Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis says that her two year plus investigation into Donald Trump's 2020 election fraud has been completed, and that a charging decision will be made by September 1.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis reaffirmed in a local news interview that she will announce charging decisions by September 1 in her investigation into efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election result, while applauding the ramped-up security measures around the local courthouse.
“The work is accomplished,” Willis told CNN affiliate WXIA at a back-to-school event over the weekend. “We’ve been working for two and half years. We’re ready to go.”
Willis has previously signaled in letters to local officials and those providing security that she would make any charging announcements between July 31 and the end of August. She laid out a variety of security provisions her team plans to take beginning Monday.
Willis’ latest commitment to that time frame comes after a judge scheduled an August 10 hearing on the Trump team’s efforts to disqualify Willis, a Democrat, from the case, toss much of the evidence she has collected and remove another judge in Fulton County from presiding over the case.
In the local news interview, Willis also praised the Fulton County sheriff after barricades recently went up around the county courthouse in anticipation of what the sheriff’s office referred to as “high profile legal proceedings.”
“I think that the sheriff is doing something smart in making sure that the courthouse stays safe,” Willis said. “I’m not willing to put any of the employees or the constituents that come to the courthouse in harm’s way.”
Indeed, Willis is certainly acting like she has the cards to play with a broad suite of charges against multiple investigation targets, including Trump himself.
Meanwhile, Trump is lawyering up and getting donors to pay for his rapidly mounting legal bills, to the tune of tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars.
Former President Donald J. Trump’s team is creating a legal-defense fund to handle some of the crush of legal bills stemming from the investigations and criminal indictments involving him and a number of employees and associates, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
The fund, which is expected to be called the Patriot Legal Defense Fund Inc., will be led by Michael Glassner, a longtime Trump political adviser, according to the people familiar with the planning, who were not authorized to discuss it publicly. Another Trump aide who worked at the Trump Organization and then in Mr. Trump’s administration, Lynne Patton, will also be involved, the people said.
It is unclear how broad a group of people the legal-defense fund will cover, but one person said it was not expected to cover Mr. Trump’s own legal bills. In recent months Mr. Trump’s political action committee has paid legal bills for him and several witnesses, spending over $40 million on lawyers in the first half of 2023.
But a wide swath of people have become entangled in the various Trump-related criminal investigations, both as witnesses — of which there are many who work for Mr. Trump personally or did in the White House — as well as defendants.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump, Steven Cheung, said that the Justice Department had “targeted innocent Americans associated with President Trump,” and that “to combat these heinous actions” and “protect these innocent people from financial ruin and prevent their lives from being completely destroyed, a new legal defense fund will help pay for their legal fees to ensure they have representation against unlawful harassment.”
Mr. Trump’s PAC, Save America, has been a focus of one of the investigations by the special counsel Jack Smith, who has had at least two grand juries looking at Mr. Trump and his allies and advisers. Mr. Smith’s team has questioned why some lawyers for specific witnesses are being paid, as well as whether aides to Mr. Trump and Republicans knew Mr. Trump had lost the election but continued to raise money off his debunked claims.
The creation of the legal-defense fund could ease some of the financial pressure on Save America, which was severe enough that it requested a refund of the $60 million it had transferred to a pro-Trump super PAC late last year.
Remember, the goal of Trump's legal team is to delay all the legal proceedings against him until he can run out the clock and win the election. At this point, he has to win, or he's spending the rest of his life in prison, so yes, the Laird of Mar-a-Lago is larding the larder with all the money he can get his orange mitts on in order to buy time.
How well that plan works, nobody knows, but time gives him options, even the more drastic ones.
We'll see.
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