallmyer, the director of the Atlanta-Fulton County Emergency Management Agency, received identical hand-delivered letters.
“We have seen in recent years that some may go outside of public expressions of opinion that are protected by the First Amendment to engage in acts of violence that will endanger the safety of those we are sworn to protect,” Willis wrote. “As leaders, it is incumbent upon us to prepare.”
The wording of Willis’s statement is evidently intended to imply that violence is anticipated and that Trump is culpable for it. Similar actions preceding Trump’s indictment in Manhattan appear to have inspired Georgia Willis to replicate those actions in an effort to create the impression that violence will erupt on Trump’s behalf.
Since then, Trump’s attorneys have filed a broad motion requesting the dismissal of Willis and any evidence compiled by the special grand jury. AJC reports that Trump’s legal team stated in a statement that the letter does “nothing more than set a potential timetable” for charging decisions.
“On behalf of President Trump, we filed a substantive legal challenge for which the DA’s Office has yet to respond,” attorneys Drew Findling, Jennifer Little, and Marissa Goldberg said. “We look forward to litigating that comprehensive motion which challenges the deeply flawed legal process and the ability of the conflicted DA’s Office to make any charging decisions at all.”
AJC stated about the Manhattan preliminaries:
Authorities erected barricades and shut down streets surrounding the courthouse. The police issued a stand-ready order for roughly 35,000 officers in the region as well as city, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. About an hour before Trump’s afternoon court appearance, a number of Manhattan courtrooms were closed, according to published reports. There was also a total shutdown of the route the former president took to the courthouse from Trump Tower and from the courthouse to board his plane at LaGuardia Airport.
Democrat legal observers predict that her letter implies an indictment is coming. “It obviously seems to imply the case against Trump will be presented to a grand jury,” former Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter said. “I don’t think any of the other targets would raise that level of caution. I think that’s the obvious implication.”
And Norm Eisen, a former ethics czar under President Barack Obama who co-authored a Brookings Institute report on the Fulton probe, agreed. “While she does not have the former president’s name in her letter, the evidence and the applicable law in Georgia point to the substantial likelihood that Donald Trump and his principal co-conspirators will be included when she follows through on the plans she confirms in this letter,” Eisen said.
The Fulton sheriff’s office referred all inquiries regarding Willis’s letter to the district attorney’s office. APD is “prepared to respond to demonstrations to ensure the safety of those in our communities and those exercising their First Amendment rights, or to address illegal activity if necessary,” according to an APD spokesman. A spokesperson for the Atlanta-Fulton County Emergency Management Agency did not respond promptly to a request for comment, according to the AJC.