ATLANTA – Ms Fani Willis, the district attorney in Atlanta, will decide this summer whether to charge former president Donald Trump and his allies for trying to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.
Ms Willis will announce charging decisions for the grand jury meeting between July 11 and Sept 1, according to a letter she sent on Monday to local law enforcement.
“I am providing this letter to bring to your attention the need for heightened security and preparedness in coming months due to this pending announcement,” she said in the letter.
Decisions in the case “may provoke a significant public reaction”, wrote Ms Willis, the Fulton County district attorney.
Ms Willis said she sent the letter to bring “attention to the need for heightened security and preparedness in the coming months due to this pending announcement”.
The Willis letter was first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Trump was indicted in New York in March by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who accused the former president of falsifying business records to hide hush money paid to bury an affair and boost his electoral prospects in 2016. Trump pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.
Hours after appearing in New York court on April 4, Trump said Ms Willis was a “local racist Democrat district attorney” who wanted to indict him over “an absolutely perfect phone call”.
Ms Willis has been investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia for more than two years.
Among other matters, she is probing the Jan 2, 2021, phone call in which Trump asked Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to “find 11,780 votes” – the amount the former president needed to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia.
Trump and his representatives have maintained in the past that the former president did nothing wrong. A Trump representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Ms Willis’ letter.
A special grand jury in Fulton County met for eight months, interviewing 75 witnesses, before delivering its recommendations to the court.
That grand jury had the power to investigate, but Ms Willis’ prosecutors need to present their results to another panel to bring charges.
Most of the report’s findings are sealed, although grand jurors have suggested in news media interviews that the panel recommended charges against Trump.
The new Willis timetable defers a decision to present evidence to a grand jury that could have come as early as next week.
Ms Willis must respond by May 1 to court filings by Trump’s attorneys seeking to dismiss the special purpose grand jury report and remove Ms Willis from the investigation.
Trump’s lawyers argued in the March 20 filing that the grand jury’s report should be quashed because the investigation violated his constitutional rights and that any evidence presented to it should not be used if prosecutors seek indictments from a new grand jury.
Trump’s lawyers cited a series of interviews that special purpose grand jurors gave after their investigation ended, as well as public statements that Ms Willis and Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney made about the case. BLOOMBERG
