Georgia prosecutors have indicated they will present their election interference case against former President Donald Trump to a grand jury early next week, according to two witnesses who say they were given notices to appear.
The grand jury would be expected to weigh criminal charges, potentially sticking Trump with his fourth criminal indictment this year.
Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) told CNN on Saturday that he received a notice to appear before a grand jury in Fulton County — which encompasses parts of Atlanta — on Tuesday morning.
“I certainly will be there to do my part in recounting the facts,” he said.
Another witness, independent journalist George Chidi, said on social media that he had also been told to appear and provide testimony.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) has been investigating Trump and associates’ efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, where voters picked President Joe Biden by a narrow margin.
Her probe includes the Jan. 2, 2021, phone call in which Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) to “find” enough votes to flip the election results in his favor.
“All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said during the call. “Because we won the state.”
Trump has claimed the phone call was “perfect.”
But Willis’ investigation also goes beyond the phone call, and is believed to encompass a range of potentially illegal activity around the 2020 election.
Chidi had burst into — and was promptly thrown out of — a meeting of Republican state lawmakers allegedly discussing how they might pull together an “alternative” slate of electors to hand the election to Trump. Willis’ office asked him to give testimony last year, and Chidi wrote about the whole experience for The Intercept.
A special grand jury returned a report recommending indictments earlier this year, but they did not have the power to issue any indictments themselves, hence the need for a regular grand jury.
“I have no expectations as to the questions, and I’ll certainly answer whatever questions are put in front of me,” Duncan told CNN. “For me, this is a story that is important for Republicans to hear — Americans to hear. Let’s hear the whole truth and nothing but the truth about Donald Trump’s actions and the surrounding cast of characters around him.”
“He’s got a chance to present these facts and say, ‘Hey, I didn’t know what was going on.’ Or what I think reality’s going to be is they knew exactly what they were doing,” Duncan said.
In March of this year, Trump became the first former president to be criminally indicted when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged him with nearly three dozen counts relating to hush money payments made in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.
Jack Smith, the federal special counsel appointed by the Justice Department to oversee its Trump investigations, is also pursuing criminal charges against the former president in two locations: Florida and Washington, D.C. The Florida case centers on a trove of classified government documents that Trump is accused of mishandling, while the D.C. case revolves around his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election from the White House.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to every charge against him so far.